All Forms of Life Are Sacred

When asked how he thought this happened, he answered: "Where we have gone wrong is our belief that because animals are cognitively different from us they have lesser moral value. They are not as cognitively sophisticated as we are -- they don't write symphonies or do calculus -- so we can eat, wear and use them, as long as we do so 'humanely.' Most animal rights activists argue that 'using them is not the problem, the problem is how we treat them.' My view is that using them is the problem. It does not matter how well we treat them. Obviously, it is worse to impose more suffering than less suffering, but that does not mean it is all right to use them in a 'humane' way. If someone sneaks into your room while you are sleeping and blows your brains out and you do not feel a thing, you are still harmed. You may not have suffered. But you have been harmed."

"The idea that ... animals [are] of lesser moral value is dangerous," he added. "It creates hierarchies that can also be used within human communities. Once you are sentient, or are subjectively aware, you have one moral right -- the right not to be used as a resource. It does not mean you get treated equally for all purposes, but it does mean you are not treated as a slave or as a commodity. A slave is excluded from the moral community. A slave has no inherent value. A slave has only external value. A slave is a thing. This is what we have done to animals. Animals are property. Animal welfare laws cannot work because they are based on balancing the interests of humans and nonhumans. As long as animals are chattel property the animal owners win. As long as animals are chattel property the standard of animal welfare will always be tied to what we need to exploit them because we will generally protect animal interests only to the extent that we get an economic benefit from doing so. Animal welfare reform, for this reason, has usually worked to make animal exploitation more economically efficient.

"The reason why you have the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, which requires that large animals be stunned before they are shackled and hoisted, is because if you have a 2,000-pound animal hanging upside down the cow hits workers. Workers are injured. You have carcass damage. If you look at the arguments put forward for chicken producers to switch to controlled atmosphere killing, essentially gassing, from the electrical stunning method, still widely used, those arguments -- made by groups such as PETA and HSUS -- are based on economic efficiency. Animal advocates are [in effect] arguing that if you gas the chickens it cuts down on carcass damage. This does not move animals out of the property paradigm. It further enmeshes them in it. It is only about efficient exploitation."

"All of the large animal charities, such as PETA and HSUS, are businesses," he said. "They want to maximize their donor base so they try and let everyone stay in their comfort zone. They don't take the position that veganism is the only rationally and morally acceptable response to the recognition that animals have moral significance. They promote reform and not abolition. Unfortunately, we live in a postmodern, poststructuralist society. No one is supposed to be a moral realist. And yet we all have certain intuitions that we accept as true. We know, for example, that suffering is bad. Nobody says suffering is good, except for perhaps a masochist, but even then the masochist only embraces suffering when he or she gets pleasure from it. You can derive an enormous amount of what you need morally in the world from the simple idea that suffering is morally bad. You can't justify doing to someone else what you would not want done to you. This is a moral truth. We all say it's wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering. We all agree that necessity cannot mean just pleasure. But the only justification we have for eating any animal foods is palate pleasure. We don't need animal foods for optimal health, and animal agriculture is an ecological disaster. We criticize people like Michael Vick for inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals, but we're all Michael Vick. Our exploitation of animals is no more necessary.

"I worry that we have raised a generation that has not been taught to think morally," Francione said. "Yes, my generation often thought about morality superficially. I do not want to romanticize the past. But events such as the Vietnam War forced us to ask what were we doing as a nation. We feared getting drafted, of course, but the war helped us see. It forced us to think about moral issues. But morality today has been reduced to a matter of mere opinion. This is dangerously wrong. The morality of unjustified and unjustifiable exploitation is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of moral fact.

"There is an intimate relationship between human rights and animal rights," said Francione, who teaches a course on human rights and animal rights with Charlton at Rutgers University. "You cannot think about this in isolation. Sexism, racism and classism are about turning others into objects. How can we talk intelligently about nonviolence when we are putting the products of violence into our mouths? We are wearing the products of violence. This is about justice. It is about justice for nonhumans, for women, for Palestinians, for African-Americans and for prisoners. Pornography represents the commodification of women. When you use pornography there is no longer a person there. There is a body part that you fetishize. The person has become a thing. You are consuming that thing. This is not all that different from going to the store and buying chicken in a Styrofoam package. The chicken is not [seen as] an animal. It is a product in Styrofoam covered with cellophane. All commodification is connected, and it's all wrong."

Isaac Bashevis Singer in his short story "The Letter Writer" said that human beings were Nazis to animals and had created "an eternal Treblinka" for the animal world. He, as well as writers such as Marguerite Yourcenar and J.M. Coetzee, saw in animal slaughterhouses the preliminary models for torture centers, extermination camps, genocide and war. Kazuo Ishiguro explored the idea of sentient beings raised "humanely" as commodities in his dystopian novel "Never Let Me Go," in which cloned children, "donors," are nurtured in special boarding schools resembling the finest private schools, but die in young adulthood when their organs are harvested for "normals" -- uncloned humans.

"I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well -- and wars will be waged -- for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale," Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz wrote in his "Dachau Diaries" while he was held in that Nazi concentration camp.

"Even though the number of people who commit suicide is quite small, there are few people who have never thought about suicide at one time or another," Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote. "The same is true about vegetarianism. We find very few people who have never thought that killing animals is actually murder, founded on the premise that might is right. ... I will call it the eternal question: What gives man the right to kill an animal, often torture it, so that he can fill his belly with its flesh. We know now, as we have always known instinctively, that animals can suffer as much as human beings. Their emotions and their sensitivity are often stronger than those of a human being. Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal -- be it a dog, a bird or even a mouse -- knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty. ... [A]s long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers la Hitler and concentration camps la Stalin ... all such deeds are done in the name of 'social justice'. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."