Not essential to understand others?

We project altruism and we think about possibilities and opportunities, and sometimes we pour our altruism into great causes. Which brings us back to Animal Rights. When we’re aware of our own altruism, (like parents can be with their kids) we go on to apply it beyond the home and beyond the personal, elsewhere, for other people, other species, other ideas. Animal Rights is just one of the great causes, another is planet care, another is social justice and the human ‘right to a life’. Many people divide up their stocks of altruism between personal matters and world matters. Energy for this comes from our empathetic enthusiasms.
For us, as humans, empathy is our forté. We can feel almost as much for the loss of a life in others as we can for the loss of our own life. Humans are often drawn to compassion when we see death amongst starving children. Kids dying of it is heartbreaking. But we see it in exploited animals too, and all these animals have their lives prematurely ended too, not by starving but by execution. As with starving kids, all farm animals are also dying young. And for kids so it is for animals it can be much the same sort of empathy we feel, not only for the dying but for the suffering whilst alive.
The ability to cause this level of suffering purposely and carelessly, denying kids food, caging and killing animals, this is the opposite of empathy. It’s full-on separation, where we see ourselves so far removed from the ‘other’ that we alienate them, exploit them or kill them. When we humans turn against each other, there’s a feeling of warlike spearation but when we turn against animals it’s worse than separation, it’s enslavement. Maintaining this sort of relationship with animals couldn’t be worse - we exercise power over them unashamedly, we grant them no rights, only the ‘privilege’ of staying alive for long enough to be productive. To us. And that’s about the most cynical foundation for a relationship one could imagine.