Beyond Humanism, Toward a New Animalism

To understand and promote the radical policy change necessary to institute innate human morality and establish justice, we must understand how animal abuse led early humans to abandon their innate morality and how civilization’s overarching animal abuse policy perpetuates violence, injustice, and human misery. Toward those objectives, I submitted to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature in 2008 a petition to change our species’ zoological name to Homo complexus, arguing that humans’ hyper-complex imagination, not sapience, distinguishes them from other animals. I use Homo complexus because what we call ourselves, like our other practices, affects all animals, including “us.” I recommend using Homo complexus and avoiding Homo sapiens: Establishing a new zoological name depends, in part, on its frequency of usage.

I. Origins of Invidious Distinctions, Violence, Hatred, Terror Culture, and Eliminationism

Civilization exists due to the most radical possible change: from living by our species’ evolved nature as plant-foraging apes on the African savanna, with a live-and-let-live attitude toward other animals, to living unnaturally according to the most aggressive human beings’ imagination, based on animal abuse. Natural prey to large cats, raptors, dogs, and reptiles, with keen eyesight, reflexes, and imagination, and scant bodily defenses, original humans (including hominids) always had to be on the lookout. Social animals confer status on individuals based on service to others, and the most valuable and conspicuous service in the original, natural human way of life was helping fellow humans avoid predation. Matthew Cartmill showed two decades ago in A View to a Death in the Morning that the notion of humans as natural “killer apes”–the “man the hunter” concept–originated in flimsy “science.”¹ It also contradicts experience and observation, human violence in all of its forms being an intensely salient anomaly, not our species’ predominant mode of living. And it ignores our species’ herbivore anatomy and physiology, alluded to by eminent archaeologists² and detailed from fingernails to intestines in “The Comparative Anatomy of Eating” by Milton R. Mills, M.D.³

The violence-rationalizing myth remains popular nevertheless. Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman lament this fact in the 2009 expanded edition of their 2005 Man the Hunted, recipient of the W.W. Howells Book Prize from the Biological Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association. The text refutes “man the hunter” so thoroughly that only uncorrected habits of thought sustain it. This, more than cruelty or lack of compassion, perpetuates animal abuse as a way of life. It rains misery and early death on humans along with other animals, drives scores of species extinct on a daily basis, and undermines the natural functioning of the living world as animals have generated, experienced, and adapted to it over hundreds of millions of years.

Prey animals’ innate fear of predators does not naturally equate to hatred of them or an organized campaign against them. Predators do not hate “us” or other prey animals any more than “we” hate fruit-bearing trees. Predation and its avoidance coevolved over millions of years. Nearly all prey animals are safe at any given moment as predators mainly capture the young, the old, the ill, the disabled, and the less acute who fail to react to danger promptly. Healthy, quick-witted animals in their prime thrive among predators, sometimes fending them off or even wounding or killing them with horns, antlers, hooves, and other natural defenses. Unbeknownst to prey animals, even to most human beings, by keeping herbivores moving about the landscape, predators help preserve life-supporting vegetation, giving each plant-food source respite from hooves, teeth, and fingers so it can continually regenerate. “Red in tooth and claw,” a misleading description of nature so embedded in conventional wisdom that The Associated Press Guide to News Writing tells newspersons to use it as a corrective to “Mother Nature,” obscures the reality that civilization is far more dangerous than nature.⁴ Homo complexus is far from the first species equipped by evolution with perception, reason, and morality, so we should assume countless others have the kinds of rich experience such traits afford. In nature undisturbed by humans, viable humans and other animals experienced joy, spirituality, and fulfillment.

