Animal agriculture and collective dissociation

There is no justice without justice for cows

I took ayahuasca to work through my complex developmental trauma and to attempt to gain access to sensation and intimacy that was still very difficult for me to access even after more than a decade of consistent therapy and concerted effort on healing.

I expected to process the incest in ceremony, and I did. What I did not expect was for the medicine to show me the cows. I was already a vegan when I took ayahuasca, and I found my empathy for animals painful, something I needed to turn away from to get through the day to day. I made an effort to be a “chill vegan,” to be socially included, to avoid the defensiveness of non-vegans, and, honestly, to hide from myself the intensity of my empathy for animals. I did not want or expect the volume of that empathy to be turned way up by the ayahuasca.

I became a vegetarian as a child. I remember hours spent in existential contemplation. I remember being a little kid and struggling so hard to understand how every person in my life, including every adult who was supposed to teach me about right and wrong, was quietly taking part in an atrocity of unthinkable proportions and acting like it was entirely normal. I could not understand it. I was filled with despair and panic at the dissonance between what was obviously right, and what was considered normal.

I felt strong social pressure to conform and eat animals. I was treated with mockery and contempt, especially by adults. Treating my vegetarianism as silly and ridiculous, and as rude, was a way for them to avoid looking at what my vegetarianism brought up for them. It cracked a tiny hole in the collective dissociation that allows us to close our hearts to the obvious suffering of billions of animals. My childhood vegetarianism and my current veganism function as a moral call to care about nonhuman animals. A lot of people feel confronted by that.

I never took a moral position against killing animals for food. I was a tiny philosopher and I explained to my parents like it was obvious (because it is) that raising animals in captivity, never letting them run and play, reducing their lives to the “production” of “meat” or “dairy”, is nothing at all like a predator animal killing a prey animal. The prey animal being chased by the predator lives a free life of their own. They are not defined as “meat” or “dairy” but exist as an animal before they are killed. Importantly and significantly, they have the right to run and to use all of their evolutionarily developed skills to evade the predator. Their fate is not sealed.

I said all of this to my father in an eight year old way and he smirked at me: “Vegetarianism on the basis that it’s not a far fight is an interesting argument.” Of course, because I was a child, no one would take me very seriously. Now, as an adult, I feel compelled to articulate an ethics of predation and to explain that industrial agriculture is based on the reduction of sentient beings to objects. That is why animal agriculture is obviously and straight forwardly wrong. The moral question of whether or not it is ever justified for humans to kill animals for food is unrelated.

We need to stop justifying animal agriculture with vague nods to the concept that it is “natural” for us to eat animals. There is nothing natural about animal agriculture or about capitalism. There is nothing natural about sentient beings being reduced to objects, selectively bred and kept in captivity their whole lives. We all know this. It’s not only unnatural but it is an affront to the sacred to treat living beings as objects. The only way we allow for this to continue is through mass collective dissociation.

The collective dissociation that we all practice every day about factory farmed animals and the atrocity of unthinkable proportions that contemporary animal agriculture represents is a training ground for all sorts of other horrifying dissociations. I see many people in my life struggling with the extreme pain of watching others dissociate about Palestine. We are witnessing a genocide in real time on our smartphones. What is happening could not be more clear. And yet so many people are able to live as if it is not happening. They are able to see the same things we see: the endless parade of livestreamed atrocities any one of which is wrong beyond imagining, and still somehow not see it. They can still somehow mock those of us pleading for empathy. Their dissociation is familiar to me and it’s the same dissociation we practice every day with farmed animals.

It is very painful to not be dissociating when others around you are, including people you love. When I say people are dissociating I am not talking about political or philosophical disagreements. I am talking about the shutting down of empathy and the splitting of reality so that the horrifying information is never fully let into the consciousness, and certainly not into the heart. Many philosophical and political positions fundamentally rely on dissociation, because it would not be possible to make those arguments if we were connected to our empathy. We are free to disagree all we want. We are not justified in denying objective facts of reality, denying human beings their humanity, or denying sentient beings their sentience. We have a moral obligation to come out of dissociation even though it is extremely painful.

Since the ayahuasca showed me the cows, my veganism and my animal advocacy have started to take up more space in my life. I am more vocal about it and this triggers and upsets some people. Others are inspired by it, and feel welcomed back to their empathy. I think most people can see that this stance is completely in alignment with all my other work. In my personal relationships (almost all of which are with non-vegans) I have begun to feel the pain of this dissonance. I have begun to be more honest about my real, heartfelt feelings about all of this. I have started to set clear boundaries that I won’t pay for animal agriculture even if I’m not the one eating it. This process has been hard and painful and alienating in some ways. But I can feel the resonance of integrity as I align my actions with my deepest held principles. And having these hard conversations can open to more intimacy. If someone does not know the extent to which I feel empathy for farmed animals, they don’t really know me.

I realize now that the ayahuasca showed me the cows because my opposition to cruelty is the most beautiful precious thing about me. Because all dissociation is the same dissociation. Because there is no world without sexual abuse and incest where there are still factory farms and dairy cows being forcibly impregnated and robbed of their children over and over again. Because all dissociation costs, and collective dissociation allows us to passively witness atrocities, or even justify them. We are losing the best of what we are when we cut off our empathy. There is no way to cut our empathy in one place and have it be unaffected in another.

There is no justice without justice for cows.

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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

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