In time

1485: 

In time, we’ll realise what we’ve done and we’ll treat all animals with as much dignity as we do our own children or companion animals.

         

In time, just as environmental consciousness has sprung out of a concern for the planet, so a plant-based diet will spring out of our concern for animals.  In time we’ll forget why we kept and ate animals.  Veganism will be normal, and in fact there won't be a dedicated word for it.  In time we'll be able to properly atone for what we’ve done to the animals, and in time there won't be any more need to rehabilitate the survivors in safe sanctuaries.  What is to happen to these species is still something we (and it is down to us) will have to consider, for it will be up to us to take an initiative about this, if only for safety reasons.  But before then, we'll have needed to retire the survivors and intervene to stop their other-than-sustainable breeding.  (Obviously, during that time, we certainly wouldn't have been actively breeding them, since we'd have had no reason to, since their usefulness to us would be no longer a factor). By then, our 'in-time'- reasoning would be pointing in a very different direction!

In time, the very idea of enslaving, let alone interfering with another species’ breeding cycles, and let alone imprisoning them for their entire lives, will be as unthinkable as approving Dr. Mengele's experiments on humans, in Nazi Germany.

         

In time, when humans become animal guardians, both human and animal will surely start to find peace.  But let's face it, a very great damage will have been done by then, that can't easily be undone.  Animals have been so completely altered from their wild state, their having been prisoners-of-the-state since time out of mind, that they wouldn’t survive for long on their own. It will be up to us to take some measures, not all of which we'd normally not want to take but for the greater good - I refer to 'stopping them breeding'.  I just hope they’ll find it possible to forgive us.