The Right to Life Does Not Run Parallel to Only Our Own Species

Most well-meaning people consume animal products as a result of inherited habit, misinformation, and general ignorance surrounding the horrors behind our food. Since we often begin consuming animal products as kids, before we even develop the ability to think and reason critically, our habits become strongly established and very hard to break, especially when those habits are pleasure-based and trigger the release of dopamine. Luckily, we aren’t strictly creatures of habit and possess the ability to change and to break old habits and embrace new ones.

A great place to start, I think, before getting into conversations about how damaging factory farming is to our planet and how counterproductive it can be to our health, is with this very important question:

Are we entitled to deny other animals the right to live?

If the answer is yes, why? And who has bestowed on us this power to decide which animals get to live and which are to die by the billions annually for our benefit?

If the answer is no, why do we as a society continue to use animals for our own good without any consideration for their lives?

We know that animals, like people, have an interest in remaining alive. We’ve seen that animals will go to the greatest lengths to fight for their lives. In February of 2021, for example, about 75 Holstein calves galloped down a highway in an almost single-file line after having ran off from a nearby Indiana farm, trying to escape their fate of suffering and eventual slaughter. In April of 2016, a bull was found wandering around the busy streets of New York City after having escaped from a slaughterhouse in Queens. In 2018, a video of a crayfish slicing off its own claw to avoid being boiled alive went viral. In 2019, a monkey held captive at a zoo in China sharpened a rock and used it to shatter the glass barrier of its enclosure. These are only a few examples of animals trying to escape their misery for a chance at freedom, but these aren’t unique stories.

These stories of animals who broke free from their confinement (or attempted to) show the natural, instinctual desire to escape harmful situations and pursue positive experiences instead.

Without a doubt, life without pain is better than life with pain.

Although we often like to think of ourselves as more intelligent beings than animals, all animals are instinctually hardwired to avoid pain, pursue pleasure, and above all else, survive. Humans and nonhuman animals are alike in that both have developed survival optimization strategies used to defend against threats. Often called a fight or flight mechanism, the Survival Optimization System (SOS) accounts for the strategies we use to weigh threat value, predict the actions of the threat, search for safety, and guide behavioral actions crucial to directed escape. If all animals (including humans) are designed by nature to protect themselves from harm and escape to safety, we can easily make the argument that all animals have an interest in living. From there, we can also argue that if animals have an interest in living, they have a right to live. Just as we do.

It may come as a shock to some, as it did to me, that non-human animals were once said to be non-sentient beings, which is to say, beings that are unthinking, unfeeling, and unconscious. Though it seems like a very difficult argument to make, considering we can see, hear, and sometimes feel within ourselves the pain, joy, and fear of other animals, 17th century western philosopher Rene Descartes popularized the idea that non-human animals were things. Descartes believed that he himself and those just like him were the only animals alive capable of thought and feeling, which we may agree is an exceptionally closed-minded and extremely shallow view of life. But it does speak to the kind of lies that we, too, tell ourselves about our own bad habits. It’s possible Descartes thought that if we convince ourselves that animals do not have rational thought and consciousness, we are not morally - and definitely not legally - expected to respect the lives of other beings and we can, as a result, use them to our advantage without any consideration for what their interests may be. Similarly, how often are we presented with the unsettling truth behind some our own actions - and how often do we change in place of finding ridiculous ways to rationalize through and absolve ourselves of the harm that we cause?

Maybe it’s not recycling when we know our environment is in danger as a direct result of our production and consumption patterns. Maybe it’s shopping at fast fashion stores when we are well aware of the horrors behind our cheap, trendy clothing. Maybe it’s having been to a dairy farm, having seen the lie behind the “happy, healthy cow” marketing tactic - and choosing to drink cow’s milk anyway, even when countless alternatives are available to us. Maybe it’s holding up a protest sign which reads in bold Sharpie, “We demand justice and peace,” while the skin of an animal warms our backs and the meat off of their bodies is for dinner an hour later.

There are very many things we claim to believe, things we claim to stand for, causes we go out and protest for (or maybe just post about to social media) but how many of these things do we find ourselves in conflict about? Like Descartes, we push off realities to justify - and to protect - the things we aren’t willing to give up, despite how wrong they are. So we are on one hand activists and, on the other, hypocrites. We fight for our own rights and for the rights of others in our communities who have been historically disadvantaged while ignoring entirely the interest of ALL other species who are not much unlike ourselves to simply live the lives they’ve been born into. As animals whose primary interest it is to survive, we still ignore that other animals just like us also have the same primal, instinctual drive to do so as well. The word we can attach to this hypocrisy is speciesism.

Coined by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation, speciesism is “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” Singer adds,

“Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case” (39).

The truth is often uncomfortable but we can only explain things away and reject (not so) new information that conflicts with our existing beliefs for so long until we might think to ourselves:

“Is this what they call ✨cognitive dissonance✨?”

Or we can choose the more popular option: to exist in our hypocrisy, firm in our beliefs on some topics, and uncaring, uninterested, and uncompromising on others. In any case, the question warrants some thought:

Does the right to life run parallel to only our own species? How can we argue that it does without embodying the kind of exploitation, injustice, and harm we often claim to reject?

While it’s better to commit to some causes than to none at all, I think we should work up to a place in which we can step back and observe our own inconsistencies. If we continue to support the exploitation of animals even when we are well informed of their suffering, no basis remains from which we can, without hypocrisy, criticize things like racism and sexism.

There is no need to rank injustices and decide which we need to be addressing first. We should fundamentally reject all forms of oppression. To do so would mean to equally consider the lives of all living beings, both human and non-human animals.

I do realize, however, that we’re all hypocrites sometimes, just varying in degree. Upon honest reflection, we can all admit that we haven’t always been perfectly consistent in what we say when compared to what we do. We see this all of the time, for example, with individuals who say they love animals but continue to buy into practices which lead to immense animal suffering: factory farming, animal entertainment, and animal experimentation just to name a few. It would more accurate, then, to say that people love pets because the way all other non-human animals are regarded is horrifying.

My goal is to move beyond my own inconsistencies, chronicle that journey, and encourage others to do the same, especially when it comes to the exploitation of animals. As a vegetarian of 6 years and an on/off vegan during that time, I myself admit to not always maintaining consistent values and actions. But I know that animal exploitation is not consistent with compassionate living, and if I am to be in alignment with my values and beliefs, I cannot, in any way, support suffering, whether that’s human suffering or animal suffering.

I invite you to question, then, whether life and the pursuit of positive experiences like love, joy, and belonging are exclusive to members of our own species. Can we reasonably say that we are the only species with the right to live freely while other animals are destined to a fate of suffering and eventual slaughter under human domination?