Animal skat verb tenses12/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Indirect activism needn’t be-and, we presume, rarely is-disingenuous. We aren’t suggesting that these activists don’t care about health, climate change, or the rights of immigrants. Want to be healthier? Go vegan! Want to reduce your carbon footprint? Go vegan! Want to distance yourself from industries that exploit undocumented immigrants? Go vegan! Indirect activism involves arguing that some cause that’s indirectly related to the activist’s primary agenda provides reasons to act in ways that are congruent with that agenda. It’s also bad news for those who want an animal-friendly food system.īecause the public isn’t very concerned about the plight of animals-or is concerned, but has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance-animal activists regularly engage in indirect activism. This may be good news for those in the industry, but it’s bad news for billions of animals. ![]() As a result, many predict that rising demand will drive up global production by roughly 50% over the next 30 years, and some estimates are higher (Alexandratos and Bruinsma 2012). At a global level, this is due to a combination of population growth and rising incomes (as income is correlated with demand for animal products) (Kearney 2010). All signs indicate that it will continue to grow in the future. Unfortunately, though, intensive animal agriculture has grown rapidly over the last century. In the short run, then, there are good arguments for increasing both the regulation and oversight of intensive systems in the long run, there are good arguments for scaling them back and, in their place, encouraging plant-based food production. Additionally, and of particular note here, intensive systems have long imposed substantial burdens on nonhuman animals. Intensive systems are subject to familiar objections concerning their impacts on the environment, workers, and public health. There were excellent reasons to reform intensive animal agriculture prior to COVID-19. Additionally, in the case of arguments against wet markets specifically, we contend that the precautionary argument can be supplemented with a side constraint condition that, arguably, activists violated insofar as they were acting in ways that maintain a racist and xenophobic system. In both cases, we think there are plausible precautionary arguments against the strategies that these activists pursued. We then assess the moral significance of this risk, concluding that while it may have been permissible to advance these arguments, there were some serious moral considerations against doing so-ones that weren’t addressed by flagging animal activists’ concern for animals or any other stakeholder in the discussion. We contend that both arguments had the risk of backfiring: they risked promoting the very systems that are worst for animals. In this paper, we consider the two indirect arguments that animal activists advanced in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, some used COVID-19 to criticize intensive animal agriculture-many of these had US-based audiences as their target second, and more modestly, some activists used COVID-19 to condemn wet markets specifically. ![]() Because the public isn’t very concerned about the plight of animals-or is concerned, but has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance-animal activists regularly engage in indirect activism. It’s also bad news for those who want an animal-friendly food system. This is bad news for billions of animals. ![]()
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