From what is known about humans’ innate terror of predators⁵ and social-primate status-seeking behavior,⁶ it is reasonable to deduce that at some prehistoric moment not precisely known, some imaginative members of Homo complexus grasped that (1) they could reduce danger and increase feelings of safety and security in their troop (extended-family social-primate society) by killing predators who were not attacking, and (2) killing predators would enhance the killers’ status within their troop. Gradually, over thousands of years, a particularly aggressive minority of human beings instituted a de facto eliminationist campaign against predators, establishing the paradigm demagogues still use against targeted human groups today. Early hunters, in a sense, constituted our species’ first radical political movement. Radicals promote root policy change. The proto-policy by which original humans lived was to play, couple, forage for plants to eat, meditate (as we now call it), and move on, always alert to animate danger, taking turns on guard duty. Hunting was a radical innovation. And in addition to killing predators, the weaponed class started to imitate them by hunting some of their natural prey, eventually using victims’ bodies to make weapons, tools, and clothing.

As compared with wielding rocks or tree branches, rounding up children, and fleeing to avoid predation, turning the tables by hunting predators involved permanent manufactured weapons. The human body lacks killing and defending features like claws, fangs, and tough skin. As reflected in their bodies, humans are naturally peaceable, cooperative, respectful, and perspicacious, with a live-and-let-live attitude toward members of other species that is adaptive as even small animals have sharp teeth, claws, venom, and a will to live.⁷ And the more prey animals in an area, the less likely any particular one will be the next victim of predation. Humans’ innate affinity for other beings–biophilia⁸–extends even to very distantly related animals, as Elisabeth Tova Bailey shows in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, in which the author observes a snail in a flowerpot by her bedside during a lengthy convalescence.⁹ Our biophilia extends to dangerous animals when they do not pose an immediate threat. Due to our innate empathy, the capacity to experience others’ sensations and emotions as our own, harming nonhuman animals arouses sympathy for victims and moral indignation toward perpetrators, as we know from public exposés of atrocities toward other animals. Slowly killing a large animal with spears must have shocked, frightened, and appalled most of the early hunters’ fellow troop members.¹⁰ Combine our species’ innate morality and biophilia with our natural conservatism–comfort with the familiar and suspicion of novelty–and we can surmise that hunting took hold in part because it involved excursions, as it still does today. Crucially, weapons made with predators in mind could be turned against conscientious objectors, enforcing the emerging might-makes-right paradigm.

A new way of thinking had to take hold for such radical change to become permanently established. Humans learned to consider themselves entitled to safety, and demonized certain animals as being inherently unworthy of life. Thus, speciesism became Homo complexus‘ first harmful invidious distinction, initiating a long series in what would become a violent and oppressive history.¹¹ The weaponed class appeared to have a legitimate claim to improving troop safety. And to consolidate their increasing status and power, members of the weaponed class taught their troop members to hate the predators they naturally viewed with fear and awe. Thus emerged terror culture, with humans fearing, on the one hand, dangerous nonhuman animals, and, on the other, those humans who killed them. Proto-humanism, a pre-ideological pattern of thought, gelled into humanism over time via religion, secular philosophy, and pseudoscience. Proto-advocates for nonhuman animals would have been easily suppressed. No police, court, or organization could protect an objector from the hunting cabal. Hunters might kill their child or torture a favorite mate to shut them up. By the time humans started living in one place, and growing crops on a significant scale–sowing the seeds of civilization–many predators were extinct due to hunting.¹²

Inculcating a radically new way of life based on misperceiving, misunderstanding, and mistreating nonhuman animals and conferring status and respect based on aggression rather than defense put Homo complexus on the destructive course that is so difficult to reverse today. The new way of thinking led inexorably to the following:

• Designating ever more kinds of animals and ever more groups of humans as enemies to maintain the status of the weaponed class and everyone else’s allegiance
• Devaluing nonviolent life-affirming social practices such as sharing, caring for others, playing nonviolently, and making love
• Exaggerating problems the ruling class chooses to address and downplaying those it creates, as in
  • devaluing women, children, and nonviolent men as needing rather than providing protection
  • inventing religions and secular philosophies to rationalize aggression and affirm human supremacy over other beings and violent humans’ supremacy over other humans
• Denigrating nonhuman animals as stupid, filthy, ugly, or needing maintenance and training by humans to fulfill their potential
• A preference for innovation separating humans and nature over the natural order;
• Esteem for private wealth and power at the expense of nonhuman animals, the living world, and most humans
• Scorn for those who object to animal abuse, violence, or oppression; anticruelty regulations that mask animal-abuse policy
• Over-valuing of meat in the human diet despite lack of an innate taste for it, due to its association with high-status humans
• Denial and repression of knowledge exposing the weaponed class as harmful rather than protective

