What is Challenge Speciesism?

When I first started participating in animal rights I barely recognized how much I still had to learn. I had learned enough about non-human animal oppression to stop participating in it directly by refusing to fund it with my money. But what I did not know was that speciesism still deeply affected my actions and beliefs.  

As I continued to participate as an animal rights activist I learned how speciesism affected my language— I was still calling non-human animals “it” rather than she, he or they.

I learned about the ways speciesism subtly influenced my beliefs and activism— I denounced unapologetic disruption of speciesist systems as “too extreme” while simultaneously supporting similar actions done in the name of ending human oppression.

I told my friends and family to stop eating pigs because they are as intelligent as a three year old human without realizing I was upholding an anthropocentric view of intelligence and dooming all other animals not perceived as intelligent as pigs to be consumed instead. I would call myself “a voice for the voiceless”, failing to see that non-human animals are screaming for their lives each day but are merely silenced. But in calling them voiceless I had erased their identities, failed to tell their stories and centred my own voice in their struggle for their liberation.

While I know all this now, I still have so much to learn. Each day I learn more about the complexity of non-human animal oppression and the ways I continue to benefit from human privilege and supremacy.

This is why Challenge Speciesism has been created. Challenge Speciesism is a space used to analyze and acknowledge the room we all have to grow in bettering ourselves as allies to non-human animals. Challenging speciesism in ourselves is critical for activist growth but Challenge Speciesism will also be pushing for disruption of speciesism in our society. We must educate, disrupt, agitate, fight and take action to make speciesism an issue that cannot be ignored. Discrimination against non-human animals has gone on too long without the challenge it deserves.