Are Animals Oppressed? A Feminist Perspective

A couple years ago, I took a highly elucidative course on the philosophy of feminism. This course tackled issues at the core of social justice, from the epistemology of the oppressed to the social phenomenon of oppression itself. It is this latter area we focus upon in the following short essay, itself a project in proving that more-than-human animals are, indeed, oppressed—and seriously so.

Toward the end of her chapter, “Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions,” Ann E. Cudd articulates four conditions that are jointly necessary and sufficient for some state of affairs to qualify as oppression: the harm condition, social group condition, privilege condition, and coercion condition. Cudd clarifies that the harm condition refers not just to any harm, whether justifiable or not, but instead to the harm that results from a given institutional practice. Similarly to Marilyn Frye, Cudd maintains that an individual can only be oppressed based on their belonging to a certain social group, a reflection which leads to Cudd’s articulation of the social group condition. Like Frye, Cudd also argues that for some state of affairs to count as oppression, it must be the case that another social group profits from a given institutional practice. Having thus clarified the privilege condition, Cudd advances to the final condition necessary for oppression: the coercion condition. Whereas other feminist philosophers, including Frye, fail to articulate this condition directly, Cudd corrects this oversight by asserting there must exist an unjustified coercive force that inflicts unnecessary harm upon an oppressed social group. As stated above, Cudd holds that these four conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for the phenomenon of oppression to actually obtain; for something to qualify as oppressive, it is therefore necessary that all four criteria, as Cudd has developed them, be satisfied.

To understand the phenomenon of oppression, we need look no further than the oppression of the 99.999% of us who are more-than-human and sentient. Perhaps the most complete expression of human supremacy can be found in the factory farms and slaughterhouses that typify modern animal agriculture. In these gulags of despair, innocent, vulnerable creatures who just wanted to live are raped, tortured, and murdered for the sake of human profit, be it monetary, gustatory, or otherwise. Our profound mistreatment of animals provides one of the purest examples not only of corporate greed, social complicity, and unjustified harm, but also the phenomenon of oppression itself. As any sensible person even marginally aware of the despicable mistreatment of more-than-human animals in modern factory farms and slaughterhouses will admit, institutional practices, from grinding baby male chicks alive by the millions to ripping off the testicles, teeth, and tails of baby pigs, cause extreme, unnecessary suffering, satisfying Cudd’s first requirement. More-than-human animals also exist as a distinct social group from the human oppressors, where the demarcation between human and more-than-human, between those deserving of respect and those not deserving of respect, could not be clearer, especially in our profoundly speciesist society, which currently assigns more weight to our desire for a particular taste than to another’s very right to life.

Meanwhile, their human oppressors maintain privilege so profound that many inconsiderate human animals not only affirm the thesis of human supremacy, but also deny that we even victimize the trillions of more-than-human animals who continue to suffer and die needlessly in factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other animal-abusing institutions. Nor do more-than-human animals choose these regrettable fates; instead, they are coerced into submission. Members of the most privileged species on Earth rob more-than-human animals of their freedom, their children, and their very lives. How can we continue to ignore their suffering? How can we continue denying that human animals, almost universally, participate in the largest, longest-running mass killing of innocents in all history? And what must we do to bring all this madness to its final, grace-abiding end?