Saturday, September 15, 2012

My Personal Influences towards Non-Violence

I have commented a little on this question on AR Zone. Here we have something a good bit more thorough:
  1. I had known about Jainism - an ancient religion that essentially originated the non-violence principle - since the 1980s. I knew a number of Jains back then, in my hometown of Toronto, Canada, including an aspiring monk, a so-called "white guy" named Bruce Costain, who was also writing a doctoral thesis on non-violence ethics. As well, I knew his mentor: Irena Upenieks. Another "white" person as that odd and unscientific term is used. Irena was also the biggest early influence on Gary Francione towards Jainism I was told by Irena herself, who had gone to a conference Gary attended. I was not there myself. I was also friends with another disciple of Irena's who was Jain, another so-termed "white" guy named Michael Proudfoot, who was not a scholar but just very nice and lucidly intelligent. You could just see the insightfulness sparkling from his eyes with that guy. I additionally, through these people, met other more traditionally ethnic Jain adults and youth. I hung out with the Jain Youth Group that existed at the time. This familiarity with Jainism gave me the basic principle of non-violence as a structure, although the Jains never convinced me to emphasize non-violence as the central principle.
  2. I had researched Jainism, including writing the article on that religion for the Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (1998), and so I have elaborated my knowledge of Jainism and non-violence over the years.
  3. Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights was highly influential on me, and he posited the harm principle, which of course is stringent about avoiding harm. (Never liked the name for that idea though: nonharming or something of that nature - indeed non-violence - would have been better.) Regan confessed in certain writings such as his autobiography in The Struggle for Animal Rights that he was heavily influenced by one of the #1 writers and proponents concerning non-violence, namely Mohandas Gandhi.
  4. I wrote about non-violence (using that term explicitly), such as in the flyer I composed for the University of Toronto Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group I was active with starting from the late 80s, and led for a time. My own ethical theory of best caring has long had a right to non-violence (in those words) too. Anyway, the most key practical principle of my theory was non-harming, or minimizing harm in dilemmas, so the theory was very key to my thinking, though it still was not the central ethical principle at the same time. The best caring principle was. And I did not always use the label, "non-violence".
  5. I was generally convinced by arguments that I myself came up with to make non-violence overarching, but there was a personal experience pertaining to an animal rights activist that I did find influential. I listened to Gary Yourofsky's much-touted "Best Speech Ever", on January 7, 2011, as my personal diary records. It was indeed very powerful and really highlighted to me the violence to which animals are routinely subjected. It got me all freshly fired up, beyond my usual strong motivation for animal rights and so on. However, I also noted a video in which he said he agreed with killing "the direct abusers of animals". Sounds a lot like murdering vivisectors, doesn't it? A type of tactic I find disturbing, repellent and wrong, although the publicizing of my case for this conclusion will have to wait. I respect that this other Gary wishes to defend the innocent and I agree with him that violence such as self-defence is sometimes justified, but I believe he goes too far and that this sort of thing is highly detrimental to the animal rights cause.
  6. Given fresh activation somehow by GY's first talk mentioned, I started seeing how nonharming could account for more than I previously thought. Then a good friend of mine, Michael Schwab - over dinner at his apartment with his wife, JoAnne - told me I should use the term "non-violence" . I resisted with many objections and counter-arguments. I thought minimizing harm was better. I thought about it deeply and extensively and then got back to him and agreed he was right in the end, for reasons I cannot go into here. Michael was also, obviously, a key influence here. The Schwabs first inducted me into animal rights activism with their group, Canadian Vegans for Animal Rights (C-VAR). Bruce Costain, the Jain (gee, I never noticed that rhymes perfectly before!), was a founding member along with the Schwabs and some others. They organized protests around the city; attracted a lot of print, TV, and radio media, including appearances on various talk shows; ran a radio show on University of Toronto radio called "The Extended Circle" (after Albert Schweitzer's saying about humans expanding the circle of their compassion); led campus activism; did a lot of talks such as at universities and elsewhere; brought a ton of speakers up here, including Tom Regan; prepared a very detailed and interesting newsletter called Conscience; ran ad campaigns; pushed for legislation such as banning the veal crate in Ontario; and so on. Wow, right? I am honoured and privileged to have been influenced by Michael Schwab again in this recent case. I recall how, way back in the 1980s, I began with reservations about so-called "medical" vivisection, one of Michael's keen specialties besides factory farming. I first became an anti-vivisectionist right in their presence, as it suddenly dawned on me at one of the social gatherings they had organized. This is parallel to Regan, who defended some medical vivisection in a published paper that later became completely overridden by The Case.

Those I suppose were my big influences, besides more amorphous ones such as my parents and teachers.

"Kaufman", whoever that is, wondered in a comment on my blog entry for September 10, 2012, if I "leaned on" Francione as an inspiration for non-violence. I don't believe so, and I can clearly explain how and why. As I noted earlier, I was not as conversant with Francione on non-violence as was "Kaufman", but that is not really the point here. I knew when I made the principle my central emphasis in 2011 that Gary was a Jain and that he, as any Jain must, considers the non-violence principle to be central to his thinking, as I have said all along, although I continue to wonder where it is in his technical writing.

