TOTW: Animal friends

No pets, no masters!

Topic of the week - Our everyday lives are often touched in someway by animals. Throughout time, the human / animal relationship has been intertwined with the earliest cave paintings depicting animals and many creation myths incorporating animals as main participants. On the opposite end, animals have experienced the sheer brute force of sharing a world with humans. This week we’re taking a look at animals / pets and the relationship to your anarchist life.

Animals are often reflected in popular culture, with timeless classics like Babe and Homeward Bound and in almost every single movie by Chris Marker. Is it the dog statue at the train station, strangely out of place in industrialized civilization, yet bringing comfort to the weary traveler, of one eternally waiting for their partners return? Perhaps it is the darker, more upsetting image of wolves being gunned down from a helicopter and in turn alphabet intelligence agencies classifying anarchists and their friends as terrorists? Whatever it is, what is and/or has been your relationship with animals / pets and is it possible to talk about this in terms of your anarchist ideas?

What annoys you most about the topic of pets? What historical examples of anarchists are there caring for their loved animals?

There are 47 Comments

(just sayin' with the quotes, i find it obnoxious to believe that humans are not animals....)

don't say anything and are a little bit less manipulative than humans are, which is why humans tend to love them so much. Of course, the meat factories are sad, and it's pathetic that people can treat their pets so badly.

Good comment. I don't say much, the silent type, and absolutely never interfere with other people's lives. I have contacted the inner-animal inside of me, and which everyone else has if they'd see through the vanity clouded glasses they look through all day!
Children retain that quality and only the brave can hold onto it.

them is to view them as your children, who you at times spoil, never or very rarely harm, and who are forever babies despite the fact its kinda annoying.

It also helps to give them big pastures, but not everyone has that luxury which is why for the urbanite it would be suitable for the pets to be like your BFF.

animals are not children. the fact that it might sometimes seem like we have to treat them that way is a function of a fucked up society, an fucked up relationships in general.

animals are autonomous creatures, with some skill sets that are different from yours/ours. infantalizing them is awful. like many other afwul thins in this society.

affection towards your pets as if they were your children. Talk about moralizing...this has to be one of the most extreme examples of it i've seen on my beloved @news, lmfao.

you completely missed the other anon's point. do you think of other human adults that you feed and show affection to as your children? if so, not only is that creepy af but it also illustrates an anthropocentric and authoritarian approach when interacting with others. and i mean, of course you haven't ever shared non creepy affection to other human adults because you're too busy trolling anews. now get the fuck off my beloved @news

I wish I'd shown as much affection and doting upon my ex-wife as I now show upon the adopted desexed homeless puppy that I have now.

Maybe the dominant asexual relationship (patriarchy) that you have now with "your puppy" just wasn't her thing?

I don't know if you're genuinely critical or just insensitive, it just so happens I'm gay and came out during my marriage and is the reason she left me. I was actually the passive meak one in the relationship, so NO to your question, YOU'RE WRONG!!

I'm a realist. When I see adult humans fondling and passionately kissing them on the mouth just after they've been licking their itchy bacterial overflowing anuses, whilst the owner was in the other room. I did not tell him what the dog had just been doing, I did smirk briefly, was that insensitive on my part? Would I have helped him if I had told him? No, fuck him for his love and affection choices.

That' s been my understanding. Never understood those who have an anti-hierachical perspective eat flesh (when they dont have to) or have pets or wear skins etc. Then there is a counter which claims vegans wear plastic (boo) and eat processed food from Bill Gates (boo). Then there are the bretharians who live on fuckall but air (wow).

pet - noun (1) \ ˈpet \
2 : a domesticated animal kept for pleasure rather than utility
---

the idea of pets, on every level, is incompatible with being an anarchist. non-human animal companions, on the other hand, can be.

if ours is a rejection of authority for ourselves and others then let's do that without qualification such as race, gender, species, etc.

"What annoys you most about the topic of pets?"

when people justify acting horribly toward non-human animals because 'they're just animals/pets' or because 'it's for their own good.'

"What historical examples of anarchists are there caring for their loved animals?"

all anarchists care for animals. :)

until every cage is open
until all are free

Dictionary quote, this smells more like puritanical hogwash than useful critique. You're not taking into account the animals which have already been domesticated and want to keep using humans for their own purposes.

Until the death of every capitalist vegan and priest...

it's "puritanical hogwash" to say i reject the mistreatment and forced subjugation of non-human animals? okay...

it's nice to know you know what domesticated animals want. this is an excellent super power. i hope you use your power for good and not just angry trolling on anews against those jerks that don't want to harm non-human animals, 08:34. damn vegans tryin' to control me!1!

ps. your, "You're not taking into account ..." is a strawman.

i also did not take into account the fact that due to overfishing by humans the oceans are projected to be devoid of fish by 2042. and many other things were also not taken into account...

focus, 08:34! focus!

read...or even think about what they say very hard. A straw man is false artifice within a conversation used with the intention of bewildering/distracting opponents and onlookers. It's very similar to max stirner's spooks, but a strawman has connotations of being used by manipulative people in debates, whereas stirner's spooks have more of a religious connotation.

Hence, the fact that you are literally saying that anarchists are not allowed to have pets is puritanical. What if they already have pets? What a conundrum! Looks like they are facing the fires of hell, right?

