Objects

1627: 

An animal should never be just a dispensable, replaceable piece of property. There’s an obvious  difference between various consciousnesses - my table, the living tree, the sentient creature, the human being. It may seem impossible at first thought, but at all levels of consciousness, each deserves respect.

There’s a lot of difference between an abusive relationship and a loving one, between the parasitic and the symbiotic. It seems that we humans haven’t yet learnt how to be symbiotic with those animals which happen to be useful to us. And as for having consideration for other levels of consciousness, forget it.

Valuable resources are lumped in with ‘useful animals’, and all regarded as 'things' for the taking. We think it’s all there for us, all part of the rich bounty to which we’re entitled. And with a mixture of minimal respect, lack of appreciation for what we already have and greed for more, it makes us never satisfied. Anything we want we can have; we acquire, we use-up, and then we keep wanting more. We graduate from indifference to abuse and then to full blown alienation.

The deadliest disease amongst humans is dissatisfaction. We open the box on Christmas Day containing a beautiful puppy dog, and six months later we’re off on our holidays, and taking the puppy (now a dog) to the vets to be put down.

If we tire of something we develop a contempt for it, so that we can distance ourselves from it; in this case it’s the no-longer-so-cute dog. All the dissimilarities, between human and non-human are highlighted, and any similarity is downgraded, so that we can dispose of it or abuse it, and rest easy with a justified conscience. ‘Food animals’ seem to be so dissimilar to us that we don’t need to consider them as beings at all. In fact they are merely alive in order to make them useful to us dead.

As addicts of animal products, like anyone addicted to anything, we must be assured of supply, so the chain of animal to farmer to animal-industry to shop keeper, is set up to maintain our lifestyle. One faulty link and it’s catastrophe - imagine, for instance, a shop being out of ice cream. Unthinkable!