Why Animal Activists Should Oppose the Iran War
Photograph Source: Mohammad Soltani – CC BY 4.0
Anyone who believes President Donald Trump is attacking Iran for the sake of democracy or human rights is profoundly naive. At no point in his time in the White House has the fascist leader evidenced any concern for such values. In fact, he has consistently worked to undermine them at home and abroad. Are we seriously to believe the man who orchestrated the January 6 coup attempt cares about such things?
Animal activists should oppose Trump’s illegal, imperialist war for at least three reasons. The first is we should oppose senseless violence against humans. The second is animals frequently are the unintended, but primary victims of human conflict. The third is funds used to conduct the military operation could be put toward any number of more beneficial purposes, including ones which would benefit animals.
An early air strike in the Southern Iranian city of Minab hit a girls’ school, killing 148 and wounding 95 at the time of writing. This is monstrous. As animal activists, we are opposed to violence against sentient beings and exploitation of the same. All humans, of course, are animals. While humans do not face violence and exploitation of the scale inflicted on, say, fish or chickens, we should nevertheless oppose such evil.
The air strike against the Minab girls school is just the beginning. Who knows how long this violence will continue? Perhaps Trump will supply himself an off-ramp from indefinite conflict, as he did in Venezuela. Still, he’s once again shown countries around the world the only thing which will protect them from United States interference is securing nuclear weapons. This development will make everyone less safe.
I have various disagreements with Wayne Hsiung, former leader of Direct Action Everywhere, but he had an excellent post on his Simple Heart blog, following the Venezuela attack, about how animals are often the primary victims of human war. Dogs and cats are abandoned. Livestock are killed by munitions or starve as infrastructure collapses. Wild animals are also caught in the crossfire and suffer the inevitable results.
“Where humans are in conflict, they deplete and destroy ecosystems on a scale unprecedented in the planet’s history,” Hsiung said. “One study in Nature found that human conflicts are ‘the single most important predictor of wildlife population trends.’ And while precise estimates of wild animal populations are hard to come by, one national park measured population declines of 95% during a period of human conflict.”
Finally, the massive financial resources dedicated to warfare could be put toward any kind of more productive purpose, including those which might help animals. For instance, I’d like to see this money directed toward public funding for cultivated-meat research. If readers are unfamiliar with the term, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. The technology exists but is not yet advanced enough to commercialize.
We should build facilities like the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture at schools across the country. Working together, I have no doubt scientists can overcome the remaining hurdles preventing mass production of cheap cultivated meat that is indistinguishable from slaughtered options. Instead of investing public resources in technology which takes lives, we should invest in technology that saves lives.
For these reasons and more, animal activists should oppose Trump’s immoral war on Iran. When we finally rid of ourselves of the fascist regime which currently occupies the White House, these vile gangsters will need to be held legally accountable. Perhaps one way of achieving this, if prosecution in the United States proves difficult, would be turning Trump and his allies over to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands.
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