You are also citing one definition of pets without any of the others. Looks like someone actually does believe that words have meaning without human participation and interaction.

Focus, you fucking priest. If pets are so terrible, and immediately imply oppression, then what are all the anarchists with pets going to do with them? Set them free to die in the streets? Take them to their local vet to murder them? Quick, your status in Dante's Inferno depends on your immediate reaction to my post!

Ye pharisees and sadduccees...one does not need to be of Jewish faith in order to act like them.

false. also, you just did it again. a lot...

one final reiteration, 09:57 : to say, 'owning pets is incompatible with anarchy' is NOT saying, "set [your current pets] free to die in the streets"! if you can't understand this then all it lost, all is lost...

calm down, my child. nobody is coming for your non-human animal slaves.
today.

they seem perfectly calm to me ... even overly patient as they try to explain to bad faith troll jerkoffs

Where was the "bad faith," lumpentroll? In the initial reading or the first response? Please respond patiently.

do you feel personally attacked?

antagonistic statements followed by ""calm down"" <---- ever seen this before? not me. never.

So you are confusing antagonism and snark in the response to a strawman argument with "bad faith"? This is not uncommon but it is incorrect.

nope. not confused because that's not a dichotomy. you might be in good or bad faith, i can't say. but I can say that telling people to "calm down" when they're being trolled is a tired troll tactic. was that you that said it? ;)

suggesting to someone that they should "calm down" after they react to a comment (supporting not subjugating non-human animals to terribleness) by calling it "puritanical hogwash," calling for "the death of every capitalist vegan and priest," and calling the commentor, a "fucking priest" might not be a troll tactic as you suggest (bad or good faith). perhaps it's a valid response to an actual troll that came out from their bridge to rage at the antispeciesist commentor for *reasons*? was that you that raged? ;)

no? nobody is raging here? we're all calmly typing at our computers like the sad, contrarian losers we are.

perhaps you need to go outside and get in a real conflict, refresh your perspective on it?

Not that he was an anarchist, but Nietzsche had his giant fit and mental breakdown after witnessing a wagoneer viciously beating his horse.
And didn't the Spanish anarchists use homing pigeons to send messages from the front, I'm sure I read that in Orwell's book?

And friendship as a two way street, where whatever harm someone does to a pet or companion is harmful to whomever is "wearing the pants"...

I should probably stop chatting about this as it's a very emotional topic for me.

cops fuck up themselves too, and prison guards, and nuclear scientists, animal experimenters, and and and. right?

Hey dude I'd prefer a leftist dog to a fascist dog, but yeah, an individualist anarch dog would be the best.

The truly individualist animal is the tiger, as Blake, an individualist himself knew too well.

,,,,,,And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?,,,,

Yes, metaphorically, the Stirnerian is ferociously independent and intellectually fearless and the lord of the social jungle it finds itself having to have dealings with for sustenance both physiological and psychological. The best pet would be the tiger because it would consume you for your weaknesses.

Loukanikos was an individualist stray (free) dog. He was walking along protests and actions he agreed to support, and treat the squat people as his friends, regardless of their problems arising from their own domestication/entrappings with society. I knew the dog myself and he'd let you know when he didn't wanted a pat from you... Free dogs in Greece are far more intelligent and well-tempered than those held as house slaves in the over-civilized West. Far more than you!

but you might consider, greek friend, that the politicization the anon is talking about comes from what people say about the dog, rather than the dog himself.

regardless of whether anon meant that or not, it's a relevant point, and reminds us to haunt the fuck out of people who misrepresent us when we're dead.

or at least, that's the relationship i think is appropriate. if we let them and pay attention, they show us other ways to live and relate.

it's likely this has fucked up some of my relationships with normies, but i have found a way to live with that. :)

this is wonderful. for sure non-human animals and all of the natural world has so much to say. if only we took the time to listen.

Civilization basically is a staged theater where the roads, buildings and tech devices really are just the props. The recent tech developments like portable screen/buddy/cop, are a deeper level of staging as nowadays you can just carry your awful corporate platform snitching (Zoom, Fedbook, etc) in wild areas as far as there's a cell phone mast somewhere around...

Relevance of this, beyond "burning cell phone masts", is that we are trapped in a fabricated consensus reality now enforced by global central authorities that are above even governments, and the Covid crisis just revealed governments are... their pets.

In such a tech-supported "realm", non-humans are only given an existence as part of an open circus of "oddities". The understanding of non-human life is still out of the picture. You can only understand "animals" by interacting with them on a regular basis.

we are not trapped. we can exit at any minute. welcome to your freedom.

our understanding of things has little bearing on the thingness of the thing. our interactions, however, can have some. perhaps the world isn’t for us to understand? perhaps we should just be.

How animals work within anarchist economics.
I will barter this cop hating guard dog for 100 sweet potatoes or 100 bong blasts!

Fuck pets! I have nonhuman animal friends that due to both of us being domesticated and caring of each other, we have some codependency.

Children are innocent
and teenagers fucked up in the head
Adults are only more fucked up
and elderlies are like children

Will there be another race to come along and take over for us?
Maybe Martians could do better than we've done... We'll make great pets

My friend says we're like the dinosaurs
Only we are doing oursevles in
Much faster then they ever did...

We'll make great pets

“Will there be another race to come along and take over for us?”

the new netflix show, sweet tooth, explores this! 9 out of 10 anarchists love it.

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