I Remain Revolted By Speciesism

“Thus we can realize, for ourselves, the opportunity to live our own lives.” Emile Armand, What We Have Been, We Still Remain

It is not vague sentimental moral pity or a lack of appreciation for the severity of the pandemic we are witnessing unfold that inspires my revulsion. My perspective is that death is always present throughout life and that egoistic-welfare is the only sincere basis for value.

What inspires my disgust for culls, before my general feel of revulsion for acts of abuse and violation, is the ideological positioning of the “human” animal atop some imaginary metaphysical hierarchy, often called the great chain of being. This is the first assumption of cull-ideology – that the anthropological-machinery of Leviathan is ontologically greater than the life of any individual living being, human or non-human, flora or fauna, or even those mineral-beings who live lives that are far slower, longer and who are certainly more powerful than the featherless bipeds who consider themselves made in the image of God.

What further fuels my revulsion for culls is living amidst the utter wreckage of human-supremacist ideology, agricultural-civilisation. All the wild beauty that still fights and struggles to survive, amidst the carnage, inspires intense joy in me. But the sight of any individual caged and industrial monocultures across the landscape are continual reminders of the ideology that seeks to dominate all life here.

The caged individual experiences anthropological-machinery attempting to repress their life-experience. The culled individual’s last experience is of the freedom and power that is their-being/their-life ended, as a sacrificial offering to anthropological-machinery, deus ex machina.

That mink are being culled to prevent the spread of Covid-19 is utterly detestable. Have they culled the airplanes that enabled its geographical reach? Will they cull any of the other aspects of anthropological-machinic-functioning that has escalated the presence of this virus to the point that it has currently reached? Is culling those human animals who have brought the virus to mink populations a prospect we should expect? Will this culture escalate mass-extinction processes to the point that absolute totalitarian-humanism has rendered all non-human presence lost?

As much as my individual welfare is ecological welfare, my egoist rejection of species-being desires total-liberation as the end of human-supremacist machinery. I desire the liberation of individuals we call mink as much as I desire the liberation of any other individual. It is irrelevant to me what the cull-numbers represent with regards to the population of the species; as the life experiences of any individual this culture assigns the label of “mink” to, their freedom and power, is not valuable for how we conceptualise them as species-being, but in their being alive.

As I realise, for myself, opportunities for intense life-experiences, I also realise constructions that serve to repress life-experiences. Much of my personal activities for several years have been directed towards anti-cull rebellion and resisting the ideology within the world I occupy, here in the badger-cull zones in the south west of Briton. That I am able to do this immediately as individualist-praxis continually intensifies my opposition towards and disgusted feeling for revolutionary posturing and ideology, which position liberation as being dependent upon collectivist-machinery and contingent upon Historical factors that are never here and now.

My inclinations towards political pessimism leave me feeling that, regardless of how they attempt to suppress and control this disease, whatever vaccines scientists can produce, how many lockdowns they implement, or whatever; the world is, as it always is, changed and now different in ways that it will never be the same again. And while my revulsion is different, as it undergoes the continuing metamorphosis of becoming that is being-in-the-world; I remain revolted by speciesism!