"All advocates can appear self-righteous. Animal advocates sound especially so, however, because none of us in the audience belong to the group on whose behalf they argue. With all the other problems in the world, animal rights cannot help but seem to be a misguided priority. We insist that our principles cover only our species, without bothering to justify the assertion."
The Rights of Animals
by Frank Wu
I think I can quickly triage the readers of this page into three groups:Of those in the second group, those who are satisfied with the situation as it is now, I believe that 90% of their reasoning comes down to "I like to eat meat." To be honest we should clarify that as, "I like to eat meat, and I don't care how much suffering I'm responsible for."
- Those who are already animal-rights supporters. (a small percentage of the population, but I suppose disproportionately represented here)
- Those who are satisfied to continue to eat meat and support livestock agribusiness. (The great majority of the population, I'm sure, but probably less likely to be reading this.)
- Those few who may actually be influenced by animal-rights arguments.
It seems to me that Animal Rights issues are a very clear demonstration of the doublethink so prevalent in human affairs --
- Raising and killing animals for food and other products plainly involves a great deal of cruelty.
- The purchase of animal-based foods and products plainly supports a great deal of cruelty.
- Most people are not particularly cruel and do not wish to be or to seem cruel.
- It is therefore generally and firmly believed that the animal-foods industries are not in fact cruel.
"...the argument that plants feel pain keeps coming back. It is usually offered by people trying to rationalize that since plants feel pain, it must be okay to kill animals. They never make the similar leap of saying that since plants feel pain it must be okay to kill humans."
"Most people who approach Taking Animals Seriously will share an unspoken presupposition. This is that animal activists take animals too seriously. They lack a sense of proportion. It's not that gratuitous cruelty to members of other species is morally defensible. Surely it isn't. If pressed, then all but the amoral, sociopathic or philosophically bewitched are likely to grant that wanton animal-abuse is best discouraged. Instead, the pervasive assumption is simply that animal suffering doesn't really matter much compared to the things that happen to human beings - to us. They, after all, are only animals: objects rather than our fellow subjects. Animal consciousness, insofar as it exists at all, is minimal and uninteresting.
Contrast one's likely reaction on learning that the infant or toddler next door is being abused. Let's suppose that the abuse is being inflicted for fun or profit - or, more broadly, for purposes that can be described only as frivolous. In such a case, then one's intuitions are equally clear. The suffering of the victim has to be taken very seriously. One has a duty actively to prevent it. The interests of the child take precedence over the wishes of the abuser. In extreme cases, the adults involved in persistent abuse may need to be legally restrained or even locked up. Indeed, it is cases of failure on our part to take action to prevent it - or failure to take action by the social services or child-protection agencies - that demand justification. To treat the suffering caused by child-abuse lightly would be to show a sense of disproportion when confronted with the nature of the practices involved - and our capacity to do something about them.
Yet here lies the crux."
"At the heart of the issue of animal protection and their legal rights is the basic question of the "property" status of animals.
"Legally, animals are property," Joyce said. (Joyce Tischler, co-founder and executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF))
"They can't have guardians or others appointed on their behalf to protect them."
"For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last (Passenger) pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auck thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. DuPont's nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush's bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts."
A Sand County Almanac
by Aldo Leopold
online here