Because animals are property, we consider as "humane treatment" that we would regard as torture if it were inflicted on humans.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the moral standards applied to the treatment of animals compared to humans.
Gary L. Francione highlights the ethical inconsistency in how society treats animals as property, where actions deemed torturous if done to humans are often accepted as humane treatment for animals. This statement prompts reflection on our moral obligations toward animals and challenges the prevailing legal and societal norms that permit their suffering simply because they are classified as property.
In practice
In a discussion on animal rights at a community meeting.
The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.
Humans treat animals as things that exist as means to human ends. That's morally wrong. Sexism promotes the idea that women are things that exist as means to the ends of men. That's morally wrong. We need to stop treating all persons - whether human or nonhuman - as things.
They are nonhuman persons. They are not food. If animals matter morally at all, there is one and only one rational response: go vegan. Everything else is just participation in animal exploitation.
We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.
We are vegans not simply because being vegan will reduce suffering. We are vegan because every sentient being values her or his life even if no one else does. We are vegan because justice minimally requires that we not take life for trivial purposes.
We can no more justify using nonhumans as human resources than we can justify human slavery. Animal use and slavery have at least one important point in common: both institutions treat sentient beings exclusively as resources of others. That cannot be justified with respect to humans; it cannot be justified with respect to nonhumans—however “humanely” we treat them.
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. ... My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return the love.
Could I be assured that America would remain virtuous, I would venture to defy the utmost Efforts of Enemies to subjugate her.
But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.
We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.
Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.
Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.