A Nation of Animal Lovers?

Examining the claims of vegan animal rights group, Animal Rising

Animal Rising are a fairly new, high-profile animal rights group taking the UK by storm. They’ve made headlines by shutting down the dairy industry’s supply chain, rescuing dogs from vivisection, disrupting the Grand National steeplechase and liberating several of ‘the King’s lambs’ who were destined for slaughter.

Their website states: ​

We love animals. But as a society we’ve lost our connection with them, as we continue to breed and kill billions of other beings each year for ‘food’ or ‘fun’.

Their stated aim is to start a conversation around “our broken relationship with animals” and to this end they have been using a range of high-profile and attention-grabbing media stunts and TV interviews.

Previously known as ‘Animal Rebellion’ they were formed as a response to Extinction Rebellion’s rather anthropocentric focus on the climate emergency as a primarily human problem.

Their recent name change reinforces their position that they are very much about promoting discussion on the rights of all sentient beings, and that the environmental and climate emergencies cannot be solved except as part of our wider relationship with the non-human world.

So far, it appears that they have been very successful. But they have also faced a fair degree of criticism from other parts of the animal rights movement.

One of the main issues has been with their claim that “Britain is a nation of animal lovers.” This isn’t a new claim, of course. It’s a well-worn trope trotted out repeatedly by everyone from the average man or woman in the street to the most heinous animal abuser.

Just last week in the House of Commons, The Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries Mark Spencer also claimed that “we are a nation of animal lovers”. Indeed, various industries built on animal exploitation have often used this phrase as a smokescreen to obscure the most horrific treatment of animals.

For a nation which kills 6.4 billion land and sea animals every year, it’s clearly ludicrous to claim that we ‘love’ animals. The suffering inflicted on these unimaginable numbers of individuals is totally beyond our capacity to comprehend and surely belies the claim that we ‘love’ animals.

Many in the animal rights movement have criticised Animal Rising’s claims the Britain is a nation of animal lovers, pointing out that not only is it a blatant lie, but it’s also failing to hold individuals to account for their role in the mass slaughter of innocents.

What’s more, it misses the point that respecting someone’s basic rights has nothing to do with ‘loving’ them. We don’t have to love all other humans to recognise that they have a right to life, freedom from slavery and torture, and so on. By the same token, we don’t have to love animals in order not to exploit or kill them.

It’s surely just about basic respect for their fundamental rights?

Furthermore, Animal Rising’s apparent focus of ‘cruelty’ rather than ‘exploitation’ or ‘oppression’ has led to charges of them being a welfarist organisation, rather than a radical rights-based group.

But Animal Rising have done their homework. They have invested a lot of time and effort into the latest research into what drives successful social change. What they have discovered is that the starting point for any real social change must come from a sense of shared values.

Rather than criticising the general public for their role in supporting such atrocities as the horse racing industry, vivisection and animal agriculture, their philosophy is to create a sense of shared value based on the idea, whether right or wrong, that we are all animal lovers at heart.

By tapping into that shared sense of compassion and concern for other animals, they hope to springboard the nation into a discussion of the implications of that, eventually facilitating a shift in consciousness, action and policy.

Rather than stating in their press releases that “we claim to be a nation of animal lovers, but…” they hope that by tapping in to people’s self-image as someone who loves animals, while at the same time drawing attention to the oppression and exploitation that we are funding, they can stimulate a public discussion whereby people can question their own roles, rather than being told that they must go vegan, for example.

After all, no-one likes being told what to do.

By telling people that they are doing something wrong, that they are responsible for the suffering, that they must change, the traditional animal rights movement has been driving a wedge between ourselves and the general populace, according to this way of thinking.

That’s at least partly why, according to Animal Rising, the animal rights movement has achieved relatively little in the past 50 years or so. By building a sense of common ground with the average man and woman in the street, at least as a starting point, Animal Rising hope to achieve massive social change within the next decade.

Will it work in the long run? Only time will tell, but Animal Rising seem to be going from strength to strength. This coming weekend, they plan on disrupting the Epsom Derby, where it is highly likely that more horses will be killed for our collective entertainment.

As a ‘nation of animal lovers’ will we get behind them? What are your thoughts?