Humans are more important

This sense of separation has become so deeply ingrained that we hardly know how to escape the belief, that we humans are the most important beings on earth and have dominion over the rest. For us it means we can do what we like with animals … which means we can behave badly, like putting animals in cages, mutilating them and generally controlling absolutely everything in their lives. We do it because it’s to our advantage to do it. It’s more profitable to keep them in slums than in palaces. And when we kill them we justify it with fancy philosophy, like when we suggest that “animals lack self awareness and have no explicitly future-directed preferences, whose death seems less of a tragedy than the death of a self-conscious being who does have such preferences. Basically we treat them badly because we know can get away with it, because they can’t fight back, because there will be no repercussions. We even justify cruelty by believing that we experience things differently. So, for instance, drowning ants in the kitchen sink or crushing cockroaches under foot is of no consequence because these creatures show no sign of suffering (which is hardly surprising since they are so small and silent). We consider it’s not even necessary to think about it, or if we do then it becomes an act of pragmatism – these are irritating ‘pests’ which need to be destroyed.
That same sense of separation is also there with fellow humans but in a less direct way. Racism makes us feel separate to our coloured neighbours. There’s an overwhelming compulsion to establish superior status over them, to see them as potential pests. We don’t have to be too obvious about it because we guess they’ve experienced racism before in their lives - we only need to signal how we feel by being pointedly not too friendly. We don’t have to spell it out to make them feel uncomfortable.
Once again, the separation we display shows we are not interested in ‘inferiors’ as individuals, that in fact we are turned off just by their audacity in assuming they are equal to us. We maintain our advantage over our inferiors, whether animals or humans, by making them feel inferior. They may be useful to us perhaps, but never social equals.
Racism stinks of course but speciesism is no different. Vegans, who don’t want to be part of this and choose to make a statement of non-separation from animals refuse to enjoy any advantages from exploiting them. The vegan attitude may be compared with that of a person who walks through a forest in awe of the beauty and only wants to preserve it, as opposed to another who sees the forest of trees as log-able items. With animals, as with our own children, it comes down to having a single response, one of marvelling at their innocence and beauty and certainly never meaning them any harm.