Thousands of years of habituation to this perversely radical new way of living and thinking helps to explain today’s “conservative movement” to undermine a Constitution whose explicitly-stated values–justice, liberty, equality, defense, tranquility, and the general welfare–so strikingly match Homo complexus’ innate morality and not the might-makes-right regime perpetuated by terror culture.¹³

II. Ramping Up the Misery: Disease, Oppression, War, Genocide, Poverty

As humans killed off and supplanted predators, they took up herding. As they started to grow and tend their own crops, it became convenient to keep some of the animals confined to one’s home base rather than follow their natural movements–in other words, to enslave them. As humans learned to engineer plant foods, they learned also to engineer animals to serve ever more human needs. They learned to make animals docile and obedient, subjecting them to mutilations; perpetual confinement; loss of relationships with offspring, other family members, and friends; and early death. Some animals were bred for rapid growth, some for larger size, some smaller, some to guard other enslaved animals, some to track or kill those designated as enemies. Human settlements attracted free-living animals to easy plant and animal pickings. To protect human children, enslaved animals, crops, and stored food supplies, humans extended to “pests” the enemy designation they had long applied to predators. Gone was humans’ original experience of other animals living harmoniously as coequal persons in great variety and abundance, composing Earth’s original symphony of color, sound, and motion.

Despite the inferiority of original agriculturists’ diet to the far more nutritious original plant diet,¹⁴ agriculturists overpopulated each area they “settled” as women gave birth more often, not constantly having to carry their children about the landscape.¹⁵ “Settler” seems an innocuous term, but each time a human community seeks “greener pastures,” its members perpetrate a holocaust against nonhuman animals in the new area. Destroying trees and other vegetation to establish agriculture drives countless animals from their homes, kills baby birds and other nesting animals, and wreaks havoc on nature. The hunt is always on for predators, other dangerous animals, and rats, mice, and others labeled as “vermin” who live especially well amid civilization, making use of crops, stored foods, and human waste. The cumulative impact is what I call the biocaust as three plant or animal species go extinct per hour according to the preeminent biologist Edward O. Wilson,¹⁶ and no animal is safe despite Homo complexus’ innate biophilia. Even as human-rights ideology took hold in England and spread to North America, slaughtering and breeding nonhuman animals (complementary components of the ongoing eliminationist endeavor) remained the first orders of business. And just as humanism paradoxically had designated some human groups less than human at demagogues’ convenience through the ages, Europeans set to work on the human beings who had inhabited the Americas for many thousands of years, as recently as 1879, arguing in court that an American Indian was not a “person” under the law.¹⁷ Finding it especially useful to put human slaves, who would resist malaria, to the miserable task of draining Southern swamplands and tending to the personal and economic needs of high-status Southern whites (the Mason-Dixon Line approximates the historic northern limit of malaria in North America), the weaponed class subjected millions of Africans and their descendants to one of humans’ most shameful institutions. Such institutionalized atrocities as the American Holocaust and human slavery derive from the logic inherent in humanism that any kind of animal, including human animals, can be less than human.¹⁸