There are only two ways Francione could have been an influence on me towards non-violence:

  1. A personal influence, such as Tom Regan and, somewhat indirectly, Gary Yourofsky were on me
  2. An intellectual influence, such as again Regan provided with The Case for Animal Rights

In order: I used to look up to Gary Francione and admire him a great deal before he fled that debate with me rather than clarify his stance in relation to my essay, "Animal Rights Law". Thus he failed to provide me with the academic assistance he said he would in that on-line debate - which involved that essay in draft. And he went from being extremely positive about my academic work - and I mean "first-rate" positive quite literally - to being so negative that he describes me as "committing literally insane acts", "incoherent", completely out of touch with reality, dishonest, and so on. From these descriptions by Gary, you would think that I am a morally decrepit, mentally disabled person who cannot even string together coherent speech. That is highly insulting, unobjective, and completely different from the appraisals of other leading scholars in this movement - including Gary himself in the early years when he read a book draft of mine plus my doctoral thesis. I utterly document all of the abuses mentioned in my blog entry that secretly peeked into his private Abolitionist Approach Forum. There, both myself and my work were extensively abused by himself and his cronies. That blog entry links to the telling proof of a transcript, complete with participant photos and so forth, leaked by a friend. As I've mentioned before, too, Francionism became less appealing to me when a very prominent Francionist wrote to various officials at Brock University in an unsuccessful bid to block my being rehired - I blocked that move myself when I caught wind of it, including with the support of some very powerful allies in the animal rights scholarly movement. There was a lot more garbage, frankly, that I will not enter into here.

So no, just because Gary embraces a view, I have zero inclination to agree with him, since I do not trust his judgment and have posted ever so many critiques where I try to show how his critical thinking goes astray. What about what he gets right, such as respect for sentient beings, animal rights, anti-speciesism, and so forth? Fine and well, but I had all of these assets quite independently of Francione. Regan influenced me in all of these respects except for the matter of sentient beings, which other people emphasized such as Peter Singer and others. Come to think of it, Singer first got me going as an anti-speciesist too, and credit must go where it is due.

What about subconscious influences? Well, how can anyone know about their subconscious without the subconscious bit disappearing and being replaced with consciousness? Suffice it to say I do not dream about GF leading rallies and swooning over his words, obsessively following his march to that different drum. But seriously now, deep down, why would I regard him as a personal influence towards non-violence when he baselessly insults my intelligence, integrity, and even sanity, not honouring his offer to clarify his view against the "Animal Rights Law" paper I wrote, suddenly cuts off a debate with me, villifies my work, and more? I do not regard any of this, nor much besides that I have witnessed or heard about, as consistent with non-violence. So how could he, personally, stand as a credible model of non-violence to me? So much for GF as a personal influence.

Did you know that the ad hominem fallacy, meaning looking to the person rather than the evidence in general, actually has not only the negative, attacking form, but also a positive, potentially flattering form? This is an obscure but very interesting tidbit of philosophy trivia, in the areas of logic and rhetoric. Just because Hitler can be put down as a person in various ways, does not logically entail that anything he says is false. The positive version is: just because someone is admirable does not logically entail that their view is correct. Interesting, isn't it? Nevertheless, there are people whose judgment we might trust in the sense that we can be confident they are authoritative about some things, and that we would do well to pay attention to their judgments in other matters, although we must always rely on our own powers of critical thinking as well. To me, GF is not one of those trusted souls. Few people are, to me.

As for the matter of any possible intellectual influence from Gary Francione, that is zero too. Unless you count my writing against his theories as exhibiting an intellectual influence, which is fair. However, I am not writing here about overall intellectual influence. I'm reflecting on whether he influenced my positive views in general, and my favoring of non-violence in particular. Now Regan had a great influence on me, and I will always be indebted to him. The Case for Animal Rights was a masterpiece that influenced a lot of people, including GF. I will be honoured to give an invited talk at the University of Vienna next year at a conference reflecting on Regan's classic thirty years later. I'm ever so glad that they are paying my way, because I am something of a pauper. Regan and Francione were bosom buddies for many years, co-organizers of a conference called A New Generation for Animal Rights at Francione's academic home base of Rutger's University in 1993 (myself and some friends/comrades attended this), and so on.

However, GF and TR fell out over a March for the Animals, in the summer of 1996, because Regan was going to join in, even though - horror of horrors! - animal welfarists also participated. You see, Regan had a change of heart, as he was originally going to boycott the walk along with Francione. Then Francione turned on Regan. Rather like I described he turned on me, a far cry from when he wrote "with affection and respect" in my copy of his Introduction to Animal Rights. Gary went from touting Regan very powerfully and extensively in GF's early talks I attended, to considering Regan's work rather rudely and crudely (e.g., dismissing it as too "complicated"), as in the latter book. I really didn't like that. It seemed clear that Gary's personal feelings were very likely interfering with his professional judgment. I was not influenced at all by the arguments in Gary's aforementioned book, except unequivocally to reject them as a specious case against speciesism. (Other animal rights theorists such as Evelyn B. Pluhar, did have a positive influence on my animal rights views to some extent though, such as her emphasis on individual rights to liberty and welfare, after Alan Gewirth.)

