In our environment, especially the ELB Euskal Herriko Laborarien Batasuna has made an effort over these years to strengthen the position of farmers. Now Confederation Paysanne – Conf – picks up his arguments on this sensitive topic in a book: “What the baserritars say about the relationship between man and animal. Claiming popular livestock.” Here we present the selected passages of this document translated into Basque.

Farmers should not fall into cartoons of our opposing positions, limiting them to ‘extremism’. Many vegan militants work with the will to ‘do well’. Let us not limit the reason for the vegan trend to an economic-industrial plot. The industrial drift, urbanization and individualisation of livestock production that is taking place in our society are important reasons.

It is a counter-production that responds to arguments such as “has always been so” to pure tradition. Tradition has never served to justify anything. This allows vegans to go even further in the questionable match between the fight against slavery and male domination and livestock exploitation.

Calm must be maintained in order to claim livestock farming. Nor should we fear that some dark points of current livestock farming will be recognised. Certain economic and political constraints (tendency to depreciate prices, inadequate industrial standards, profitability demanded of slaughterhouses …) sometimes force the baserritars to the unfortunate logics of animals, which often lose their autonomy and know-how at the same time. That is why the fight against industrialization is linked to the fight for the welfare of farmers and for good treatment of animals.

Pretending to impose your ideology at any price does not turn vegans into alerts. To carry out peaceful symbolic acts is a respectable form of action, we too use them. On the contrary, the spread of psychological harassment against farmers, slaughterhouse workers and butchers, the attempt to cause shock on other human beings and psychological violence against them is absolutely despicable. It is unacceptable that the person doing so should call himself an allergist. We therefore respond to the legitimate and growing questions that many citizens have about the relationship between the human being and the animal.

1.- “It is immoral to kill animals for pleasure”

The industrialisation of livestock production, it is true, raises a great moral question, especially when we see how it affects the terrible work rates imposed on slaughterhouse workers, environmental damage and health.

However, the distance from the life of animals from the cycle shows how the distance from the human being to nature is sensitive, moral and metaphysical. We are part of an ecosystem, of a territory. Livestock farming is a developed form of relations that closely bind human beings, animals and their territory. The question is to know: What lifestyle do we want? Do we want to live with animals? Or do we want wild nature – paradoxically to give it its “freedom” – to be limited and continue to live in spaces without nature (city, concrete…) surrounded by synthetic themes?

Popular livestock farming is closely linked to the resources of the territory in which it is based. The coherence of the polylaban and livestock systems allows for a real relationship with nature, it cannot be denied or said that it is an unconscious behaviour. Baserritars can talk more than anyone about that special relationship with nature, which has often been lost in a society that is citizenship, even in rural areas. Farmers, because of their day-to-day relationships, have known for a long time that animals are able to feel things subjectively.

Rejection of death shows as a symptom how Western culture has moved away as far as possible from the process of death. However, fear and disgust of death have increased at once. But there is no life without death. And those who work with living things know that they feed on organic. The rejection of suffering is legitimate when it comes to useless and therefore cruel suffering. However, we fully assume the need to die within the livestock cycle. Suffering is inherent to life.

2.- “Slaughterhouses must be closed”

The public debate on slaughterhouses [in the French State] has made it possible to clarify the issue of slaughterhouses, which for a long time were hidden and dark, symbols of a widespread distancing from death and the diversion of industrial and standardized agro-food. Faced with the challenge, we [Confederation Paysannek] have worked on concrete proposals: nearby, mobile and farmhouse slaughterhouses, lightening work rates, job rotation, staff training, increased value of trades, shortening livestock transport times.

3.- “Animal species are at the same level as the human species: antispecism must prevail”

We must not wait for the advent of the philosophy of antispecism to understand that the human being is part of nature and that a hierarchy must not be established between species. This does not deny the existence of trophic, ecosystem relationships located in each territory. Vegans themselves are not anti-specionists, as they establish the boundary between species, between animals, especially mammals, and the rest of living beings. The sensitivity of each living being is based on the ability to perceive things subjectively, to have experiences. It has to do with consciousness and suffering. But is that limit justified? Should we not respect other living creatures as far as sensitive animals are concerned? Are the forms of cultivation as harmful to plants and invertebrated animals as insects acceptable? Respect is due to all living beings and also to the resources of ecosystems (soils, water, air…).

The cultivation of plants also lives at the expense of the destruction of some small animals. Moreover, if some species were allowed to grow, they would compete with the food produced by the fields for humans (wild boar, rabbit…). How do you think vegans have to play with these animals? Sterilizing it? Cercando? Drastically reducing the human population?

Everything is about balance and the productive capacity of nature. Living with animals is a social option, such as the lifestyle that is chosen with respect to them. According to societies, various balances have developed, always in combination with livestock, from nomadic pastors to a part of Indian society, the vegetan. The elimination of animals from the economic cycle cannot mean the disappearance of animals, but the submission to the whim of certain privileged human beings (possibility of citizens or tourists…).

4.- “The struggle for the prohibition of livestock means moral progress, at the same level as the fight against male slavery or domination.”

The domestication of animals, and its component is the stockbreeding of baserritars, cannot be considered as a form of domination. The fact of being an Abmodel does not imply a social increase to the detriment of the rest of the population. About one billion people live in the world of livestock, and many of them are among the poorest people. Popular livestock farming helps them in food security and survival. Moral progress is naturally universalist. It cannot therefore be said that the Inuits or the nomads of Mongolia are enlightened.

Popular livestock farming is based on the complementarity between plant and animal, it works with nature cycles to achieve a harmonious environment for humans and animals. Would there be more harmony without livestock? Our landscapes have emerged from a very interrelated human and natural history, the result of this union between the two. The distancing of the increasingly urban human population from nature in their daily lives causes the disconnection between nature and culture, between life and death, between agriculture and food.

Certainly, industrialisation has been an unjustifiable logic of the profitability of living things. This logic is also devastating for human well-being, climate, the environment and animals. But without pity, it acts mostly to be alive. Combating the industrialization of production animals is in no way a rejection of popular livestock farming. The economic and financial system is bad and unmatched what we call into question in its conjunto.Este system has established the oppression of the population, of the baserritars and of the animals, depending on the economic strength each has.

A strategy of vegans is to place their way in the direction of history within the progressive movements to convince their audience: “The future will give us reason,” “progress goes there,” etc. It seems that the position of their path in the set of humanistic, feminist and social struggles is what gives more strength to the thesis they call ‘anti-speciist’, a thesis that is not at all universal and intellectually founded. Taking for themselves the word antispecism, they place themselves on the side of ‘good’. However, his thesis only receives the name of antispecist, as they establish a new hierarchization of living beings based on the concepts of consciousness and sensitivity. Faced with this, we prefer a systemic view of living beings that, like animals, does not classify plants, insects and plants according to their capacity for suffering or their consciousness (which we do not know well) or any other criteria. We ourselves are part of that ecological balance. This balance, which is the painful truth, has been weakened by human actions, such as industrial agriculture, whether in animal or plant production. We are one of the main victims, the peasants.