The Disconnection Between Humans, Animals, and Reality

Once in a while I come across a feminist that is clearly either misguided or ignorant when it comes to animals. Intelligent, articulate, wonderfully brilliant and visionary women—but they simply do not understand when it comes to animals, and animals and how these animals' rights relate to their own rights as beings. Though it is in my nature that, once one great feat has been accomplished—the cognisance of the worthiness of women for, and personal self-actualisation—I expect more cognisance of the worthiness of other oppressions to be battled, I must break away from this and recognise that this is not a failure of these women alone, accomplished though they might be; it is a failure—and indeed, tenet—of our entire society.

We do not accept animals as our equals; not even as our sisters. I have heard feminists claim that "we are not animals.." because of a social norm of ours that is not seen in their society; I have heard them say that, no matter what, humans' problems are more important—fundamentally because they think that because we and our sisters live in different bodies, we are different at our core.

Now, to anyone that has studied biology, it's obvious that humans are animals, but even scientists will not allow any familiarisation more than that. You see it in every article about animal intelligence where we are forced to ratchet up our ideas of just how intelligent animals are; it is if there is a compulsion within these people to insert the words "rudimentary", "basic", "lower", and many other words that designate what is happening as lesser, as though these animals would find out and lose perspective of what is their "place" in life—or we would.

This I see as a basic disconnect in our everyday lives; we wake, eat, breathe, sleep thinking that we are the greatest of all beings, the crowning glory of Earth, the peak of evolution. And yet we are destroying our own planet, something no other creature does; we are enslaving and subjugating beings that, given enough time and friendly exposure, would be our friends—and who are our distant cousins.

I am forced to wonder—not unkindly—if these feminists see the status of women on Earth and, instead of making everyone equal, reach out to become better than someone else so that at least they have some status in the world.

But this does not work! One cannot exchange the oppression of one for another. To paraphrase, "while one is oppressed, none are free". And this is infinitely, intimately true for women, men, animals, people of all hair colours, skin colours, fur colours, eye colours, ability, and everything else that differentiates us from one another. If a woman is oppressed, the man or woman—even if that woman has a higher status—that loves her will be oppressed. We are oppressed when those that we love are oppressed, when they are treated as property; but for the human-animal enslavement, it goes deeper than that.

We put their flesh and stolen milk and eggs in our mouths, we ingest them; and by doing so we harm our bodies—not irrevocably, but we do so always, always ignorant of what goes on when we do this to ourselves; if we knew just how devastating it was, no man or woman would touch another's flesh or milk or egg, and they would not do so to their children.

Heart disease; osteoporosis; type 1 diabetes, to our children; type 2 diabetes, to all those we love; arthritis; gout; multiple sclerosis; lupus; breast cancer, prostate cancer, bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, and many more. It is truly amazing to me that we risk the lives of ourselves—needed by our loved ones—and the lives of our loved ones for nothing more than a particular taste.

Humans are—indisputably, when looking at the evidence—biological herbivores. It hurts not only billions of animals each year for us to consume the flesh, milk, and menstruation of others; it hurts us—and belies our words when we say that we need to stay alive for those we love.

Why do we assume that the flesh, milk, and menstruation of others cannot hurt us? I believe that at the root of this belief is the dichotomy of Dangerous/Inferior that we place animals in. If an animal can be conquered, subjugated, and enslaved, ze is inferior to us. If that animal cannot, ze is dangerous to us.

Clearly this is a human-centric point of view; but more than that, it is also a male-centric point of view, for it has been the same attitude towards women ever since we began agriculture and developed a hierarchy.

If a woman can be dominated, she is inferior; if she cannot, she is dangerous. And what happens to those that are percieved of as dangerous? They are either killed or, in these "gentler" times, ostracised. More sinisterly and rarely, their wills are broken, through beatings, emotional abuse, starvation, or rape; animals' wills, because they are too valuable a "resource", are broken through beatings, isolation, starvation, and the crippling pain of having their children stolen from them before their time.

Truly I do not call them our sisters because it is a useful rhetorical tool; they are our sisters not only in spirit, but in suffering as well. We may be taught that our suffering is not the same, but learning is not always correct; wisdom, however, is.