I do not know that Francione has ever convinced me of anything important through argumentation, except that he was wrong. I thought his arguments were generally so poor that I found it hard to look up to him intellectually. I tried to be open-minded, but I started to see that he had very questionable judgment, and that if he came out with an argument, it was probably errant, and I should be able to use standard academic critical thinking tools such as fallacies to show the errors for those who have the training to perceive them - and many lack this. But of course you cannot prejudge, and you have to admit that someone could be right until shown to be wrong. In any event, I found that Francione was not normally receptive to these sorts of critiques. He did not learn or admit mistakes like other people I have known. I attribute that to an impairment of his objectivity in some way - as his hostile floundering about with Regan and myself seemed to me to exhibit - although I will not venture to speculate on this matter.

Certainly I was not convinced by Gary Francione, nor indeed Jainism, to embrace non-violence as an overarching principle. Their arguments for this conclusion, to the extent that they exist (in Jainism, but nothing that Gary has produced to my knowledge), failed to convince me. I had to come up with those particular arguments on my own, although clearly, I was also deeply influenced by the people and works that I have acknowledged above. In the end, it is always arguments that influence or indeed determine what I will conclude on any intellectual matter, although people and other factors do orient me, as they do other people, in ways that are not always easy to trace out. Such are the sources for this river of non-violence I am now riding in my little boat, still endeavouring to make my way to open sea.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Friday, September 14, 2012

P.S. Re Francione's Talks

I said I've seen a number of talks by Francione and he did not mention non-violence. Perfectly true. But I have not heard him speak in the last decade. These were early days, before he was banned from certain venues apparently. Perhaps "Kaufman" heard Gary more recently and might assume that I would have heard like talks. Alas, that is not the case. If I had had "Kaufman's" knowledge-base then what is obvious to him would have obviated my own wondering in this case. But it should never be assumed that others share the same knowledge-base.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

Please read this article by Paul Shapiro in VegNews (September 10, 2012): "Why US Meat Consumption Is Falling".

It contains several facts that are of interest for the incrementalism versus anti-incrementalism debate:

  1. U.S. meat consumption used to be on the rise every year until about five years ago
  2. Now it has declined by a whopping 12.2% (great news!)
  3. This means the killing of "several hundred million" fewer animals every year
  4. The drop is attributed to animal, health and environmentalist concerns, and the higher cost of meat (feed prices have increased and this is passed onto consumers)
  5. The next key part of our analysis is worth quoting directly from the article:
    Interestingly, the numbers and headlines aren’t being driven by an influx of new vegetarians and vegans. Last year, a national poll found that the number of vegetarians in America remained at about 5 percent. But the same poll found that a whopping 16 percent of people now eat vegetarian more than half time. In other words, take 50 million people and put them on a so-called “flexitarian” diet, and the shrinking figures for meat consumption start making sense.
  6. there have also been successful animal welfarist initiatives during this time (the article goes into more detail here)
Now, back on June 13, 2008, I posted about my essentially incrementalist approach to veganism as the moral baseline for animal rights. I said:
[Gary Francione] wrote in a blog entry of April 9, 2008 that we should not waste time with organizations that say that some forms of animal abuse are worse than others. This implies that we should be equally dismissive of lacto-ovo vegetarians and meat-eaters, and be equally condemnatory of factory farming and traditional “family” farms that try to be humane towards animals.

So Francione is equally negative towards everybody, no matter if they are cutting down meat-consumption, or curbing their animal abuse by supporting reformist initiatives. No matter if they are animal rights incrementalists, or if he is quietly infusing negative energy into his followers. I say we need to be vegan as a matter of duty. But if someone only manages an increment of that, we should praise the positive and criticize the negative, because every bit counts. And that will not only be more truthful, or reflective of objective reality which is composed of increments as well as wholes. Positive incrementalism will encourage people to go along further on the road to liberation. Being negative and condemnatory, comparing them to mass murderers as Francione does (in particular, Jeffrey Dahmer, and his "Simon the Sadist" hypothetical) would not only be pop psychology at its crudist and most vicious - most meat-eaters are not genuinely sadistic, let alone psychopathic. This approach (and we could amplify on the negativity they spread around here ) repels people from the animal rights message, makes them avoid it, and thus have less of a chance of being pro-animal-transformative.

Let's get the implications of this recent study out on the table now:

