9 years ago today I visited a Vegas farmed animal sanctuary for the first time:
Status update from a Las Vegas farmed animal sanctuary or: Hmmm, 'Bacon?'
"There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery." - Charles Darwin
Sure some beautiful weather we are having in Vegas today. Just the right temperature for strolling around the grounds of the new animal sanctuary here in town. The weather seemed to agree with Norman as well. It was very moving to see him overcoming adversity, running around on his three legs, and then Sarah, another bovine, coming over and playing with him.
Of course Norman and Sarah and all the other individuals at the sanctuary are the exception to the rule. The dominant culture as it is, Norman and Sarah could have just as easily become anonymous bodies on a plate, commodities on some fast food menu.
But the oppression of non-human animals doesn't reflect any objective order. It is an imagined order which takes our species' traits personally and depersonalizes other individuals as we wish and casts them as extras in this script we've written. By ignoring the negative rights of these beings who share our ability to experience pleasure and our desire to avoid pain, we dismiss the single most significant characteristic to consider if we want to speak in any meaningful way about rights and equality for any being.
Long gone are the days when it might be reasonable to simply assume other species of animals are automata. Science now gives us a better vantage point that snaps us out of that mass hallucination and reveals them to be conscious beings http://fcmconference.org/.../CambridgeDeclarationOnConsci... with complex minds aware of pleasure and distress and even capable of empathy http://www.psychologytoday.com/.../empathic-rats-and... .
We know better, but we still act no better. We cherish and fight for our freedom, yet take that of another to use them as food and amusement as if one person's whims are enough to trump another person's basic rights. Who are we to take an individual with a personality all their own, a unique being distinct from every other being that has ever existed, exists now or ever will exist and remove them from their natural environment or remove their natural environment from them? Who are we to break their social bonds and group continuity? Who are we to breed beings for our benefit? What gives us the right to keep someone captive in a lab, an amusement park, a factory or free-range farm where they experience grief, anxiety, confusion, fear, loneliness and sorrow , feelings that you and I understand and wish to avoid?
Our shelves and shopping carts are loaded with language which twists reality, but it forms a poor and porous barrier. Our words are woven with our actions and a person still occupies the 'product.' When we buy the 'cheese' , 'beef' , 'bacon' and 'ham' we are electing to interact with other individuals and participate in the world in a particular way, a way which demands the unnecessary death and/ or mental anguish of others. We are saying 'might makes right.' But might doesn't make right. And our power over vulnerable beings isn't a valid reason to deviate from the principle of impartiality.
Animal rights isn't a very radical notion. It is merely an extension of universal values, a reflection of our shared belief that we shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering. By respecting the rights of other species we respect ourselves. The exploitation of others simply isn't acceptable given all the possibilities. Let's enjoy our species' distinctions and explore our advantages to the furthest extent. Let's use, even celebrate our minds' unique capacity for scenario building and for linking with other scenario building minds and let's build better scenarios together. Scenarios where the goal isn't to come out on top of some hierarchy. Scenarios where we dismantle the apartheid between body and mind and we are no longer estranged from ourselves and each other.
As Neil DEGrasse Tyson said so brilliantly- "Accepting our kinship with all life on earth is not only solid science. In my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience."
As one who has come to understand that all sentient beings should have rights and deserve my moral concern, I couldn't agree more.
For those of you who have also come to understand this already, I thank you for your time and for your consideration for all beings.
For those of you who have not come to understand this yet, I thank you for your time and urge you to give consideration to all beings.
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