We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.
Interpretation
The quote argues against the contradiction in advocating for animal rights while accepting the concept of humane slaughter.
Gary L. Francione highlights the inherent inconsistency in discussing animal rights while also endorsing practices like humane slaughter. He emphasizes that true animal rights cannot coexist with any form of killing, even if it is labeled as 'humane', thereby challenging us to rethink our ethical stance on how we treat animals.
In practice
In a discussion about ethical farming practices, one could use this quote to challenge the notion of humane animal treatment.
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 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.
Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.
Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
He that comes to Christ cannot, it is true, always get on as fast as he would. Poor coming soul, thou art like the man that would ride full gallop whose horse will hardly trot. Now the desire of his mind is not to be judged of by the slow pace of the dull jade he rides on, but by the hitching and kicking and spurring as he sits on his back. Thy flesh is like this dull jade, it will not gallop after Christ, it will be backward though thy soul and heaven lie at stake.
They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.
The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.
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