  1. Francione cannot take credit for the decline in meat consumption, because this is not attributed to people becoming vegetarian and vegan. Mostly, it is people reducing meat consumption. That is an incrementalist approach that he disdains, disuses, and indeed disavows. I wish people would just go vegan, but we need to live in the real world. It's the only one we've got. Myself and my fellow incrementalists are very positive about progressive steps and it is working. Those who would kill pro-incrementalism, as the Francionists are trying to do, would cause a lot of suffering and death. If there were no "meat-free" Monday campaigns and slogans to cut it out or cut it down (not that I've heard that slogan), and only the super-negative Francionist approach, we would have a chilly climate of the same amount of vegans (because anti-incrementalists have been pushing for that along with my pro-vegan comrades, who in general have never failed to promote veganism), but not this saving of hundreds of millions of animal lives, and preventing the same number of miserable, factory-farmed existences. That is like an enormous phantom Holocaust in itself that never came to be with these prevented, murdered and mangled lives!
  2. Francionists say that meat-consumption being on the rise proves that the incrementalist approach is not working. Well, the incrementalist approach of PETA and the rest is and always has been quite dominant. The Francionists are just a fringe group, quite frankly, who go contrary to all common-sense that substantive anti-cruelty laws are better for animals than no change in legally allowable factory farming - to take just one example. As Shapiro notes, there have been a number of successful animal welfarist initiatives. So meat-consumption being on the decline proves the exact opposite of what Francione always used to say. It is the incrementalist approach that is working because gains are attributable to incrementalist actions far more than purely animal rights/vegan action.
  3. These statistics provide what we might call a reduction premise for animal protection incrementalism (which encompasses the law but also pro-vegetarian campaigns). The premise is most promising for the future. If there are countries which are not yet at the U.S.’s stage of seeing a very significant drop in meat-consumption due to activism – actually, decline in the U.K. is much more dramatic – they should eventually get there due especially to incremental forms of activism. Such activism and its results will only spike higher and higher, as more and more people are drawn into its inevitably and abundantly well-reasoned conclusions. For there is no truthful disguising of the fact – although industries attempt to subvert this tendency - that animal agriculture is disastrous for both our health, and the environment that we all share. All of this seems to imply projected progress for reducing animal-product-consumption as a steady tendency. Still, such progress will not be enough to satisfy many activists – for good reason. For all oppressed animals matter, and most of them receive wholly inadequate attention and treatment. But we can take some satisfaction in progress, even if we are not left fully satisfied, as we should not be. Complacency in the life of one can mean death and suffering in the lives of others.

    The reduction premise also seems to be robust in its significance. It is not just a slight reduction in animal-destruction, but a very significant difference. There is a margin of hundreds of millions of lives per year, each individual being infinitely valuable. If speciesism decreases, even more lives will be saved than just by appeals to self-interest, since the incrementalists support anti-speciesism too, in a way that is a great many times more effective than the comparatively marginal anti-incrementalists. Greater anti-speciesism can still use all the help it can get from human-interested reasons for vegetarianism. Or if speciesism increases – which is perhaps unlikely - it will be even more important than ever to rely on reduction strategies based on appeals to human self-interest. The latter is where most of our gains would be made, recalling that recent consumption-reduction was mostly on an incrementalist basis. Even if there is only a temporary spike in consumption, in the long run there will be less suffering and death, as I note in our next point:

  4. I offered an analysis, showing that even if welfarist campaigns resulted in a temporary spike in meat consumption, the incrementalist advocacy would still result in less suffering and death overall in the long-term. These new figures suggest that incrementalist approaches can result in a decline in animal suffering and death, even well before animal rights could ever be achieved in legislation. Even if there is an upswing in meat consumption, there would only be much worse hills on our graphs if reductionist appeals to lessen meat consumption were eliminated as the Francionists propose.
  5. It is interesting how incremental progress can save whole animal lives! In Judaism we say that to save a life is to save a world.

This is just like my debate with Katherine Perlo, in which I proved that her approach of only advocating animal rights results in more suffering and death or violence. It was a different debate, although related because it concerns stubborn, all-or-nothing approaches. Francionism fails on similar grounds. It could only be otherwise if he could successfully argue that more nonhuman animal agony and dying is somehow more "pro-animal". I want to thank all of the activists responsible for these great changes. And I want to condemn afresh the people who are "marching backwards", to use a colourful phrase that Francione penned in his literary-philosophical debacle, Rain without Thunder. If you are positive about progressive change, well...it might just happen!

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

More Statements Concerning Francione on Non-Violence

In addition to my partial retraction and explanation of why I erroneously wrote what I did in my blog, I would like to add the following positive statements:

