Carol J Adams

We distance ourselves from whatever is different by equating it with something we have already objectified.

Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food.

One cannot feed on grace and eat animals... In the place of misery, let there be grace.

I would love to see more empathy-based activism rather than positioning the animal rights movement as a "war" against animal oppressors. What if anger isn't the emotion we start with but compassion? If discovering we can live without benefiting from so many of the ways the other species are oppressed is transformative, then why aren't we acting as transformed people? What's our model for activism based on but male-defined criteria: left-brained, argumentative, scoring points? Where's incubation, and silence, and trusting interactions, and creativity? Why are we accepting such a limited model?

Consumption is the fulfillment of oppression, the annihilation of will, of separate identity.