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 anything that can’t hit back, poor people, trees, minerals and most especially animals … which means we can behave as badly as we like. We can put animals in cages, mutilate them and generally control absolutely everything in their lives. We do it because it’s in our advantage to do it.
The greatest source of revenue comes from the farm animals trade. It’s more profitable to keep them in slums. And when we kill them we do so because we de-animate them: “animals lack self awareness and have no explicitly future-directed preferences. Their death seems less of a tragedy than the death of a self-conscious being who does have such preferences” – this is typical ant-animal talk.
Basically we treat them badly because we know can get away with it, no repercussions. We justify cruelty by believing that they 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 force ourselves to justify what we do. then it becomes an act of pragmatism – we say of the ant or other insects that they are irritating ‘pests’ which need to be destroyed.
That same sense of separation is also there with fellow humans but we show it in a less direct way. Racism makes us feel separate to our coloured neighbours when there’s a compulsion to establish superior status over them. We 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.
As separation-ists we are not interested in ‘inferiors’ as individuals. We’re particularly turned off just when they assume 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 about it, refuse to enjoy any advantages from exploiting animals. 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 towards them - one of marvelling at their innocence and beauty and certainly never meaning them any harm.