A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #6-26 - Beyond Speciesism. The Path to Total Liberation (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

"Eating meat is something you do to someone else's body without their 
consent." ---- Pattrice Jones (Fighting Cocks. Ecofeminism vs. 
Sexualized Violence, 2011) ---- It was 1792 when Mary Wollstonecraft, 
featured in the "A Philosopher a Month" column in the February 2026 
issue of Umanità Nova, published her essay "A Vindication of the Rights 
of Woman." ---- In that same year, Thomas Taylor, a British Neoplatonic 
philosopher at Cambridge University, published the satirical text "A 
Vindication of the Rights of Brutes," using a pseudonym, to ridicule 
Wollstonecraft's claim for women's rights. To underscore the absurdity 
of women's claiming rights, Taylor provocatively suggested extending 
those rights to animals as well.

In her pamphlet, Taylor places women, whose demands often provoke 
derisive laughter, in the same category as animals. However, with this 
reductio ad absurdum, she actually suggests a connection between 
feminist demands and those of animal liberation.
Today, with all due respect to Taylor, such demands no longer provoke 
such hilarity, and on a philosophical level, the ethical demands of 
animal liberation have been embraced by feminism since the 1960s. From a 
political perspective, it is indeed possible to find a connection 
between feminism and animal rights, understood as liberation movements 
that identify the paradigm of domination as the common root of oppression.

This connection is well emphasized by Australian philosopher Peter 
Singer, who, in Animal Liberation (1975), popularized the term 
speciesism (coined in 1970 by Richard D. Ryder, a British psychologist 
who, after the initiation of animal experiments, launched a campaign 
against this practice and became a pioneer of the animal liberation 
movement), defining it as "a distortion of judgment in favor of the 
interests of one's own species and against those of members of other 
species." Singer's utilitarian philosophy considers morally right those 
actions that take into account the interests of beings with the capacity 
to suffer.

Speciesism is the widespread ideology, in which we are all immersed and 
which we absorb without realizing it, that places the human species at 
the top of a pyramid and legitimizes the view of all other animal 
species as inferior. This vision has cultural roots and, Singer argues, 
is codified in ancient Hebrew scriptures, which hold that the human 
species has a divine right to dominate other species, and in classical 
Greece with its anthropocentric vision. These principles would later 
flow into Christianity, through which they rose to dominance in Europe 
and, over the past five centuries, beyond Europe's borders, to the point 
of influencing the rest of the world.

The systematic devaluation of nonhuman animals, reducing them to objects 
at our complete disposal, enables their exploitation and killing. This 
draws a close analogy to racism and sexism, as forms of discrimination 
based on the interests of one group at the expense of others and the 
perpetuation of a power hierarchy. Antispeciesism, close to the deep 
ecology movement and green anarchy, expands the concepts of anti-racism 
and anti-sexism to include other animal species and, transcending the 
anthropocentric view, maintains that biological belonging to the human 
species can in no way justify the ability to dispose of the life, 
liberty, and body of an individual belonging to another species, 
recognized as a sentient being and no longer as a resource or means.

Among the figures Singer credits with extraordinary pioneering work is 
the English essayist and activist Henry Salt, an antispeciesist ahead of 
his time, who was the first in the history of Western thought to 
recognize a common political root between human and animal oppression. 
Salt, to whom we owe the notion of animal rights, fought for the 
abolition of the death penalty and for prison reform, and in 1891 
founded the Humanitarian League to oppose both injustices against humans 
and forms of cruelty towards other animals. In 1894, he wrote the essay 
"Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress," in which 
he emphasized the analogy between the condition of domestic animals and 
that of black slaves in the previous century: "The emancipation of men 
from cruelty and injustice," he wrote, "will bring with it, in due 
course, the emancipation of animals. The two reforms are inseparable, 
and neither can be fully accomplished by itself." The modernity of 
Salt's thought lies in overcoming the pitying attitude typical of 
protectionist approaches toward other species and in the intuition of 
uniting the natural rights of all species in a single cause to be fought.

Today, we find a similar approach in the work of American natural law 
philosopher Tom Regan, author of the essay Animal Rights (1983), in 
which he advocates for the cessation of all exploitation practices, 
based on the assumption that every animal, as a subject-of-a-life, and 
therefore endowed with intrinsic value and a stake in living, is the 
holder of inalienable moral rights.
In his essay "Empty Cages: The Challenge of Animal Rights" (2004), 
Regan's abolitionist approach and rejection of so-called animal welfare 
practices are well summarized in the phrase: "We must empty the cages, 
not make them bigger."

