Abolition for All Species
There’s a particular kind of silence that hums beneath every slaughterhouse floor. Not the silence of peace, but the engineered quiet of erasure. The hum of forgetting. Mechanical. Methodical. You feel it if you get too close. That pressure behind the eyes. That twitch in the teeth. Like something screaming just beyond human range.
I know because I lived near one.
Western Sydney. Dry air thick with exhaust fumes and eucalyptus. An abattoir crouched at the edge of the industrial zone, low-slung and wide, painted the colour of forgetting. My brother Gary, Shaun, Michael, and myself, twelve, vulnerable, explorers in thongs and cut-offs, circled it like it was a ruin from another time. Not locked up like they are now. No barbed wire. No surveillance. No lies about "biosecurity." Just a building bloated with secrets, and four boys daring it to show them something real.
We’d ride our bikes to its perimeter. Throw rocks. Stare at the red drains. Talk about what happened inside like it was a horror film. We heard things. Grunts. Groans. Metal clanging. Rhythmic thuds. Back then, we thought it was machinery. Now I wonder if we were hearing pain. Not metaphorical. Literal. Raw-throated panic. Bodies breaking in real time. Lives ending where our imaginations began.
Something stayed with me. Something still howls.
But it wasn’t just there that I learned the sound of stolen life.
Years later, I spent a year in South Africa working with orphaned baboons. Infants, mostly. Wide-eyed and wild-souled. Clinging to nothing because their mothers were already gone. Shot. Sniped. Blown open by bullets fired from white farmers' rifles. Labelled pests. Treated as vermin. Left in piles like rubbish. Some still warm when we found their babies. Some dead with their arms still outstretched. Protecting even in the final frame.
I held those babies against my chest. Fed them from syringes. Rocked them through the screaming. Slept with them curled beneath my shirt, their small bodies shaking with the trauma of being alive in a world that wanted them gone. Each one carried grief like a ghost. Soft howls in the middle of the night. Fingers searching for fur that was no longer there. Some stopped eating. Some stopped moving. Some stopped trusting anything but the sky.
This is what speciesism looks like.
Not theory. Not philosophy. But bullets. But orphans. But bureaucrats with permits and farmers with God complexes and tourists who shrug and say “it’s just a monkey.”
I’ve seen up close what it means to be treated as unworthy of mourning. To be categorised as a “problem animal” in the ledger of land ownership. To be marked for erasure. This is not just about meat. It is about the mythology of dominion. The violent fiction that says this planet belongs to us.
And yet the world keeps walking. Heads down. Earbuds in. Addicted to convenience. Sedated by denial. Because we’ve been taught that some cages are natural. That suffering has a species limit. That abolition ends at the farm gate.
But it doesn’t. It can’t. Not if it’s real.
Abolition, true, ferocious abolition, must be total. It cannot stop at skin tone or sentience score or strategic convenience. It must reach for every being who bleeds, who breathes, who longs to live. Not just the charismatic or the endangered. Not just the creatures we cradle. It must mean the pig in the crate. The fish in the trawler net. The calf torn from his mother and killed before his first birthday. The monkey in the research lab. The chicken in the scalding tank. The octopus on the restaurant table, still pulsing while patrons clap.
Let’s not abstract this.
Let’s name names. Because the architecture of animal oppression has architects. Builders. Beneficiaries.
Woolworths and Coles, peddling “RSPCA-approved” corpses while greenwashing cruelty with cartoon hens and meadow fonts. The RSPCA itself, complicit in legitimising torture through its partnerships with industry, acting not as protector but as lubricant for the machine. Peter Dutton, defender of live export, arm-in-arm with agribusiness barons while calling animal defenders extremists. JBS Australia, the meat giant with a rap sheet of violations and a belly full of blood. Racing Victoria, masking brutality with prize money and prime-time ads. Petstock, pushing bred animals while shelters overflow. SeaWorld, turning stolen lives into photo ops. And let’s not forget the influencers posing with sedated lion cubs, grinning beside ghosts.
They know. They profit. They continue.
And behind it all, the state nods along. Because animal agriculture props up trade. Because politicians fear rural backlash. Because ethics don’t fund campaigns. So the laws stay loyal to industry. The courts protect profit. The media sanitises death into dinner.