  1. Gary Francione has done pioneering work in putting forward non-violence as a central principle in the animal rights movement. I think he should be applauded for that. I wonder if other animal rights philosophers have also done so in ways that are not reflected in their academic or technical writing? Certainly Tom Regan, in his informal collection of essays (The Struggle for Animal Rights and autobiographical writings), gives credit to Gandhi, one of the premier non-violence writers and proponents. But like Francione, non-violence is absent from Regan's technical writings. Except maybe implicitly. The closest thing in The Case for Animal Rights is what Regan labels "the harm principle". (How infelicitous: "nonharming principle" or something like that would have been more sensible.) Notes about Francione being "pioneering" need to be qualified by indicating that the non-violence tradition regarding animals extends back thousands of years in the Jain tradition, and there are a great many Western Jains besides Francione who have supported animal rights in the name of non-violence for a very long time. Long before Francione even converted to animal rights. I have met such people in Toronto as far back as the 1980s.
  2. I think the Jains Francione has known deserve the credit for Francione's emphasis on non-violence, although Francione himself deserves credit for adopting that already pre-existing idea which has a firmly entrenched tradition, complete with many arguments in favour of non-violence (towards animals). That said, Francione's own arguments for what he sometimes calls non-violence are distinctive, even though traditional Jainism has for centuries spoken of avoiding suffering for sentient beings, treating them equally, and so on. But they have not emphasized the property status of animals, as Francione does in dizzyingly erroneous ways, as I argue elsewhere.
  3. That Francione considers non-violence to be a central principle is well substantiated in materials such as an interview with Friends of Animals, on his website in some blog entries, and certainly it is a very major factor in the fourth item in his mission statement. Those iterations go back a substantial length of time of at least a decade. I have "Kaufman" - whoever that may be - to thank for doing what needed to be done: opening my eyes to this material.
  4. Non-violence is curiously absent as being treated as a central concept in much of Francione's writing such as his books that I have researched. He does compare ordinary meat-eaters with "Simon the Sadist" in his Introduction to Animal Rights for example, but still this non-violence discourse is oddly missing. (I have not yet read Animals as Persons - I wonder if that is any different in this respect). I view this as non-violence emerging as a central concept only nascently in his technical writings, although not in his less formal literature.
  5. If or when I do academic writing about Francione’s non-violence assertions, which I have not yet set out to do, I will or would thoroughly research the question of Francione’s indications about non-violence.
  6. People should not exaggerate what was going on here, which was:
    • A person explicitly conceding that Francione has thought of non-violence as a central principle going back a long time, not least since his adoption of Jainism, which I indicated preceded my own starting to give non-violence a central emphasis; I indicated animals have a central right to non-violence in my published article of 2006, "The Rights of Animal Persons," and the rest of my work there can be regarded in part as an elaboration of that, but even so it was not a central emphasis as a term in the way that I am writing presently.
    • That person wondering aloud in his blog why non-violence was not emphasized as such in Francione's writing as well as that writing could be recalled. Keep in mind that this is still a serioius question. When a philosopher, and I concede Francione is one of sorts, makes something emphasized as a central principle, it comes up not as absent from their technical writings as is the case with Gary, but very much present explicitly and virtually countless times. That is the way Kant regarded the categorical imperative as a central principle, and duly emphasized it as such. This principle Kant would not merely assert as a sideline, but it would consistently be his main focus. Also, explicit arguments for the central principle would be provided. But if the principle is not even mentioned in the technical writings, we can only extrapolate how the given arguments support the given principle, which I have done in Francione's case. Researchers who emphasize something as a central principle also account for the research tradition regarding the principle, in a thorough way if indeed it is their central point. Perhaps these phenomena are yet to come in Francione's work. But they are not there now. When I said I predict he will more centrally emphasize non-violence than he has done, I am indicating he will probably start to discourse in the way I just outlined above. At least, the scholarly community should hope that he will do so.
    • That person saying in December 2011 that Jainism is sufficient to account for Francione's evolution of thought towards Jainism and its non-violence (Francione is a Jain after all).
    • That person explicitly and only asking questions about central emphasis in Francione's writings, not taking any credit for definitely inspiring Francione in his growing emphasis on non-violence, and explicitly stating as much.

I apologize for not being fully knowledgeable about Francione on non-violence in earlier blog entries.

That said, I wish people would be as concerned with Francione's errors - and not just in his theories. I merely dared to ask a question in my personal blog, to which I did not know the answer, on a topic that I have not academically researched yet in Francione's literature. Francione seriously misrepresented Peter Singer's view for many years in a number of peer-reviewed publications that are supposed to be thoroughly and technically researched, unlike mere questions asked in blog entries. The point never should have passed peer review but was never caught till I publicized the matter. The blog is not formal academic writing but I make assertions relevant to that domain, and Kaufman helped me out. Anyway, returning to our point, Francione said Singer believes animals used for food are neither self-aware nor do they have the right not to be killed. I proved Singer maintains the exact opposite in materials that Francione cites as having researched. See here for that blog entry, and here for Singer's thanking me for the correction of Francione's misrepresentations. Did Francione ever publicly apologize for the extensive misrepresentation? He never even recognized it, let alone apologized for it.

Also, Francione went way beyond asking questions about my views when he critiqued my theories about animal welfarism and showed he had virtually no understanding of those views. Not only did he not reflect the arguments I actually make, but gave two complete misrepresentations of my views, saying that I think animal welfarism is a moral and practical way of achieving abolition, when I said pretty much the exact opposite. Such laws do not need to achieve abolition at all. Abolitionist campaigns do that, although compassionate laws will make for kinder culture. He also said I am trying to reduce animal rights/abolition to animal welfarism, which is also the opposite of what I say. He wasn't just asking questions about my beliefs, folks, he was actively "reporting" my assertions but in reality was doing nothing of the kind. He totally failed to show any understanding of my main arguments, let alone any reply to them and my objections to his own view. He remains unaccountable by normal academic standards.

I continue to move forward researching on non-violence and animals. I am aware of the arguments Francione has offered for animal ethics, since that is my job. Although they favorably impress some people, I believe that I have identified irreparable logical problems with those views. Also, asserting non-violence is central to animal rights is not an argument but an assertion. His other arguments can be taken to support this assertion though. But Francione, like most ethicists, is an intuitionist, who believes it is legitimate to make assertions without justification. Whether he will admit as much is less relevant and a matter of his own personal psychology. But analysis of his writings can identify which assertions of his are intuitions or basic assumptions. No one will stop him from asserting non-violence as yet another intuition, but again, it is plain that he also has other arguments meant to support his non-violence approach.

