*By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns*

I want to thank everyone very much who took the time to read my June 17
Honoring
<http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/180617_honoring_anthony_bourdain.html>
Anthony Bourdain
<http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/180617_honoring_anthony_bourdain.html>
and to email me personally and post their reactions on UPC’s
<https://www.facebook.com/UnitedPoultryConcerns>
Facebook page <https://www.facebook.com/UnitedPoultryConcerns>.

I’ve received an outpouring of emails from animal advocates expressing
gratitude
for my post. A recurrent theme is: “Thank you for letting me know it’s not
just
me who finds fawning over this man and eulogizing him baffling, weird,
unfortunate, and depressing. I thought I was living in a parallel universe.”

A few complained that by criticizing Anthony Bourdain and his vegan
defenders, I
dishonored a “depressed” fellow human and his family. I suppose probably
everyone who systematically, consciously and deliberately inflicts pain,
suffering and death on others could be diagnosed with clinical depression or
some other mental problem. Should mass murderers and serial abusers (of
human
beings), instead of being “judged” (heaven forbid we be “judgmental”!), be
lavished with praise and larded with “tolerance”?

(Some vegans are judging me for being “judgmental.”)

Some Bourdain sympathizers have said such things as: since virtually
everyone
“eats meat,” they are just as guilty as, or even more guilty than, Anthony
Bourdain; he at least “looked his victims in the eye.”

I have never believed that people who “kill their own meat” are on a higher
plane of morality than those who thoughtlessly buy meat in a supermarket or
a
restaurant. I distinguish between people who’ve grown up on farms, where
killing
animals up close and personal is so routine that they don’t question or
feel it
anymore, and those who, not having grown up that way, suddenly decide that,
instead of just buying meat at the store, they’re going to kill the animals
themselves. (Typically, such people, including the Anthony Bourdains, Mark
Zuckerbergs and Michael Pollens, do both, and encourage their groupies to
copy
them, it’s so cool!)

The defense for killing your own animals is: you’re acting more “honorably”
and
“authentically” and “un-hypocritically” when you experience your victim’s
living
body, which you are personally going to destroy, than when your victim has
already been conveniently “disappeared” into a food product by others
somewhere
in a “packing plant.”

One more point – which I’ve been making for decades* – is why, in the words
of a
person who wrote to me earlier this week, do some vegans “take the
viewpoint of
someone who vocalized complete hatred of ethical vegans?” What underlies the
self-deprecation, the judging of oneself from the point of view of The
Destroyer? Of course, animal people who share the same goals for animals
have
different temperaments that shape their style of advocacy. I would never
argue
that every advocate who chooses a “softer” approach to advocacy is a
sellout or
a betrayer of animals. But there’s a difference between softness as a
thought-through strategy, and softness as a cover for lack of confidence in
one’s cause and one’s skills, compounded by a penchant for passivity and a
fear
of confrontation, however mild, with mainstream opinion.

Once in the 1990s, I was sitting around with a group of activists including
one
who was prominent in our movement at the time. He complained about how hard
it
was for him to be an animal rights activist. He did not like being or
feeling
like an “outsider.” He resented being associated with people the mainstream
considered “wacko.” He almost went so far as to resent the animals
themselves
for putting him in this predicament. He eventually left the movement. Just
as
well. With friends like that, animals don’t need enemies.

As for calling Anthony Bourdain a monster, I stand by my closing statement
in
“Honoring Anthony Bourdain”: “From the point of view of his victims – and
from
my point of view as an animal rights activist – he was a monster who could
never
be missed.”

If you think he was *not* a monster from the point of view of his victims,
what do
you think he was – *from their point of view*? Which, without sounding
presumptuous, I share. By the way, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Should
he get
a break and even be honored because he was, as well as a mass murderer, a
pathologically “flawed” human being who needed help? Was he evolving? Could
he
have been saved?

* The Rhetoric of Apology in Animal Rights
<http://www.upc-online.org/thinking/rhetoric_of_apology.html>

—
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don’t just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
http://www.UPC-online.org/ http://www.twitter.com/upcnews
http://www.facebook.com/UnitedPoultryConcerns

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