ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the contradiction between the values that many people claim to hold and their actual behavior, and how the system of producing animals as commodities under capitalism maintains their exploitation through construction of various myths, by the criminalization of animal activists, and by the pretense that those who oppress and exploit nonhuman animals are the victims of those activists. The chapter critiques the fetishization of animal body parts as commodities and advertising and industry propaganda that conceal actual relations of production and structural violence, and rejects the exculpatory narratives embraced by consumers, neo-welfarists, post-humanist academics, and do-it-yourself slaughter enthusiasts. It exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called “humane” use of non-human animals, showing that the humane myth is essentially a speciesist reaffirmation that the violent domination and murder of others is legitimate. Various rhetorical techniques (such as claims that nonhuman animals embrace their deaths, demonization of animal advocates, use of euphemisms, arrogation of victimhood) are examined. The chapter maintains that vegan animal rights activists present the rational alternative to this confused and hypocritical behavior: We must end the institutionalized exploitation of nonhuman animals and stop regarding them merely as property and resources for our use.