I hope to do better than Francione has done. But quite apart from Francionism, I am not complacent that I will succeed in this extremely difficult task of trying to entrench animal ethics in a thoroughly liberationist and rationalist manner.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Truth and Non-Violence versus "Happy Meat"

I use the principle of non-violent approximation in my blog entry on anti-cruelty laws, from August 20, 2012. I argue simply that it minimizes violence to animals to eradicate factory farming. However, it does not minimize violence to animals to use a deceptive euphemism such as “happy meat”. We need to push back against such commercial slogans.

Here are some violations associated with the phrase "happy meat":

  1. It is designed to pump consumers to buy meat, which is wrong to encourage as eating meat is ethically wrong: it violates animals.
  2. It violates the truth to say that animals are “meat”. That is like saying a human being is "meat" which people do when they have oppressive attitudes: cynical contempt for those killed in war, oppressive comments on women, and so on. Thinking of animals as "meat" only conduces towards their violation as though it is already a done deal or after the fact. Yet many animal murders for flesh-eating are impending.
  3. The truth is violated once again because meat is part of a corpse and can be neither happy nor unhappy. It is a logically incoherent notion.
  4. Finally, Gandhi's twin chief beloved ideals of truth and non-violence are transgressed because the animals themselves are not happy in slaughterhouses, whatever innovations Temple Grandin may have leveraged on some "industries".
So "happy meat" is neither happy nor could meat even intelligibly be happy. This is corporate garbage-talk of the first order. When the Francionists try to associate such language with anti-cruelty law advocates, they are creating a straw man argument (technically: an argument attributed to an opponent that the latter does not really hold). Guess what? The straw man you've created is smiling back at you. But I myself do not smile at linguistic abominations such as "happy meat". I'm grateful to Spencer Lo for asking me about this slogan as he is writing his own very thoughtful commentary on this topic.

P.S. Some people will have well-intended concerns about spikes in meat consumption leading to more suffering and death. But such concerns do not map out a long-term, comparative pattern. To see how this pans out, please read my article linked to here.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Partial Retraction about Francione on Articulating the Centrality of Non-Violence

A quasi-anonymous person going only by "Kaufman," whom I thought at first was Dr. Steve Kaufman, but it is not him, left a comment on a recent blog entry (September 10, 2012). In particular, I wrote in my August 20, 2012 blog entry which Kaufman refers to in the aforementioned comment:

Francione as a theorist may well have followed me in terms of starting to rely on non-violence theory as a central emphasis. (He never did before, and then suddenly after I did so, I heard about him doing so. History has shown that he is well aware of my writings.)

Kaufman writes by way of response (starting with quoting the above passage):

Anyone who has known Gary Francione since the 1990s knows has been writing and speaking about non-violence publicly the the entire time. For well over a decade, Francione has had a list of six principles of the abolitionist movement. The sixth principle is the principle of nonviolence. You can see him list the principles, including the principle of nonviolence, in 2002. See here: http://www.friendsofanimals.org/programs/animal-rights/interview-with-gary-francione.html. Indeed, not only does Francione list the principle of non-violence, but he calls it "the guiding principle" of the movement. To emphasize: he uses the definite article ("THE guiding principle"). For over a decade, Francione has publicly explained that the principle of non-violence is the central principle of his abolitionist theory. And he's been speaking about non-violence for much, much longer.
It looks like you've got things precisely the wrong way around. It looks to me like you're leaning on him.
Why do you maintain otherwise? I want to believe that it is neither due to a lack of care and attentiveness, nor due to a lack of honesty.

To reply to Kaufman’s remarks, I would like to begin first by conceding something he brought to light. He refers to an interview of Francione by the activist group, Friends of Animals from 2002. In that article, Francione calls non-violence the guiding principle of the animal rights movement. That does indeed conceive of non-violence given a “central emphasis”. As a result, I retract the assertion that Francione might have followed me in publicly asserting the principle of non-violence in a way that gives it central emphasis. Note that I never made a categorical assertion, but only wondered if he followed me.

Kaufman's assertion caused me to do a bit more research on the Abolitionist Approach website. You see, I am mostly familiar with Francione's peer-reviewed academic writings which some of my own academic work focuses on. (Needless to say, this blog is not peer-reviewed academic work.) I am only superficially familiar with Francione's website. Anyway, I now feel sure that further findings will back up Kaufman's claim that Francione has centrally emphasized non-violence in the past. Here is another sample I found in Francione's August 13, 2007 blog entry entitled "A Comment on Violence". He now uses the same language in the elaborated version of his mission statement, so maybe he changed the mission statement after the blog entry in question. I do not recall reading this before, but it states:

...in my view, the animal rights position is the ultimate rejection of violence. It is the ultimate affirmation of peace. I see the animal rights movement as the logical progression of the peace movement, which seeks to end conflict between humans.

This provides more early evidence such as what Kaufman produced that Gary is thinking about non-violence...which I already knew, as I explained in my blog post of December 11, 2011.

