There has been a video circulating on the internet as of late that depicts some of the US armed forces engaged in unspeakable violence towards a sheep. The sheep was beaten to death with a baseball bat while others looked on and cheered. A friend of mine who is in the Marines brought the video to my attention, absolutely disgusted, and asked me not to judge our soldiers based on the actions of “one bad apple.” I found this to be extremely intriguing for two reasons. First, the armed forces are, by very definition, regularly engaged in violence as part of their duty to our country. Second, any person who is not vegan is inherently engaged in comparable violence.
The US government has been instrumental not only in normalizing violence, but in otherizing populations who are different from us in some way. Generally, those populations otherized are those who are somehow vulnerable and who control or otherwise represent an exploitable resource. Can it be any surprise that the soldiers employed by this institution have applied these values to a nonhuman? Violence and oppression is encouraged and routinized among the troops. It's also encouraged and routinized among all citizens.
As Gary Francione so famously discussed in his letter to the Philadelphia Daily News, our tendency to single out any one particular instance of violence inflicted on a nonhuman as particularly criminal or deviant is misguided. If we are not vegan, we engage in similar atrocities. Nonhumans used as our resources are treated just as despicably: they suffer and they are killed. What’s more, the sensationalizing of these acts usually reflects an underlying racism (as in the Michael Vick case), xenophobia (as seen in the campaign against live export which targets Muslims), or sexism (as seen in the animal rights movement’s focus on fur). This sheep beating case is interesting in that the subject of outrage is a group of people who are generally admired and glorified.
We might be disgusted in the horrific violence inflicted on the sheep, but we must recognize that this behavior is a merely an extension of the normalized ideology of violence, dominion, and otherization that our government nurtures. We must also recognize that consuming the body parts, reproductive products, or services of nonhumans represents violence towards those individuals in ways that are absolutely comparable to the incident with the air force service members. We must reject all violence—whether it be state-sanctioned violence against other humans or economically normalized violence towards humans and nonhumans. The air force members who so callously killed the sheep are also guilty of inflicting similar atrocities to other humans in our Middle East campaign and in every bite of flesh from their dinner plates. And, in our support for the war campaign and our continued rejection of veganism, our actions are no less despicable than those portrayed in the video clip.
If you found this video appalling, I urge you embrace nonviolence in your own life. Support peace and support veganism. We must challenge our hierarchical ideology that makes dominion over others seem natural, necessary, or justified. Violence and oppression against humans and other animals is inextricably linked—we have a duty to recognize that and to embrace equal consideration for all.
