Different from me

1470: 

I doubt if there is a sudden welling up of kindness that stimulates one's sense of caring.  I think it stems more from an interest in seeing the differences in others, whether it’s racial, sexual or species difference.  In whatever form, it’s the diversity of life that becomes so deeply fascinating. And from that comes the looking-out-for, the 'caring'.

At first, the differences don’t show up as attractive.  Take ideas for instance.  If your idea differs from mine, I might find that threatening.  When you introduce your idea to me, it might be unfamiliar and scary at first, but if I can consider it, it may show me whole new possibilities.  It may be the window to an opportunity to help me move on, to self-develop and to grow up.

         

Perhaps great ideas, for example those concerning the value of non-separation and non-violence, suggest essential radical changes in one's whole approach to life.  They suggest a more egalitarian and gentler way of treating one another.  They show how one can accept  animals as being of equal value and as sovereign beings.

If my change of attitude can take me this far, it will impel me to make lots of changes in my life.  That's the scary bit.  Take animals, in some ways we’re superior to them, but in other ways we’re their inferiors.  I can learn a lot from them to my benefit, by observing them and without hurting them.  By realising some of their superior qualities I’m more likely to re-think how I view them and how I see other humans.  For example, they may have better survival skills or better relationship skills, or they're less gratuitously violent with each other.  They probably lack revenge and they don’t bear a grudge.  They seem, in many ways, so much more sophisticated than humans.

         

If I’m going to accept animals as my equal, I’ll need to use my imagination.  If animals are worthy of a respect equal to that which I would show another human, then I'd be unable to condone their abuse.  Hurting an animal would be no different to my hurting you.  That's what happens with something like racism, where we behave badly with someone from a foreign culture, because we can get away with it, because they’re not in a position to defend themselves.  Speciesism is no different.  We have no reason to treat any animal with disrespect, just because they appear to have different physical or intellectual powers.  And likewise with people from a different cultural background to ourselves.

A non-speciesist attitude isn’t merely a matter of trying to be kinder to animals, it's more that we start to find an interest in them, and an interest in learning more about them.  Our respect for them is likely to spring from wonder which turns into a gratitude for what animals shows us about ourselves, that we didn’t know before, or couldn’t have discovered by other means.  Particularly valuable, is learning just how slanted the human perception of our own superiority is, and how animals shouldn’t be regarded as insignificant enough that we needn’t care about how we treat them.

The implications of such new learning is obvious, in that no longer can we blithely accept all the advantages of animal-abuse.  For a start, we'd be unable to condone the farming of them or killing them or exploiting them, meaning no longer using them for food or clothing.

But if such considerations, at first, make us feel uncomfortable, then we have to convince ourselves that we feel hostility towards them or feel threatened by the unfamiliarity of them.  But whether this is hatred or fear or simply disregard, it stems from an unresolved attitude to difference, whether it be species- or racial-difference.  Once we lose that fear, then immediately we start to empathise with their situation.  We want to liberate them.  We want to alleviate their terrible suffering. And our dislike switches from hostility to admiration.