Humans’ various holocausts against nonhuman animals, including the eliminationism inherent in breeding out of them their natural traits and ways of life (this debasement makes them especial objects of both human affection and cruelty), brought limitless disaster upon human beings, who until relatively recently were ignorant of organisms invisible to the naked eye. Hundreds of infectious diseases that chickens, pigs, cows, rabbits, camels, sheep, goats, horses, dogs, and others had adapted to over millions of years wreaked havoc on humans who assumed they could enslave other animals with impunity. Supernatural explanations arose for smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, and other scourges that in actuality were zoonotic. Though it is well documented, few people yet realize that today’s AIDS disaster originates in animal abuse and poor human nutrition in Cameroon, possibly also in Europeans’ enslaving human beings there to assist them in killing trees for the timber and rubber industries (institutionalized animal abuse) in the late 19^th or beginning of the 20^th century.¹⁹ Poor food rations drove slaves to butcher forest animals, including chimpanzees, from whom the virus entered at least one open human wound, over time causing the pandemic. Lyme disease and many others come from supplanting enough forest with human habitation to transfer to humans parasites who otherwise would have remained harmless in acclimated nonhuman animals.²⁰ Nor were the origins of “diseases of affluence”–non-communicable afflictions linked to the meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries–known until recent times. How sadly ironic that, even with the connection established, the ruling classes persist in promoting such pseudo-foods among human populations emerging from poverty–only to find themselves going from dirt-floor hut to factory town to hospital.

War, human slavery, and poverty arise from the unnatural way of life that grew out of animal abuse and humanism. Possessing land rather than just living on it, enslaving nonhuman animals and owning their genetic lines, manufacturing devices for controlling nonhuman animals and forcing them to labor for humans, and developing irrigation canals that required constant dredging moved dominant humans to force some members of their species to do the most undesirable tasks. The enslavement of horses and camels made warriors far more powerful and capable of driving vast herds of cattle long distances. Kurgan people from the Russian steppes crushed non-warlike agrarian societies in central Europe some 6,000 years ago²¹–a process perpetually repeated, eventually extending to the American West, where supplanting native bison helped exterminate plains Indians and make the world safe for transcontinental railroads. Humans’ original way of life might have involved drought, but that did not constitute poverty of some vis à vis wealth of others. It took Homo complexus’ culturally evolving practice of seizing more than an ape’s share of Earth’s wealth to institute poverty and a rationalizing ideology that blames the poor. Thus, animal abuse is a root cause even of human miseries that do not appear linked to it at first glance. Nor do we have to touch animals to abuse them: we just have to cut down trees; protect our crops; construct roads, buildings, and parking lots; make dishes, furniture, carpets, appliances, musical instruments, paper, televisions, computers, and snack foods; and operate ships, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes.²² No wonder the industry-government-university-media complex backlash against environmental and animal advocacy has been so determined and thorough!

III. Advocating for a Humane and Just Future

Because animal abuse is civilization’s predominant policy and a root cause of the big human problems, animal advocates should be able to dominate public discourse and policymaking. For the most part, they labor at the margins, emphasizing anticruelty measures as a “starting point” without articulating an “end point,” and urging people to eliminate meat, dairy, fish, and eggs from their diet even though long experience and research show that (1) very few people change their diet based on facts, and (2) mind management, propaganda, and policy determine diet, not the other way around.²³ I spent much of my first quarter-century of full-time animal advocacy addressing superficial symptoms while neglecting root causes. It was frustrating, exhausting, and demoralizing, like working to extinguish a massive fire by blowing out flames rather than dousing the underlying white-hot embers fueling the biocaust. Now, I work each day to supplant the Homo sapiens/”killer ape” narrative and humanist ideology with the Homo complexus/tyrannized peaceable ape narrative and new-animalist ideology.

Hundreds of thousands of years after the first spear, the weaponed class is still sticking it to the majority. The industry-government-university-media complex maintains civilization’s animal abuse infrastructure, not because of cruelty or a lack of compassion, but because animal abuse, eliminationism, and human overpopulation make our species dependent on animal abuse. Like disease or crime, ending animal abuse overnight would crash the global human economy, disrupting the semi-orderly perpetual holocaust against enslaved animals, and chaotically setting billions of humans upon the last remaining free-living animals and each other. Animal advocates must reckon with the embers, not the flames–not because it is never possible to rescue a nonhuman animal from terrible suffering, punish someone for cruelty to animals, get someone to “go vegan,” or eliminate a particular corporate assault on nonhuman animals, but because absent fundamental policy change reversing the radical change set in motion by the original hunting cabal, improvements can only occur at the margins, never helping a net number of animals. The needed change demands that we serve as Thomas Paines, Elizabeth Cady Stantons, and Martin Luther Kings, not as Florence Nightingales, Jonas Salks, or Mother Teresas, great as the latters’ gifts to humanity stand in their own right.

