Week 6

This week's discussion of reform versus revolution is very pertinent to the animal rights movement. This is something I have seen all the time in my own experience in the animal rights movement, particularly in vegan spaces: Person 1 celebrates an incremental advance in animal welfare, such as a fast-food restaurant providing a new meatless dish. Person 2 argues that this doesn't matter because buying this meal would still support the restaurant, and the restaurant still serves meat, therefore vegans are indirectly funding animal abuse by eating it. To make this analogous to this week's text, Person 1 would be akin to the groups that worked with the APA to demedicalize homosexuality, and Person 2 would be akin to the gay liberation groups that disrupted conferences and snubbed demedicalization.

In my research for my timeline, I found an interesting real-life example of this. I was reading about Peter Singer, a philosopher who is famous in the movement for writing the foundational text Animal Liberation but also infamous for his relatively lax views toward eating animal products (and also being ableist, but that's another story for another blog). I ended up on the site of radical vegan Gary Francione. As it turns out, the whole site focuses on this division in the movement, with Francione deeming revolutionists "abolitionists" and the reform approach "welfarism." I'm not sure what side of this issue I fall on, but it's honestly fascinating to read through these debates, even if you aren't concerned with animal rights.

Finally, I wanted to include a real-life example of this division. I am part of a Facebook group called Baltimore Vegans. It's a pretty laid-back group, but there is sometimes debate. For the "reform" side, I found this thought-provoking post from a long-time vegan. I wasn't able to find a "revolutionary" example, unfortunately.

It's so interesting to me that this phenomenon apparently occurs in just about every activist movement!