I don’t think I ever mentioned that my office is in the building that belongs to the Foundation for Human Rights Initiatives. The other day I was entering the building when I found a cow wondering around the entrance of the building. I thought it was quite ironic that an animal had found itself by the building for Human Rights Initiatives. I thought maybe he had lost his way to the building for Animal Rights Initiatives or maybe it wanted one of us “activists” to refer him to the animal rights section. I then, snapped out of the little fantasy world that I had created for my self and thought about animals here in this part of the world.
When I first arrived here, I was so excited to find different kind of farm animals on the streets of
I started to think about the definition of animal rights and tried to be as objective as I could possibly be. I tried to describe it for my self, and every time I ended up having the Northern/Western perspective which apparently is the perspective of the rich who have hard time realizing what its like to not have meat for months. I brought this point up in a conversation with a few Ugandans and their argument was that people in
This got me thinking. If the most parts of the continent of
I know that I could be creating a huge debate over this, but don’t forget that I am all for “animal rights”. The only thing is that I think I have been socialized this way, and if I was to be socialized elsewhere in the world and was never exposed to the Western media and culture, I most likely would have been violating “animal rights” with out feeling guilty.
However when the argument comes down to the illegal hunting of animals that are distinct such as tigers and panda bears, I don’t think that it is the culture that is the driving force, rather it is the market.
After all I think in most cases, what we call the violation of “animal rights” in the East is inherited in the culture, and in cases that are otherwise, the violation is driven by the market forces, i.e capitalism. Culture is one of the most complex concepts that were ever created; therefore questioning the culturally inherited violations of animal rights opens a can of warms that has many sociologists and anthropologists thinking for years.
I am not too sure whether you can label my views as liberal or conservative, but I believe that since we all live in a globe where many cultures coexists, striving for one form of culture (which is usually the dominant one, i.e. the Western culture) can only destroy the beauty of the multi coloured planet that we call the Earth.
2 comments:
When I was in Colombia this past January, I remember we were standing outside our host's house waiting for the cab to come pick us up. At the other side of the alley, which intersected the main street, there were these bunch of kids playing around. But they weren't just playing around. They had caught a couple of iguanas and were messing around with them. So Ahmed and I tried to tell them that these are endangered animals and they shouldn't be harming them, but of course we didn't speak spanish and the cab had arrived, so we make some angry faces and give the kids some cut eyes and leave. But as we're leaving, we saw the fate that the kids had in mind for those poor lizards. Let's just say they killed them and leave it at that. Kids can be cruel. The incident reminded me of how I used to kill frogs and snakes and birds and shoot cats and chickens and whatever I could find with my BB gun when I was a kid just for the heck of it. Now, I can't even kill a spider when I see one at home. I have to take it and release it outside.
Anyways, I think you're right on target about how a lot of these rights, which we like to think are universal, were really originated from the West and many of them only after the Second World War. Even the concept of liberal democracy, this form of government which many of us take as the ultimate method of governance, as if the 'natural" path of political evolution leads to nowhere but democracy, is born in the West. And to me, there's nothing universal about liberal democracy. It's just a method of governance which one group of people with some cultural similarities took and then tried to sell it, sometimes forcefully, to other states. Same thing with human rights. Of course, I prefer living in a liberal democracy where human rights is respected, but because these ideas are not universal, I'm reluctant support the effort of states such as the US in bringing democracy to countries like Iran or China (even though I prefer Iran was a true democracy).
Anyways, I don't have any points this time. Just my 2 cents.
I mean, human rights are culturally constructed as well. They are very important and valuable, and an important counterbalance to corporate globalization that ignores the plight of people...but when we say that women should be equal to men, isn't that a cultural judgement? I mean, in North America we say that women and men should be equal, but that rich and poor should be very unequal, wouldn't another society have the opposite view? And would they be wrong?
I know what you mean about animal rights though. Here in Guatemala a lot of people can't afford food, let alone meat, and there are high levels of malnutrition from eating mostly corn, and not even enough of that. Tell people who are terribly malnourished that chickens have rights.
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