Further evidence that he is recently featuring non-violence now more than ever is in his blog entry entitled "Veganism and Nonviolence" from July 23, 2012. It provides more evidence of his recent shift after the time I noted when I first did likewise, including with my essay published in October 2011 (introduced in my blog on the 20th of that month), before the blog entry just noted, which I had entitled "Veganism versus Violence". In Francione's blog entry, for its part, he writes:

If the principle of nonviolence means anything, it means that you cannot justify any killing or suffering for transparently frivolous reasons such as pleasure, amusement, or convenience. And doing something “with compassion” that is not morally justifiable does not change the fact that it’s morally unjustifiable.

Gary might never have been aware of my essay for all I know for absolute sure, and I am not claimiing that he copied my title or anything. His is different and of course that is on the up-and-up. And he is not copying me in thinking about non-violence. I hardly take credit for that principle!!!

However, I wish to state that my guess that he might have followed me with a recent change of emphasis was based on facts that in fact I introduced in an earlier blog post on this topic on December 11, 2011.

In that post I go over some interesting and relevant facts which led to my speculation which I will elaborate on here:

  1. In none, a word I could repeat, not a one of Francione’s books such as Animals, Property and the Law, Rain without Thunder, and Introduction to Animal Rights does Francione emphasize the principle of non-violence as the central principle of the animal rights movement. My recollection, which might be fallible, is that he does not mention non-violence at all, although perhaps there may be some remarks about tactics. As a scholar, I look to his peer-reviewed publications as the key indicator of what a theorist maintains. Doing so leads to a justifiable conclusion that no, Francione did not consider the principle of non-violence to be a central principle. Rather, he relied on:
    • anti-speciesism
    • a certain argument that we should avoid unnecessary suffering and that all animal usages are cases of this and
    • the related arguments based on the principle of equal consideration and his right for animals not to be considered property.
  2. similar remarks apply to the many journal articles by Francione I have read, as well as more informal articles, pamphlets, and so forth
  3. On Francione’s website, the Abolitionist Approach, I remember reading a list of his central principles, and they mentioned non-violence in a subsidiary capacity, so that our tactics should be non-violent, but not using it to defend his central thinking. It turns out from research of today, September 13, 2012, that my memory did not deceive me. At that time, the #1 argument highlighted on the site was the unnecessary suffering argument, with the other arguments more in the background for those familiar with his books. Memory told me it was a shorter list from the one you reproduced. My memory was right. It turns out I was recalling the Mission Statement of the Abolitionist Approach website:
    The mission of this website is to provide a clear statement of an approach to animal rights that (1) promotes the abolition of animal exploitation and rejects the regulation of animal exploitation; (2) is based only on animal sentience and no other cognitive characteristic, (3) regards veganism as the moral baseline of the animal rights position; and (4) rejects all violence and promotes activism in the form of creative, non-violent vegan education.

    The last statement I took to be about activism and education, as the fourth principle indicates. But I see now how it would be interpreted as being about non-violence generally since it declares an opposition to "all violence". I'm not sure if this is the exact same wording as what I read back in 2007. I thought that was mainly about activism, not a new articulation of his animal rights approach based in non-violence.

    I had not clicked on his elaboration of his mission statement which does indeed start with non-violence towards all animals...as again I knew he affirmed for a long time. I was unaware of this elaboration, and thought his fourth statement was mainly about activism. I believe I was wrong in taking away that, since it seems equally about non-violence to animals as I read it now. But I was not wrong that his central arguments for animal rights at the time in 2007 were not based in non-violence as research shows. I saw a side-show, saying that, another way of articulating animal rights is non-violence, but Gary does not rely on that in his arguments. And he didn't. I think he will start to argue differently now, which will go beyond just making assertions about non-violence as central. I think subsequent books will see them featured in his academic arguments, not just general-audience remarks on his website. As an academic, I am mainly interested in his academic arguments, although of course his other remarks on his website are of some interest.

  4. I heard many of his talks since the 1990s. Close to half a dozen. Again, not a whisper about non-violence as a central principle.

Then suddenly, soon after I shifted gears and let non-violence have truly central emphasis in what I articulate, although it has long been a key component of my view, the following came to light, as I wrote in this blog on December 11, 2011:

In Boston two weeks ago [that would be early May--DS], Gary Francione synopsized his view as 'committing ourselves to the greatest possible reduction in overall violence'

Note that this is different from anything I heard in any of his talks. In that earlier blog post, I also wrote that I knew Francione considered himself a Jain for many years prior to my big highlighting of non-violence, acknowledging that non-violence is central according to Jainism. So I wondered why does he not make it central in the four ways listed above: books, paper articles, site, talks? I never said he depended on me for thinking non-violence is in some way central, because I acknowledged this Jainism track. I was talking about what he publicly articulated as central. I could only rely on the evidence known to me. I was always open to new evidence such as what you, thankfully, introduced. I heard many of his talks but do not pretend to be familiar with all that he has typed into the internet nor all his many interviews that he has had with various parties.

