Ethical treatment of animals - Part I

Treating animals with a greater sense of equality, with an understanding of cohabitation will correspond to greater treatment of fellow humans.  The treatment of animals influences how humans can be dehumanized. Because nonhumans are cast into a harmable category the effect of dehumanizing holds significant weight. The undoubted effectiveness of the dehumanization process, indicated by frequency of usage, should not be underestimated since even genocide can arise from skillful application.

What is it that makes the deprivation of "humanity" status such a destructive eventuality? Why is perceiving a human being as nonhuman seemingly enough to allow every vile and crude misfortune to come her way, be it discrimination, abuse, torture or collective eradication? What is so wrong, so unforgiving, so horrendous and incredibly dangerous about being on the nonhuman side of this imagined divide?

Perhaps because nonhuman animals are a priori ‘already’ part of acceptable or necessary death that their treatment is somehow excusable. It should be stressed at this point that it appears not to matter that, biologically, humans are animals.

Treating animals disrespectfully, cruelly and with no regard for their feelings of pain as they aren't what human beings might recognize as 'meaningful' feelings of pain, opens the way for treating anything vulnerable as expendable.

Miriam Rothschild, a British natural scientist and author with contributions to the fields of zoology, entomology, and botany, noted that ‘just as we have to depersonalize human opponents in wartime in order to kill them with indifference, so we have to create a void between ourselves and the animals on which we inflict pain and misery for profit’.

A central resource in processes of dehumanization is the notion of a ‘bridgeless chasm’ between human beings and other animals. For, as soon as human beings are successfully constituted as ‘animals’, individual persons or entire groups are immediately rendered as ‘moral inferiors’, who behave ‘just like animals’, or behave like ‘misfits’. It allows society to hide away those who we deem to have lost their humanity. These categories have moral and practical importance that can be used as tools to dominate, exploit and kill.

If you care about human beings, you can't exclude animals from that care as to treat a vulnerable animal as meaningless says an awful lot about who we are as human beings and what we're capable of.

I think anyone with a heart really does care about it when they learn of slaughterhouse conditions. Hopefully we can move in a better direction when more people don't just ignore that out of guilt. Ethical treatment of animals gives something back to humanity by depowering the societal power of dehumanization.

edit: On coming to power in January 1933, the Nazi Party passed a comprehensive set of animal protection laws. These laws tried to abolish the distinction between humans and animals, not by treating animals as persons, but by treating persons as animals. Kathleen Kete writes that it was the worst possible answer to the question of what our relationship with other species ought to be.