Blogs

Cow is a harrowing documentary about the lived reality of a dairy cow. But Arnold’s observational style might ultimately offer an apologia rather than an intervention. The camera hovers at head height, an animal its object of consideration. We peer into a cow’s eye, a deep black pool like a magic eight ball. The cow, now craning its neck upwards, looks into the clouded sky. Its yellow ear-tag flaps into view: number 201699. Sniffing, exhaling, the cow lowers itself onto the grass below. The camera goes down with the cow towards the dry…continue reading →

I open my laptop, smoothening out the corners of my notebook. A logical list of tasks forms itself in my head, in a word document. But the page keeps shifting, slowly slipping away as I try to pin it down. My mind keeps drifting off into a sea of other thoughts, where terrestrial logic dissipates. As I think of that watery being, my hands follow a tentacular path that does not stick to this rectangular page space. Ever more strangely, a fluidity overflows these words, spills their ink into the margins of this…continue reading →

A few years ago, I was flicking through a book called The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat. It contains lots of great essays, but one title in particular caught my eye – Donald Bruckner’s ‘Strict Vegetarianism is Immoral’. I remember being sceptical. I’d read plenty of arguments saying that we don’t have to be vegan – most of them pretty terrible – but it’s hard to think of an argument saying that it’s wrong to be vegan. Maybe (I remember thinking) it was going to forward a trite religious argument, saying that we…continue reading →

Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was an essayist, poet and activist who lived on the border between Derbyshire and Sheffield. My thesis unpicks aspects of his extensive body of work which reach beyond the parameters of the human, including his animal rights advocacy and his broader vision of a multispecies, sexually liberated socialist utopia. At present, I am working on a chapter exploring Carpenter’s anti-vivisection advocacy, a major area of his pro-animal thought. Within this research, I am also encountering many of Carpenter’s ideas on anti-vaccination. Carpenter’s critique of vaccination is mostly articulated across his…continue reading →

We value our rights to autonomy, life, and wellbeing; we protect these rights because we believe all humans deserve them, but whether we exclusively deserve rights is questionable. Human rights are conceptually universal and regulated through governmental bodies and social leverage; they were created with the goal of promoting equality and protecting human interests. Unfortunately, by preserving our implementation of human rights, we may inadvertently make "a powerful statement about human capabilities and potential"[1]. In enacting and maintaining these privileges, we continuously fail to combat, address, or adequately mitigate the charge of 'speciesism.'…continue reading →

Meijendel, summer of 1942.[1] A faint golden sun is shining through dark grey clouds, yellowing the green and white landscape of sand, bush and trees. Standing out within the mass of rose- and orange-dotted green, the cross gentians bloom. Brightly dancing in the wind, the deep blue flowers break the silence. Their display attracts innocent visitors, bringing out lepidopterists like Barend Jan Lempke. He watches the butterflies return to their host plant, sucking out nectar from the flowers. The grey-blue wings look pale next to the bright flowers, their black spots darting as…continue reading →

Here in the UK, as in many liberal democracies, there are laws against hate speech. The Public Order Act of 1986, for example, makes it a criminal offence to publish or distribute ‘written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting’, when intending ‘thereby to stir up racial hatred’ or ‘having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby’. Across many states, laws protect people from speech targeting their racial or ethnic origin; sexuality, sex, or gender; disability status; and so on. No such law protects individuals targeted…continue reading →