“Animals as Experiencing Entities: Theories and Historical Narratives,” Edited by Dr. Michael Glover and Dr. Les Mitchell (both vegans), Part 2 of 2

Today, we continue our conversation with Drs. Glover and Mitchell. “Anthropocentrism is quite a devastating way of seeing the world. The philosopher Jonathan Birch recently said that perhaps humanity’s maltreatment of animals is not so much to do with speciesism, but is a basic failure to respect that animals are sentient and have lives of their own.” “You’ll see that there’s precious little of animals’ experiences in animal history. So, I hope that by providing these types of precedents, by showing methods, by showing that it’s really, in many ways, a very simple argument to be able to include animals’ subjective historical experiences,” “And it’s really important because if people write like that, it means that we reflect on what we do today. And that has major impact.”

“And I think that when we can see how animals choose to live in context of maximum autonomy, we can see how different that is to the kind of productionist settings that we trap them into in the modern world.” “When people can break down the barriers and see how similar we are to other animals, that’s...in a way you don’t need any words. Can I give you a quote from Tom Reagan? Because it says it all to me: ‘All animals are somebody – someone with a life of their own. Behind those eyes is a story... of their life in their world as they experience it.’ And to me, if you take that on board, how could you possibly support the abuse and depression of non-human animals?”