Aiyana Goodfellow
Choose Animality Over Apathy!
What does it mean to be direct? To direct our anger, our love, our pain. In British society, we are encouraged to dismiss the truths inside of us, to repress them for the sake of civility, to be ‘acceptable’. Keep calm, carry on. But being calm in a world that profits from death, exploits our labour, and burns our planet, is another kind of violence in itself. We look back at historical examples of genocide, enslavement, war, and fascism imagining a version of ourselves in these former times. We would have been the “good people”, speaking up and speaking out. We would have marched with Dr. King and sheltered Jewish people in our homes. We all like to think we would be on the right side of history – but the truth is, similar violence occurs today. And what are we doing about it? To be calm and carry on with the illusion of normality, is to be direction-less, floating through the monotony of capitalistic life. Those of us on the margins struggling to survive cannot be so apathetic. For some, direction and action are choices; for others, necessities of survival.
One such community who must bite back to survive are nonhuman animals. Other animals are usually dismissed as beings with personhood, let alone people who experience systemic violence through the removal of said personhood. Personhood does not belong to human-animals, but all of us. Personhood is not defined by humanity, or a proximity to it, but through the virtue of existence. Humans are animals. You are an animal.
Their lives are often spent in physical or metaphorical cages, as our so-called property through pethood, in zoos and aquariums as entertainment, or perhaps their bloody bodies simply sit as fodder on our plates. Human supremacy maintains a world that centres a human need and experience, disregarding the lives of other animals as important or valuable beyond the benefit of humans. In my book, Radical Companionship: Rejecting Pethood & Embracing Our Multispecies World I define ‘speciesism’ – the oppression of nonhuman animals – as “actively rejecting the ideology of human supremacy, the interpersonal violence of ownership based human-to-animal relationships, and the institutional, deliberate colonisation, degradation and exploitation of nonhuman animals.”
Whilst overall the majority of us don’t even have a base-level understanding of these concepts and the realities of speciesist violence, education alone will not save us. Awareness is not, by itself, a means of freedom. Most of us know on some simple level that nonhuman animals are exploited by humans on mass scales, many might even disagree with the treatment of nonhumans, but how many of us take action and put the effort in to change? How many of us are aware of the violence in the world right now, yet choose to ignore it? We are all – if not already – closer to being homeless than being billionaires. Similarly, we are closer to animality than we are to the idealised controlling version of humanity we are taught to emulate. The animals we are, the versions of ourselves we are taught to repress, resist, fight, and feel in connection to the world. Those small moments when you admire a flock of birds in the sky, the way you grieved your first “pet”, or the feeling it gives you to see animals in their natural environments are evidence of our inherent animality. Will you break the monotony of capitalist humanity? Will you choose animal action over apathy?
To do so, we must understand action as a concept in the context of liberation movements. Actions are born from the choices we make in alignment with our goals of freedom and the behaviours that happen as a result. Action is a verb, requiring us to be actively making differences in our communities. Direct action is the combination of authentically expressing our need for freedom and taking steps to achieve this. Direct action is a necessary response to systems without care or a conscience, who take peaceful protest as a weakness. The animal liberation movement has always been, and should always be, a direct action movement. Animals of all other species fight for autonomy every day, resisting death in slaughterhouses, running from farms, attacking ‘trainers’ (read: captors) in circuses, zoos, water parks, and more. Before humans ever decided to form the Animal Liberation Front, Hunt Saboteurs, or other groups, nonhumans were carrying out their own forms of direct action. Every pull on a leash, every bite, every scratch, every sting… is a person telling us they are here.
“Delete the idea of the passive animal from your mind – animals are alive and fight to be so every single day.”
— Radical Companionship: Rejecting Pethood & Embracing Our Multispecies World
Human direct action is solidarity with nonhuman animals. It can look like assisting the liberation of nonhuman animals from capture, supporting animals in accessing healthcare, protecting hunted animals through sabotaging hunts and so much more. It means going out into the world and allowing yourself to be directed by your anger, your love, your pain, your yearnings for a better way to live. Because direct action benefits us all. This is a fight that requires proactivity: the language barriers between the human and nonhuman worlds prevent us from engaging in deeper discourse about what the best solidarity can look like, but we can draw on human freedom fighters of past and present to help us learn. Be an active agent in your understanding of society. Find community and tools to feed your joy as well as your fire: sustainability is survival. Most essentially, believe in our capacity to change the world. The systems are designed to keep us afraid and hesitant but spending our lives in the illusion of safety and the grey of capitalism is simply prolonged death. Isn’t it better to know we chose animality over apathy?
How far is too far before you take action? How long will you sit in the pressure cooker of violence we call a society before you scream? The longer we sit calmly, the more we will find familiarity in oppression, priming ourselves to accept even worse standards of existence. Each time we accept the cruelness in our own lives, we fail to protect someone more marginalised than us, experiencing this cruelty in even more severity.
Aiyana Goodfellow is young author, organiser, and multidisciplinary artist based in London, UK.