12
AUGUST 2014
DOGGIERESCUE.COM MAGAZINE
DOGGIERESCUE UNLEASHED AND DANGEROUS compiled by Roland Briefrel
They’re only animals. Below are 4 foetuses—they bear striking similarities.
I have a confession. I eat meat and I love my dogs. In light of this, I probably qualify as a hypocrite. So this month’s article is as much for me as it is for anyone prepared to take the time to at least THINK and start a conversation about the issues raised. They are hard and confronting issues – but not as hard as they are for the animals around us.
Having just seen the Oscar winning movie 12 Years a Slave and the hauntingly disturbing 1955 documentary Night and Fog I wondered how any of us, from the vantage point of supposed enlightenment in 2014, would react if we had lived through the events portrayed.
Would any of us really have the steely backbone required to be abolitionist or stand against the terrors of Nazism? I suspect many would say of course we would, as we overlay modern enlightenment onto situations in which people had few means to know or act better.
While the majority of us, according to Sam De Brito❶, “reject the relatively recent beliefs that women or people of different races are inferior”, there is unfortunately, a reasoning most humans still embrace as “obvious” or “natural”, when it comes to the rights of animals, that we are their superiors; we can thus do with them what we like.
• In the same way that we cannot own other races of people, we have no right to own other species.
• In the same way that we must not do harm to human animals, we have no right to harm other animals.
• In the same way that most of us care for human beings, we must care for all other living beings.
Paul Seymour
Even the most politically correct and progressive have a blind spot when it comes to our attitude towards animals.
We continue to brutalise animals in ways we would never allow to happen to a human. So what is going on when human behaviour collides with animal welfare?
The ensuing violence is a result of speciesism.
A recent article by Katrina Fox❷ posits the following: “The term was coined by psychologist Richard Ryder in
1970 and refers to a prejudice similar to sexism or racism in that the treatment of individuals is determined by their membership of a particular group. Just as less value is placed on certain people based on their sex, gender, race, sexual orientation or other defining characteristic, so too are animals afforded even less consideration and moral worth based on the fact they are a species other than human.
In short, speciesism is taking place whenever we justify the violence and exploitation of other beings by saying "they're only animals".
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