In the earlier post, which really clarifies the off-hand remark you are commenting on, I also wrote:

The main inspiration [for his shift in emphasis in public iterations], though, would have to have been his by now long commitment to Jainism. In fact that would be sufficient on its own to account for the evolution of his thought.

So clearly I never gave myself all the credit, nor necessarily any credit at all, for inspiring Francione, and conceded I might have had nothing to do with it. At most, I thought I might have stimulated him to bring to the fore ideas I acknowledged, last year, that he already had, as part of his professed Jainism. You wonder if I am “dishonest” or “insensitive”. How could there be dishonesty since I based my questions on the evidence in my awareness, and it is still important evidence that might occasion anyone not perfectly familiar with Francione’s work to think that non-violence is not at all articulated as a central principle in his public remarks. It is such powerful evidence that frankly, it cannot be said without ambiguity that non-violence is articulated as his central principle. On the one hand, in the vast majority of cases, it has never been portrayed that way. On the other individuals such as yourself are aware of instances in which Francione offers non-violence as a central principle and that is news to me. So there should be no question about dishonesty. I also think it is wrong to call me “insensitive” since I engage with specifics in Francione’s writings more than the vast majority of other animal rights scholars, and my wondering was based on important evidence that I already introduced in a previous blog entry. That said, I do not expect you or others to be familiar with a blog entry of less than a year ago, nor indeed with any other blog entry. And I do not claim to be an expert on all that Francione says. I am not necessarily "insensitive", but more like not perfectly learned.

You also said it looks to you as though I am leaning on Francione for featuring non-violence as a central principle. Kaufman, whoever you are, how could I do so when I was unaware of any instances in which he features the principle explicitly in this way, although I was aware of his calling himself Jain long before I started writing more focally on non-violence? I guess someone might say I should give Gary credit for Jainism. But then again, maybe not. In the December 11 post I also document how non-violence has been articulated by me as a central principle for a long time, since the 1990s, where I have literature for University of Toronto Students for the Ethical Treatment of animals stating that, and I have it featured in other writings as well, long before I ever saw Gary mention it, and apparently before he did, given my friend, Irena Upeniek's influence which I wrote about on December 11th 2011, cited above.

I think the best way to characterize Francione’s evolution of ideas, by way of a revisionist interpretation, is this:

  1. In by far the most prominently featured public articulations by Francione in his books, talks, and on his website, to the best of my knowledge, he has not featured non-violence as a central principle, and this fact makes it only true with important qualifications that he has articulated the principle as central, BUT
  2. Some people are aware of some instances in which Francione has suggested that non-violence is a central principle, and to these people it is quite evident that he has articulated this, although to other people who are familiar even with a large bulk of Francione’s work it has not always been so evident, and the evidence is therefore obscure to those unfamiliar with it unless it is somehow brought to light. But obscurity is a relative concept. What is part of the long-time light of understanding to one person may be, or have been, obscure to another. It would be too black-and-white to say that "Francione articulates non-violence as a central principle in his public remarks," although it is true to a degree. It would be more accurate to say: "In some places, he articulates non-violence as a central principle in his public remarks, but thus far and by far, mostly not." It's funny because in the micro, the remark you mentioned emphasizes non-violence as a central principle. But in the macro, or his work as a whole, there is hardly any emphasis of non-violence as a central principle. As I said in the 2011 post already cited, I predicted this would shift and indeed there are signs that this is starting to occur, so that there will be this emphasis both in the micro and macro. We will have to wait and see though.

Kaufman, I very much thank you for bringing evidence to light that was unknown to me. It is valuable for interpretation concerning the history of ideas in Francione’s public articulations. I only offered a possible question, as we do in science, which calls for evidence to settle it. You have provided evidence that is new to me, and so my scientific knowledge (I think awareness of what people say can be characterized as a science) has increased as a result. Thanks again.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Monday, September 10, 2012

Non-Violence in "The Rights of Animal Persons"

I now emphasize non-violence much more in my current writings as many have noticed, but as I said in my AR Zone interview, it was a feature of my past writings as well. Here is a quote from my 2006 essay, "The Rights of Animal Persons", p. 15:
...non-violence is the norm on my form of rights reasoning, and I assert that this follows logically. If one objects that what is best full-out is too demanding, it should not be too taxing to insist on that minimal component of what is best or ideal which is not-harming, as we generally require when human interests are at stake. Interestingly, I have suggested that we would call using mentally disabled humans for meat, skins, or experiments “violent,” but the only standard justification for violence is defense, and we do not defend ourselves against animals when we use them in these very ways. No one has thought of a brilliant alternative justification for violence besides defense in the case of animals. Speciesists are hard-pressed to justify their violence in any way. Just because animals are different from humans does not give us a license to harm these other creatures. I also argue at length in my book that in addition to being rightfully entitled to non-violence, sentient beings have rights to respect, life, welfare, and freedom since these are important goods for all sentient beings.
And also on p. 16:
Vivisection however is not best for any sentient being who is subjected to such treatment, and is contrary to the principle of non-violence. Therefore vivisection is not consistent with what is best in general given best caring ethics.

And there are any number of relevant passages discussing the related concept of harm as well. This is just a matter of some interest with respect to the history of my ideas.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang


Dr. David Sztybel Home Page