The present age is one where technologies are rapidly emerging that will supplant the animal industry, indeed make it redundant. The animal industry will within the next decades be phased out and specifically so not because of its gargantuan worldwide atrocities but because its technologies are rapidly become antiquated. All animal products without exception will be grown in huge bio-reactors at an increasingly low cost without the involvement of actual animals. Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) apparently is coming quicker than anyone expects, indeed at an exponential rate and the human genome will be mapped by AI in understanding every aspect of the functioning of every allele and how they interact with each other in affecting human health in paving the way for personalized medicine with animal testing becoming recognized as unnecessary, ineffective and inaccurate with all the technologies of the animal industry becoming phased out by rapid scientific progress.
We need therefore imagine animal politics beyond the contemporary animal industry of evil. Humanism/universalism and equality will become redundant and democracy will need to be reconsidered to include non-human persons and other organisms as important others pursuing their own legitimate interests.
I once saw a documentary about chimpanzees and primatologists. A primatologist who decades ago had trained chimpanzees in sign language met one of his former pupils who afterwards in the following decades had been a research subject in HIV research. The primatologist met the caged chimpanzee who signed him a pertinent question: ”Why did you not come earlier?”
Indeed, animal communication is one of the fields where we can expect rapid progress with advanced AI in the coming decades. Science will be able to accurately tell us the concerns of non-human animals and integrate them in our democracy.
One of the foundational myths of liberalism is that we are born equal when we clearly are not. Socialism as the child of liberalism also believes that we are born equal. National socialism believed that any human who is not perceived as ”equal” must killed. Liberalism and conservatism believes that those not equal have themselves to blame and therefore blame the ”unequal” for not being equal, socialists and national socialists believe that designated ”scapegoat” others are to blame for what is inequality between and within human genetic groups formerly known as ”races”. All those ideologies are based on barely secularized Christian humanism/universalism and which systematically regard inequality to be eliminated for the sake of secular salvation. Animal politics in contrast must recognize inequality as its very foundation while addressing political issues such as health care, education, freedom, justice and security, including for non-human persons.
Domesticated animals are in effect part of human society and it is clear that they require citizenship and extension of human rights. Regarding other animals things are not as clear as much thought will need to be invested in restoring nature and instituting rights of wild animals. We must recognize that we are here talking about unequals, in fact we are all unequals.
Aliyah Organization 