Despite the fact that over the years there appears to have been a 
greater focus on animal welfare, for which numerous laws have been 
enacted, there is no doubt that the advent of capitalism and the 
industrial age have made ours "the worst time to be an animal," to use 
Peter Singer's words, since speciesism has had the tools to carry out 
the greatest extermination in the history of the planet: "Industrial 
animal agriculture is nothing more than the application of technology 
and market forces to the idea that animals are a means to our ends."

Every year, approximately 170 billion sentient beings worldwide 
(considering only animals raised for food), each with their own complex, 
unique individuality, even without the need for humankind to feed them, 
live trapped in the gears of a gigantic assembly line. These already 
staggering sums exclude marine animals, whose numbers, difficult to 
quantify, even rounded down, far exceed those resulting from the 
massacre of terrestrial fauna.

These abnormal numbers and the increasing level of cruelty that market 
competition leads to inflicting on animals to increase production while 
containing costs lie behind the 2002 book Treblinka: The Massacre of 
Animals and the Holocaust by American historian and Holocaust scholar 
Charles Patterson. Following a historical analysis essential to 
understanding how a tragedy of such proportions arose, and giving voice 
to some Holocaust survivors who later became animal advocates after 
understanding the shared root of the violence, he draws an undeniable 
comparison between the Nazis' treatment of their victims and the way 
animals are treated in today's society. The book's title draws 
inspiration from the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and specifically 
from a passage from his story "The Letter Writer": "To them, everyone is 
a Nazi; to animals, Treblinka lasts forever." Patterson's analogy 
sparked controversy and outrage, but it is undeniable that the 
management of concentration camps, as described by survivors' 
testimonies, recalls industrial-style procedures typical of 
slaughterhouses, just as the treatment of individual bodies, reduced to 
objects in both cases.

The theme of the reification of animal bodies, combined with the 
commodification of women's bodies, is central to the work of Carol J. 
Adams, an American essayist and activist, author of Cannabis Flesh: The 
Sexual Politics of Flesh (1990). Adams identifies the shared daily fate 
of female and animal bodies in the phases of objectification, 
fragmentation, and consumption. It is language that fosters the 
normalization of oppression, generating a dissociation between the meat 
on the plate and the body of the slaughtered animal. To explain this 
process of removal, Adams introduces the concept of the absent referent: 
by replacing the animal being consumed with neutral terms like "meat," 
"hamburger," or "steak," which defuse the cruel impact of violence, the 
language prevents a direct association with the body of the animal to 
which those pieces belonged. It is precisely since the 1990s that, on a 
theoretical level, an intersectional, anti-speciesist, and environmental 
feminist movement has developed, which identifies as its cornerstones 
the inviolability of bodies, the fight against all forms of oppression, 
and the culture of anthropocentric domination.

To overcome anthropocentrism, we must radically rethink our role as a 
species within the web of living things and recover what, thanks to 
modern anthropological studies, we know to have been the relationship 
between pre-civilized humans and nature, a relationship that still 
characterizes many indigenous populations today: a relationship of 
non-separation, devoid of hierarchies, which allows humans to dialogue 
without species boundaries with the community of living things to which 
they belong.

It is important to remember that the conflict between nature and culture 
that we modern Westerners have elevated to a paradigm is nothing more 
than a dysfunctional approach to reality, leading us to our own demise. 
We must overcome this dichotomous model, this vision of nature as 
otherness that has colonized the minds of all of us, but which, as we 
now know thanks to scientific developments (especially ethology and 
neuroscience), is at odds with our very biology.

As we have seen, at the root of every form of oppression there is always 
a separation, the arbitrary attribution of superiority on one side and 
subordination on the other, which legitimizes oppression, whether we are 
talking about human bodies, animal bodies, forests, ecological systems, 
indigenous communities, etc.
If we fight discrimination, there is no valid reason not to question 
speciesism. If we fight for the freedom and self-determination of 
individuals, there is no valid reason to adopt a different moral 
standard towards individuals who belong to a species other than our own. 
Being libertarian is one more reason to refuse to ignore the horror to 
which our species subjects all others. How can we oppose violence 
without considering the fact that our plates are full of it? How can we 
accept perpetuating the religious legacy of a hierarchy between species? 
Building fences of identity and experiencing struggles in a sectoral way 
makes no sense. It is, however, necessary and urgent, especially in 
light of current scenarios and future challenges, to reiterate once 
again the need for an intersectional approach to struggles, one that 
finally recognizes and addresses the common root of all forms of 
oppression, without forgetting speciesism, which is so internalized and 
normalized that it is often not only absent from debates but is not even 
considered a battleground. Speciesism, however, must be addressed to 
dismantle even the last bastion of exploitation and systematic violence 
and to build a common front on the only possible path: that of total 
liberation.

Francesca Geloni - Gruppo Germinal Carrara

https://umanitanova.org/oltre-lo-specismo-il-cammino-verso-la-liberazione-totale/
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