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.
I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.
The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
I've noticed that even people who believe in fate look both ways before crossing the street.
The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.
Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.
The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.