Hurting animals

By representing Animal Rights we have to step aside from being personally right about animal cruelty and animal food in order to stress the importance of mature empathy for people, which in turn ignites people’s empathy for animals according to do unto others what you’d have done to yourself . If we can apply this to fellow humans why not to animals too? By taking the emphasis away from our own self development and by being consistent, we bring our arguments down to a very simple comparison, between the empathy we naturally show any dog or cuddly cat or horse and our feelings for other animals. For the companions at home, the last thing we’d want to do is hurt them, because we know them as individuals and know each one to have their own strong personality. Animal Rights is all about these strong empathetic bonds we have between ourselves and ‘the creatures’ and it’s likely none of us could purposely de-individualise any animal, and certainly not to help us end its life.
When I was young I was hiking in the country overnight. In the evening I found a pigeon which had eaten poisoned bait. I looked after it overnight but it was in such obvious pain the next day I took a knife to its throat. I often think of that bird, at the moment when I had to end its life and I hope it understood why I did it. But for an animal to face the knife without their being any compassionate reason to kill it, must be like any victim facing their murderer. And yet billions of such animals face their murderers each day. Present is no kindly vet to ease the trauma, no anaesthetics, just the machinery of death and humans forcing them forwards to their execution. To think how one animal will suffer like this, let alone billions of them, is unimaginable. Humans love animals as they do children. We have a strong sense of empathy for animals. Even trees being deforested are less empathised with than animals, but humans are good at pretending. They pretend they can feel empathy because they love their dogs and cats, and that allows them to exclude farm animals who they condemn to death row and for whose bodies and by products they provide a market.