Unlike the dawn of terror culture, the present moment finds humans inhabiting a desolate world, stripped of most life. The powdery beaches where people love to vacation were covered with living beings just a couple of centuries ago, their oceans teeming with so many fish that you could not see the bottom. Lacking original humans’ infinitely rich daily experience of an animal-saturated world (with no expectation of perpetual safety, buildings, climate control, rapid transportation, mass societies, mass media, or constant amusements and “lifestyle” considerations), humans today do not see the animal abuse at the heart of their misery. They are not heartbroken because they are not paying attention, and the industry-government-university-media complex works daily to keep it that way. Surely moral apes, who can imagine something so relatively paltry as their own enhanced status and the immediate safety of their own troop, can imagine something far greater: a living world that is not in the process of dying; a living world that they are not personally complicit in destroying; a living world that will not consist only of human beings and human-engineered animals dodging floods, droughts, blizzards, bombs, toxic chemicals and gases, epidemics, and parasites. The effort to be popular, raise funds, and avoid persecution and ostracism prevents many organizers, spokespersons, and other advocates from promoting radical ideas and policy. But nothing less can create the needed change; we must stop piddling while Earth burns.

Whereas humanist dictionaries define “animalism” as the doctrine that man is a mere animal with no soul or spiritual quality, the new animalism presumes that all animals, as persons (bodies) have the meaningful experiences humans call “spirit”; that “mere” does not accurately describe any animal or any other component of the infinite web of life; that humans are not inherently entitled to perpetual safety against nature or to more than an ape’s natural share of Earth’s wealth; that all animals’ wellbeing and fulfillment should be humans’ top priority. Civilization affords no meaningful protection to anyone lacking equal guaranteed autonomy, ecology, and dignity rights. Human beings have made considerable progress toward establishing such rights for themselves, but their humanist ideology obscures the reality that rights of humans without rights of the other animals intensifies the paradoxical dynamic we now comprehend: what “we” do to “them,” “we” do to “us.”

The move from humanism to the new animalism, from animal abuse to rights of all animals as the basis of governance, is a struggle against injustice, so we will do well to elicit the moral indignation humans naturally experience at animal abuse rather than emphasize compassion, which positively affects those in our presence, not policy. Belittled as “anger” by the industry-government-university-media complex, moral indignation is the human trait most likely to instigate radical policy change. The Constitution refers to establishing justice, not promoting compassion. Moral indignation fueled the Abolition movement to eliminate human chattel slavery, the women’s suffrage movement, the Nuremberg Trials, and much more. When people view a film like Earthlings, showing many of humans’ worst atrocities against nonhuman animals, they experience moral indignation. Invoking compassion rather than moral indignation might hamper the needed political engagement: How do I compassionately set on the course of ultimate extinction practices that today constitute millions of human beings’ livelihoods as well as human-engineered animals many people love?

Many of those who directly harm nonhuman animals today–in agriculture-college meat, dairy, fish, and egg programs, in pharmaceuticals and other product-testing laboratories, in animal factories and slaughterhouses, at fur farms, on fishing, lobstering, and crabbing expeditions, at puppy mills, or wielding rifles, bows and arrows, traps, or poisons against free-living animals–would rather work in a department store, a bank, a restaurant, or a nonprofit organization if they could (except maybe the experimenters), where their contribution to animal abuse would be indirect rather than direct. As long as animal abuse remains civilization’s overarching policy, demonizing people based on their work will accomplish little. Demanding that all of our institutions tell the truth and that policy be based on morality, not rationalization, can phase out the worst suffering as atrocities become recognized as such rather than retain acceptability as services to humans.

