The documentary begins with an Arthur Schopenhauer quote (although the source is not properly cited) describing the three stages of a truth:

1. Ridiculization
2. Violent opposition
3. Acceptance

There are three things we can say about this phenomenology of truth: First, there are ridiculous interpretations of the world that are not necessarily true (they rather have an "effect of truth"). Also, in the same way, some unfair situations deserve to be violently opposed. Finally, many fallacies and injustices are generally accepted, which does not make them true. When we are really facing a truth, it's not a matter of whether or not we can allocate a place for it, but a question of how can we place ourselves in it. So what kind of truths are we dealing with here? Does the truth revealed in this documentary demand for a different subjective position or it is easily assimilated into our world?

Anti-speciesists claim that we humans should not make moral distinctions between humans and… non-humans. But how far can we go this way? Sexism, racism, and ageism are different forms of discrimination among humans. If you claim equality as a principle you cannot elaborate -at the same time- an ethical edifice based on differences. If men are no different than women in the eyes of justice, it is because men and women share a common condition (i.e. humanity). So what is the common condition that makes humans and animals subjects of ethics? Being mere forms of life? Is that what this is all about?

If our ethical horizon will be defined in terms of biological features, let’s start from the beginning. A Species is a category or rank in the biological taxonomy. This is the basic hierarchy:

Life > Domain > Kingdom > Phylum > Class > Order > Family > Genus > Species

The first thing we need to know is how far we are willing to go in our ethical stance. Here’s the first problem: Considering other forms of life as subjects of ethics does not expand ethics. On the contrary, it reduces ethics to pure natural selection. The more we escalate this taxonomy the more we fall into a mystification of nature. Ethics lose their ground: they are no longer decisions made by subjects sharing a common condition. They become laws of nature. The only possible ethical act is therefore obeying the laws of nature.

We know there's no final cause in nature. What we call nature is an essentially chaotic and violent process, with no ultimate goal; no bigger plan that we all are part of. This reminds us a Spinoza quote on the traditional dicta that God or nature does nothing in vain, that God does everything for the best that there are no gaps in nature:

But in seeking to show that Nature does nothing in vain, that is, nothing that is not to man's advantage, they seem to have shown only this, that Nature and the gods are as crazy as mankind. (Ethics P1, Appendix).

This mystification is consistent with scientistic discourses according to which nature has a personality, and a purpose. We should not be surprised when biologists like Richard Dawkins compare speciesism with human slavery:

What I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven't yet produced to break out of that. It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery.

As you can see in the dialog between two characters in Notting Hill (1999), Cinema takes a step further on this:

William: And, ahm: what exactly is a fruitarian?

Keziah: We believe that fruits and vegetables have feeling so we think cooking is cruel. We only eat things that have actually fallen off a tree or bush - that are, in fact, dead already.

William: Right. Right. Interesting stuff. So, these carrots...

Keziah: Have been murdered, yes.

William: Murdered? Poor carrots. How beastly!

So the truth of anti-speciesism -and with it, its whole ethical structure- appears to be the equalization of human rights and animal rights. Isn’t this a little bit arbitrary? Here’s the second problem: What consequences can we expect from this? In any case the empathy for other species does not require political activism. Following the same logic we should ask ourselves if we are not forgetting the cruelty to other forms of life outside the kingdom Animalia, such as plants, and fungi. Right after anti-speciesism we should fight against genusism, then familism, and so on. Being anti-speciesists does not safeguard us from being genusists or domainists. What is the limit here? By following this same path we will end up talking about mineral rights.


Where in earth is justice?

Is life the boundary of ethics? If this is the case, if life as such is the common ground for our ethical edifice, the only condition to threat any living being as equal could be dwelling the same planet. At least that is what is implied in the commercial motto: “We are earthlings, make the connection”. Then let’s take this a step further: If being an earthling is the basis of the egalitarian principle…. Why discriminate against extra-terrestrial forms of life? Those poor little aliens… It was just a matter of time until they released the documentary-style film District 9 (2009), showing the inhuman conditions of extra-terrestrial slum dwellers.

But who are the victims? How are they identified? Do they present themselves as victims? We can differentiate natural and artificial victims, produced by men. The incumbency of anti-speciesism is therefore very limited: preventing animal cruelty in conditions of artificiality. However, only humans can make this "connection", only humans can conceive the artificiality of violence and avoid it. Then anti-speciesism can be, at best, a protocol to avoid unnecessary abuses to other forms of life.

Then what does anti-speciesism really account for? Is it an extreme form of anthropocentrism that identifies men with animals from the perspective of humanity? If this is the case, human rights should be extended to all species of animals, and the only price we have to pay is the humanization of animals (considering other forms of life like genera, families, orders, etc. as inferior… for now). Or is anti-speciesism another theological way of denying subjectivity? Then we are dealing with another Zen mystification of nature. We’re not humanizing animals, but animalizing humans. Humans are fully identified with their bodies, with their animality.

This is ultimately true: Humans are animals. Humans are mortal creatures, predators. But this is not what singularizes the human animal in the world of the living. If humans are “somebody” instead of “something” then the anti-speciesist concept of animals should consider them “somebody” as well. The thing is “somebody” and “something” are human distinctions. Animals cannot tell the difference, or if they can, we cannot tell if they tell. We are stuck here. According to anti-speciesists, we humans and animals have the same rights and therefore we should share a common conception of justice. But what kind of justice does not allow us to transmit what is just or unjust to our congeners? What notion of justice is that where the ultimate goal is to prevent the suffering of the victims? Far from questioning the ideological matrix that shaped the proclamation of the Rights of Man (i.e. the idea of justice as the piety of the righteous) we are expanding it out of its boundaries.

