#white girl alert i am a white girl talking ab racism there are ppl way more educated on these issues than i

[angrylesbianstereotype]

Okay I am going to try and word this very carefully for the benefit of the internet strawman that lives in my head that is already playing telephone with what I’m trying to say butttt as an animal caretaker I’m not loving the way y’all talk about animal welfare. Don’t get me wrong (please) drawing comparisons between how white people treat people of color and how they treat animals is a totally valid way to illustrate how white people often view and treat people of color as subhuman, but lately I kind of feel like this sentiment is being reiterated over and over again without being expanded on in terms of either human rights or animal welfare. I think it’s valuable and even critical to examine the historical context behind white supremacy’s investment in animal welfare, but that it’s a mistake to view the two as inextricably linked. White supremacists will also claim to have a vested interest in children’s rights, which couldn’t be further from the truth if you take even a cursory look at their policies and practices, but the reason they pretend to give a shit about children and animals without bothering to extend this same courtesy to people of color, queer people, etc is because children and animals cannot advocate for themselves, which leaves room for racists to hawk their own agenda under the guise of charity. They are not interested in advocating on behalf of anyone they cannot completely control. Animals aren’t treated well, which I believe was the initial reasoning behind the comparison to racism; that white people abuse people of color even more fervently than they do animals. But that’s a call to end systemic injustice towards people of color, not to forego animal advocacy altogether. We should all care about animals! We should all be working toward educating ourselves about the literal millions of other living beings we share a planet with, whose habitats we are destroying without impunity, who are entirely at our mercy, who are disposed of and exploited and treated more as objects to facilitate human existence than living creatures in their own right, even when they fall into the very exclusive category of beloved. It’s imperative for safety reasons to educate ourselves about animal behavior, not to mention fundamental to indigenous activism to work toward the preservation of their habitats and continued existence on this planet. Also, I fully reject the fundamentally Christian idea that animals don’t have souls, that they don’t have feelings, that they were put on this earth to prop up humanity, that their behaviors and physiologies are all virtually the same because they all fall into the very broad category of Not Human. I agree that saying their mistreatment is somehow worse than racism is misleading, wildly ignorant and offensive, not because animals don’t deserve our protection, but because it demonstrates such little understanding of and willingness to understand the consequences of racism, and because these are really different issues altogether. Animals don’t want or need human rights; they’re not human. They prioritize differently, even the expectation of being eaten is just a normative experience for them, as ghoulish as that sounds. But not being human, or anything akin to human, doesn’t make them automatons, doesn’t mean they can’t feel pain or should be treated unfairly. They are an integral part of all of our lives even if you don’t consider yourself an animal person, and we should try and extend understanding and empathy towards them for no other reason than that they are alive.