The advocacy method I have been implementing on behalf of Responsible Policies for Animals acknowledges both the necessity and the difficulty of creating radical change. Variously attributed to John and Samuel Adams is this colorful version of a political truism: “It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” For years, RPA has been demanding that our colleges of agriculture tell the truth about humans and the other animals, and stop providing training, research, sales, collusion, and promotions for the meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries; that state and US officials compel the colleges do that and in other ways shift policy away from animal abuse; that public radio and other news venues stop calling humans “predators” and feigning surprise at nonhuman animals’ complex intelligence; and, more recently, that colleges implement a Beyond Humanism program due to humanism’s enormously harmful substantive and dynamic flaws. Caught up in work, rattled by financial concerns and mental and physical illness, seized by infinite mass-media distractions and amusements, and given to travel, a significant part of the biocaust, to “get away from it all,” most humans will not dedicate themselves to any political activity, let alone a radical endeavor with many risks and few short-term rewards. My personal experience confirms the value of the advice that the great civil-rights organizer Bayard Rustin received from his grandmother: “Do what is right.”²⁴ I hope this brief narrative of our species and its biocaust will persuade readers to take up the only struggle likely to create the much-needed change: justice for all animals. All of Earth’s beating hearts are genetically interrelated, and nature does not create inferior and superior beings.

¹ Matthew Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

² Richard Leakey, The Origin of Humankind (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

³ Milton R. Mills, “The Comparative Anatomy of Eating,” Responsible Policies for Animals, Inc., accessed August 28, 2014, http://www.RPAforAll.org/Mills.html.

⁴ Rene J. Cappon, The Associated Press Guide to News Writing, 3rd ed. (Lawrenceville, N.J.: Peterson’s, 1999).

⁵ Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, expanded ed. (New York: Westview, 2009); David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York: Norton, 2003).

⁶ Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899); Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Dale Peterson, The Moral Lives of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Franz de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

⁷ Stephen Post and Jill Newmark, Why Good Things Happen to Good People (New York: Broadway, 2006); Dacher Keltner, Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (New York: Norton, 2009).

⁸ Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993).

⁹ Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2010).

¹⁰ Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010).

¹¹ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009); Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern, 2002); David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martins, 2011).

¹² Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion: From Global Warming to Rain Forest Destruction, Famine, and Air and Water Pollution – Why Overpopulation Is Our #1 Environmental Problem (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1993).

¹³ John W. Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 2007); Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Expansionism (New York: Holt, 2009).

¹⁴ Charles B. Heiser Jr., Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980); Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (New York: Walker & Company, 2009).

¹⁵ Ehrlich and Ehrlich, The Population Explosion; Standage, Edible History.

¹⁶ “Human Population Growth and Extinction,” Center for Biological Diversity, accessed August 23, 2014, http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/index.html.

¹⁷ Bill Kent, “A Jew Adopted by Indians in the West,” review of Magic Words by Gerald Kolpan, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 2012.

¹⁸ David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, 2nd ed. (New York: Mirror Books, 1989).

¹⁹ David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York: Norton, 2012); Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It (New York: Penguin, 2012).

²⁰ Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times (New York: Touchstone, 1996); Richard S. Ostfield and Clive G. Jones, “Peril in the Understory,” Audubon, July/August, 1999; Alicia Chang, “Study: Risk of Lyme Disease Increases as Forests Shrink,” Associated Press, February 23, 2003.

²¹ Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton, 1992).

²² Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA), Animal Abuse: It’s Why We Suffer, brochure, Glenside, Pa.: RPA, accessed (as Animal Abuse: The Whole Story) August 2014, http://www.rpaforall.org/animalabuse-its-why-we-suffer.pdf.

²³ Joshua Frank, “Meat as a Bad Habit: A Case for Positive Feedback in Consumption Preferences Leading to Lock-In,” Review of Social Economy 65, No. 3 (2007): 319-348; Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jeff Blyskal and Marie Blyskal, PR: How the Public Relations Industry Writes the News (New York: Morrow, 1985); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn: Ig, 2005. Originally published New York: Liveright, 1928); Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996); George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008).

²⁴ Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, 2002, DVD.