Think of it: The very delimitation of this ethical quagmire is derived from power relationships, which, again, are specifically human. Ethical principles are human inventions; they are not the result of a survival strategy. Anti-speciesism is based on a trivialization of the principle of equality. The declaration of the animal “bill or rights” was not signed by animals… that we know of.


Biopolitics at its purest

There’s a part in the documentary where Joaquin Phoenix says animals understand the world in which they live (the same way humans do), because if they couldn’t, they would not survive. We reached the ideological core of the anti-speciesist stance: What constitutes its “ethics” (its “truth effect”) is the proclamation that we all (living beings in this planet) have the right to survive, the right to avoid suffering and death. The ultimate goal is survival; we have nothing but our instinct of self-preservation. As a consequence of this, the documentary has a rapt gaze on the Nazi Holocaust as the greatest of all imaginable Evils. Since human existence is a form of life among others, we are told that humans are “not equal, nor inferior, but other nations”. Yes, you heard right: Animals are considered nations. So anti-speciesists want to be the UN consuls among animal nations. They want to establish a new perpetual peace among species. Too bad there will be only human representatives. Maybe that is why they have chosen Joaquin Phoenix as the narrator. His hare lips remind us the connection with animality.

According to the protectors of life in earth, having certain rights makes us subjects of ethics: the right to survive, the right not to feel pain. This is a by definition a conservative vision: the main purpose is to preserve the Status Quo of life. Life is something precious and fragile that needs to be protected. Ethics are reduced to bio-ethics. But, again, why not fungi? Why not plants or other forms of life outside Animalia? The focus on the suffering of the victims says it all: anti-speciesists protect potentially conscious ways of life, living beings that have the ability to feel pain. In the eyes of this conception of justice, we are just suffering creatures that need to be protected. The preservation of life is the ultimate ethical act. Pain must be avoided at all costs. It is OK if everything remains the same, as long as pain is kept to a minimum. So animals are either considered “pain receptors” (defenseless creatures at the mercy of the great master, the homo sapiens), or “nations”, fully conscious living beings, with a history of their own, whose natural rights should be upheld according to the universal principles of nature. And what do these two ideas have in common? Aren't they both two sides of the same coin?

When the euthanasia theme is discussed in the documentary, lethal injection is presented as the more "human" method for sacrificing animals. They say human culture must learn to feel outside of itself. We humans should learn empathy. The empathy we have between humans should be not different that the empathy we have to other forms of life (at least in this planet). But this is nothing new. Don't the “Help Animals” and “Help Africa” commercials share the demand that we should demonstrate the same empathy for a hungry stray dog than for hungry children?

We can't really "take into consideration the interests of animals". How could we? Are we aware of those interests? Do animals have interests? The only thing we can do is set priorities and act according to principles. Protecting life above all things is quite an arbitrary principle, presented as something rational and benevolent. Why is the homo sapiens the only privileged creature that knows the difference between right and wrong? All this humanitarian chatter is just the reverse side of the silence imposed to the victims (our own human victims). Naming ourselves (human beings) the protectors of all forms of life in this planet (in the image and likeness of us) accounts for a reactionary idea of justice: That is, a justice that comes from outside of us; whose voice can be heard only by the righteous. A justice imparted to bodies without Idea: living beings that need to be protected in their essence: bodies that eat, suffer, and die; fragile creatures who desperate plea for shelter.

We are later told that killing animals for food is a unilateral decision. Maybe they forgot to mention than breeding and reproducing animals are unilateral decisions as well. It's actually part of the modernization of man, the creation of human culture. So then what are these statements aiming to? Going back to idealized communities where animals are killed in religious rituals as in James Cameron's Avatar (2009)? This is how the spiritual path begins: the return to the lost paradise, the return to a transcendental balance, to a past that never really existed. All origin myth is nothing but a mystification of ideological underpinnings.

But cheer up, anti-speciesists! Here' the “good news”: Animals are not actually getting the worst part of it: Millions of human beings are already being treated as captive animals. The majority of world population are living in slums, rural settlements, displaced areas and refugee camps. Thousands of people die of hunger for each whale that is killed. The EU annual subsides for each cow are greater than the GDP per capita in many African countries. And this is just a start.

The actual finality of this ideology is justifying the stratification of man and other life forms excluding certain parts of the definition of man. Those man who are not fully identified with their human “essence” are already being treated as cattle, at the mercy of the market (a.k.a. “the nature”) to exploit them, cast away from humanity and considered inhumane and dangerous. This conception of all men as equals has its reverse: If you are not equal, you are not a man. In the same way, anti-speciesists might say that all living beings are equal, but... if you are not equal, you are not even alive. Finally, we will reach the ontological zero level of the definitive “bill of rights”: All that exists is equal, and if you are not equal, you don't exist.

Ideology cannot but escape always in the same direction: forwards. Just look at the movie poster. The harmonic trilogy Humankind - Animals - Nature is just a reverse side of a more dangerous trinity: Homo Sacer - “Living Being” Sacer - “Entity” Sacer. We're entering the second stage now. The life preservation nihilism is nothing but contempt for life, a deeply symptomatic will of nothingness, or, in Freudian terms, a death drive. The ultimate (unconscious?) goal for anti-speciesists is to safely keep all forms of life in this planet in a conservation area, which is nothing different than what’s already happening... humans included.