Altruism and animals

1473: 

We consider altruism and how it suggests 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 out of our empathetic enthusiasms.

For us, as humans, empathy is our forte. We can feel almost as much for the loss of a life in another as we can for the threatened loss of our own life.  Humans are often drawn to compassion, especially when we see death amongst starving children.  Kids dying of lack of food is heartbreaking.  But we feel similar compassion when we see exploited animals, their lives being prematurely ended, not from starvation but from execution.  As with starving kids, all farm animals are also dying young.  As for kids so for animals, and so for us the same sort of empathy we feel, not only for the dying but for those who are suffering whilst still alive.

         

The ability to cause this level of suffering purposely and carelessly, denying kids food, caging and killing animals - it's the opposite of empathy.  In fact it comes about by way of full-on separation, where we see ourselves so far removed from ‘the other’ that we feel alienated from them and thus are able to exploit them or kill them.  When we humans turn against each other, there’s a feeling of warlike separation between us, but when we turn against animals it’s worse than separation, it’s the coldest form of separation that we call 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 (for our benefit).  And that’s about the most cynical foundation for a relationship one could ever imagine.