This is not about lifestyle. It’s not about who eats what. It’s about domination. It’s about who gets to live, and who decides. And every system of oppression, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, has rehearsed its violence on animals first. The human supremacist mindset is the original weapon. It carved up the natural world into resource zones. Turned lives into commodities. Rewrote kinship into ownership.
We did not inherit this. We constructed it. And we can tear it down.
Abolition means the end of all animal exploitation. Not better cages. No cages. Not humane slaughter. No slaughter. Not higher welfare. True freedom. It means ending breeding. Ending sale. Ending use. It means animals are not property. Not entertainment. Not food. Not tools. Not yours. It means seeing them as persons. As kin. As sovereign lives with their own reasons for being.
Yes, that will make people uncomfortable. Good. Justice without discomfort is branding. Real change costs.
And no, animal liberation is not a distraction from human rights. It is their expansion. Their deepest expression. Because any liberation that leaves billions behind is not liberation. It is selective empathy dressed in progressive drag.
So how do we begin, knowing we won’t live to see it?
We begin anyway.
Let’s be honest. Animal abolition, true, legal, cultural, global, will not happen in my lifetime. Nor in my step-children’s. Not even in the lifetime of my step-grandson, Cillian, whose four month old tiny hands are just now learning to hold the world gently. But that is not a reason to delay. It is the reason to begin.
Because movements are not miracles. They are built. Brick by brick. Year by bloody year. By people willing to lay foundations they will never walk on. We are not here to finish it. We are here to start it properly. To build the conditions for it to come.
So we study the movements that made change real. Not symbolic. Not palatable. But tectonic.
The transatlantic slave abolitionists who dismantled an economy built on human bondage. Not by being liked, but by being relentless. Organising boycotts. Flooding Parliament. Flooding ports. Flooding public consciousness with images of chained bodies and shredded backs. They used pamphlets. They used art. They used ships. They were called radicals, traitors, fools. They kept going.
The suffragettes who smashed windows and starved in prisons. Who built networks in parlours and backstreets. Who refused compromise when it came to bodily autonomy. They didn't ask permission. They didn't settle for being nice.
The AIDS activists who forced the world to reckon with queer death. ACT UP didn’t just protest. They researched. They infiltrated. They rewrote policy. They put bodies on the line and data in the faces of those in power. They made themselves impossible to ignore.
That is the legacy we inherit. Not from the polished, but from the persistent.
So what do we do now?
We get serious. We professionalise the movement. We stop pretending compassion is enough. We build political power. Lobbyists. Legal teams. Investigative units. Think tanks. Cultural arms. Campaign strategies. Policy frameworks. Alliances with environmental and public health fronts. We show that the animal-industrial complex is a pillar of climate collapse, of pandemics, of antibiotic resistance, of water theft, of Indigenous land dispossession. And we name the enemy with precision.
We shift money. Away from welfare whitewashing. Away from performative plant-based startups that sell “kindness” while staying quiet on exploitation. We fund abolitionist litigation. Journalism. Education. We back legislation that removes animals from the category of property. We draft policy for sentience recognition, for wildlife corridors, for banning speciesist advertising, for replacing dissection with tech, for taxing slaughter, for criminalising torture — not just at the domestic scale, but at the level of industrial design.
We make animal liberation part of every justice conversation. Not an afterthought. Not an optional extra. We insist it belongs alongside climate justice, alongside racial justice, alongside disability rights and land back and gender autonomy. We weave it in because it is already there. Every system of harm has always been scaffolded by the belief that some lives do not count.
We refuse to let children grow up in a world where the first song they learn is “Old MacDonald,” where a trip to the zoo is called education, where every birthday cake comes with a side of suffering. We replace it with stories of kinship. Of resistance. Of respect. We train teachers. We rewrite curriculums. We make abolition part of civic literacy.
And we resist the urge to compromise. To settle for “better” slaughter. For “ethical” milk. For language that soothes the consumer but leaves the animal dead. We say the word abolition with our full chest.
Because anything less is betrayal.
This is a lifelong fight. We may never win it. But we can turn the tide. We can erode the grip of normal. We can ensure the next generation inherits not just the problem, but the tools.
So we act. Now. While the world is burning and the bodies are piling. While there’s still breath to be spared and laws to be broken and laws to be written.
Abolition is coming. Not because it’s inevitable. But because we will make it.
For every body. Every species. Every sacred breath.
Not someday. Not one day. Now.