Democratic Socialists of America Animal Liberation Working Group Statement on Thanksgiving
By: Animal Liberation
Tags: Socialism, Vegan, Thanksgiving, Dsa, Animal Rights

Thanksgiving is a holiday of whitewashed violence. In school, many Americans are taught that the first Thanksgiving was a benign coming-together of Pilgrims and Native Americans. This story is a fraud, a piece of “imperialist nostalgia” invented to portray white settlers as benevolent and conceal the genocide of indigenous people on which the United States was built.

Much as this myth forecloses our ability to reckon with historical violence, the picturesque ideal of the Thanksgiving meal prevents an honest confrontation with animal agriculture. The turkey on the table presents nonhuman animals as mere resources to be consumed by humans rather than as individuals with their own interests and desires. It also ignores the catastrophic reality of industrialized animal agriculture, which has plundered our planet’s abundance for short-term profit and bears much blame for our climate crisis.

Turkeys raised for food in the U.S. — 46 million of them will be eaten this year on Thanksgiving alone — don’t resemble any wild animal 17th-century Americans would recognize. They have been bred to grow so fast and in such proportions that they live with chronic pain and are unable to carry out basic activities, including mating, walking, or, often, even standing up. They typically spend their lives sitting in dark, overcrowded warehouses waiting to be taken to slaughter, and are routinely mutilated and subjected to extreme, shocking violence at human hands.

Compared to large mammals like pigs and cows, poultry birds appear relatively dissimilar to us (not showing their emotions on their faces, for example), which has contributed to the sense that they lack intelligence and don’t deserve protection from abuse. Chickens and turkeys are denied even the low-level protection afforded by the federal Humane Slaughter Act — despite chickens representing the vast majority of the 10 billion animals killed for food in the U.S. each year. In reality, these birds are curious, emotional, and highly social animals who feel pleasure and pain, and have evolved unique abilities to navigate their environments (chickens, for example, like many birds, navigate using electromagnetic fields).

Animal behaviorists and cognitive scientists are increasingly rejecting the idea of a straightforward hierarchy of intelligence with humans at the top — and there is much evidence to suggest a parallel evolution of complex intelligence in birds. Disability scholar Sunaura Taylor writes, “The association of animals with cognitive deficiency must be challenged, not only because many species exhibit signs of human intelligence and because animal minds are complex in their own right (in ways that often cannot easily be compared and contrasted with human capacities), but because intellectual capacity should not determine a being’s worth and the protections they are granted.”

Human workers, too, are abused in the industry’s quest for profits, forced to endure unsafe, traumatizing conditions for poverty wages. The threat of ICE raids keeps a largely immigrant workforce hesitant to speak out about labor conditions. The United States’ exploitative agricultural system is spreading: Just as capitalism, financialization, and American imperialism have created a world of perpetual deprivation and war for the many, they have exported the North American model of total, industrialized violence against nonhuman animals all over the world.

The DSA Animal Liberation Working Group stands against settler colonialism and the commodification of turkeys. We express solidarity with our human and nonhuman comrades harmed by or lost to the annual commemoration of Thanksgiving.

About the DSA Animal Liberation Working Group

Founded in 2017, the Animal Liberation Working Group seeks to educate socialists on the widespread exploitation of nonhuman animals and bring an anti-capitalist analysis to animal advocacy. We believe that the commodification of nonhuman animals is intimately connected to capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and other oppressive systems, and that liberation for all animals — including humans — means working toward democratic ecosocialism. We advocate for DSA and the broader socialist movement to stand against the mass confinement, torture, and slaughter of nonhuman animals, wild and domesticated.

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