EDUCATION
I Went Back to School After 33 Years
And it still sucked
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At the end of our first year at Comprehensive School my best friend won the First Year Achievement Award.
Up to the point it was announced at a parents’ evening near the end of term, we had no idea the award even existed.
Now that we knew about it, it became a friendly competition between us as I determined to win the award next year.
By the end of the third year, it was clear this wasn’t an annual thing. There were no more awards.
Still, I’d always done well at school without really trying and this early impetus in senior school had set me on a trajectory for success.
I sailed through my O Levels and started the Sixth Form fully intent on going to university after I sat my A Levels.
By this time, though, the wider world was starting to become more interesting than what we were learning at school and over the course of that two-year study for my A Levels, I became increasingly focused on other priorities.
I started to suspect that the most important changes needed in society weren’t being taught in the education system.
I also realised that the teachers were mostly dicks.
I got into studying and practising Buddhism and would spend hours in the school library between classes reading Buddhist texts, as well as more esoteric writings on martial arts by the likes of Gichin Funakoshi.
Simultaneously, I was becoming more obsessed with birding and practical, hands-on conservation, working as a volunteer during weekends at my local Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) centre.
I lost all interest in going to University and couldn’t wait to get out into the real world and get my hands dirty.
As soon as I’d sat my final A-level exam, I started working at the WWT full time and I loved it… for a while.
I’ve written previously, in ‘The Dark Side of Conservation’ (below), about how my dream job there became a nightmare as I realised the extent of the cruelty and killing that went on behind the scenes.
I eventually left that job when I was no longer able to ignore the killing of countless wild animals and birds in the name of conservation. When I found myself sabotaging their traps, I knew it was time to move on.
By that time I had immersed myself more deeply in Zen Buddhism and the spiritual benefits of simple, practical work. I rejected society and eschewed personal ambition.
I became a full-time vegan activist and have spent decades advocating for animal rights.
I’d always figured that if I wanted to learn something, I could do that without going to university. That’s what books are for.
That’s what the internet is for.
But three years ago I realised I was stuck in a rut and decided to go back and get the degree I’d cast aside more than three decades earlier.
At 52 years old, I enrolled for a law degree at the Open University.
I’d always had an interest in law, particularly as I’d experienced first-hand as an animal rights activist how the law was used to protect the status quo by those with power, money and vested interests.
I’d gotten quite good at defending myself and others in court, researching case law and studying legal processes when the state refused to provide us legal aid for a defence solicitor.
I figured that maybe a degree in law would be a good way to further the cause of animal rights.
Last week I completed my Bachelor of Laws.
Was it worth it? I’ve still got mixed feelings.
I’m not going to be a solicitor, and if anything these last three years have only confirmed what I already knew— that the law is largely just a reflection of the status quo.
Laws — and the way they are applied — are shaped by society, not vice versa.
I hoped that a law degree might give me some leverage to promote the rights of animals. Instead, I learned that the law will always lag behind the moral vanguard, merely reflecting the current mores of society.
Until society at large stops seeing and treating nonhuman animals as property or commodities to be exploited, the law will never enforce that.
I learned that although rivers, forests and even corporations are recognised as having personhood in law, intelligent sentient individuals are not.
I learned that even a university that is woke to the point of absurdity still views nonhuman animals as little more than inanimate objects.
Throughout the course, points of law were illustrated with countless examples using fictional characters. Almost every character was from a minority group.
Rather than being proportionally representative of English and Welsh society (I was studying English and Welsh law), these characters were overwhelmingly non-white, gay and lesbian, in same-sex marriages, with children as young as five identifying as ‘nonbinary’ — even when this had nothing to do with the legal points being discussed.
I get it. One of the roles of education in a diverse, pluralistic society is to challenge assumptions and prejudice. Minorities need to be made more visible.
Yet it often felt they were going so far out of their way to be progressive and inclusive that they were going to the other extreme.
I would have hoped that an institution so overtly concerned about issues of social justice, racism, sexism, homophobia and rights issues in general would have had a greater awareness of speciesism.
Speciesism, of course, is the way we discriminate against members of other species, in the same way that racists discriminate against other races, sexists discriminate against other sexes, etc.
Speciesism is the reason thousands of monkeys can be caged, burned, poisoned, electrocuted and otherwise tortured in laboratories for a new product.
It’s the reason a billion animals a day can be slaughtered for products we don’t need while nobody bats an eye.
Yet despite the university’s emphasis on all other forms of social injustice and prejudice, speciesism was ignored.
More than that, it was rife.
Despite pronouns being given all the weight you would expect from such a ‘woke’ institution, pigs, cows, dogs and other animals were still referred to as ‘it’.
The course writers and tutors seemed completely blind to the personhood and moral rights of nonhuman animals.
On the world stage, efforts to have personhood recognised in law, even for such obviously sentient beings as chimpanzees and elephants, have so far been rejected.
The best that animal law groups can do at present is to prosecute for welfare violations within the animal exploitation industries.
This idea that it’s acceptable to imprison, exploit, oppress, torture and kill other animals as long as we don’t do it in a way which is ‘too cruel’ or ‘inhuman’ is the very ethos that perpetuates these obscene industries.
Only when society starts to recognise that apes and dogs and cats and elephants and pigs and cows and whales and birds all have an inherent right to life, freedom and self-determination will the laws change to reflect that.
I believe the best we can do for now is to keep on chipping away at the prejudice that deems it acceptable to exploit and kill others based purely on the fact that they are different to us.
And we don’t need a law degree to do that.
