I Sent an Email to Filmmaker Michael Moore Asking Why Aren’t Our Fellow Animals on Your Progressive Agenda?
Alienation and isolation from the living world of planet Earth
Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns, October 30, 2022, responded to Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #31 by emailing Michael Moore at michaelmoore+mikes-midterm-tsunami-of-truth@substack.com.
Dear Michael Moore,
You and I are on the same side of social justice and politics. I appreciate your commentaries and exhortations on behalf of victimized human beings and, in a general way, the environment and the “climate.”
But I would like to know why you and the majority of “progressives” show no awareness of or interest in or compassion for the animals who share the planet with us. Progressives talk about the planet and climate change in a very abstract way. To read you and others, it’s as if nothing and nobody exists outside the human isolation chamber – a self-constructed prison containing only ourselves and our ever-mounting mountains of trash. “Out there” is “the climate” which we have to consider because our abuse of the earth and its creatures, whom we are either exterminating or incarcerating, is affecting the human animal’s pursuit of happiness (shopping, money, materialism) adversely.
Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I seem to recall hearing you on MSNBC a few years ago speaking in a somewhat jocular manner about shooting birds, for fun, with your friends growing up. Pretty soon, there will be few or no birds left, the rate of their decline, because of us, is so dramatic. The only birds will be the countless chickens, turkeys, ducks and various others condemned to live in humanity’s toilet bowls and sewers, i.e., industrialized sheds in preparation to be tortured – TORTURED – with paralytic shocks prior to having their throats partially cut before millions and millions are scalded alive each year, in this country alone, in slaughterhouse scald water tanks – all this maniacal, human-manufactured FASCIST evil for “KFC” and depraved culinary savagery.
Let us not omit the countless birds, mammals, and other poor souls being tortured, with impunity, in NIH-funded laboratories in the U.S. and elsewhere. Let us not forget the countless millions of chickens, turkeys and ducks who are being intentionally suffocated and baked alive, in laboratories and on factory farms, all to protect the poultry industry, which is itself responsible for the ever-mutating strains of avian influenza viruses, and that taxpayer are footing the bill for agribusiness indemnities paid through USDA programs. Let us not forget all the wolves, coyotes and others being shot from helicopters and poisoned by U.S. Fish and Wildlife and its state affiliates for the livestock industry. The rainforests in Brazil and Asia are being destroyed for this industry: 75-80% of soybeans grown in the Brazilian rainforest are grown to feed chickens and other industrially-confined farmed animals.
I will conclude by saying, simply, that our species is the one species on Earth that no other species, animal or plant, needs in order to thrive, except perhaps for certain host-specific microbes. We bring misery, terror, depletions and poisons everywhere we penetrate ourselves into. Is this going to continue into Eternity? Are mainstream “progressives” congenitally incapable of even acknowledging the existence of beings outside ourselves? We are ruining the planet for all these creatures who are NOT ruining the planet. Are these beings really not in your consciousness at all? It isn’t just “Trumpism,” narrowly construed, that’s the problem. Toward our planet and its other-than-human individuals, species, homes and habitats, our species, with miniscule exceptions, is ALL TRUMPISM: brutal, callous, pitiless, selfish, sociopathic.
I would appreciate a meaningful response from you. Please do not bother with a pro forma. Thank you for your time.
Karen Davis, PhD, President
United Poultry Concerns
Machipongo, VA 23405
https://www.upc-online.org