For most people, blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman beings, in order to harm humans more easily, is disturbing not because it raises questions about how we treat other animals, but because it threatens our superior status as humans.
KAREN DAVIS: Heinrich Himmler, who founded the quasi-military police unit known as the SS and administered the Nazi death camps, was initially a chicken farmer. According to Charles Patterson in his book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Himmler’s “agricultural studies and experience breeding chickens convinced him that since all behavioral characteristics are hereditary, the most effective way to shape the future of a population – human or non-human – was to institute breeding projects that favored the desirable and eliminated the undesirable”…
For most people, as I discuss in The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale, blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman beings, in order to harm humans more easily, is disturbing not because it raises questions about how we treat other animals, but because it threatens our superior status as humans. For many people, the idea that it is as morally wrong to harm animals intentionally as it is to harm humans intentionally borders on heresy.
Similarly, the idea that animals could suffer as terribly as humans in being forced to engage in degrading behavior offends many people. Hostility between and among human groups is historical, but just as bickering individuals and nations come together against a common human enemy, so most people unite in defense of human supremacy and uniqueness over all other forms of life. The boundary between “human” and “animal” cannot be breached…
Animals are substituted for humans in biomedical research, which is based on the assumption that animals can double for people as sources of information about the human condition. Inflicting human diseases on animals in search of a cure, however modern it may seem, is really a type of primitive purification ritual. Through the ages, people have sought consciously or unconsciously to rid themselves of their impurities (diseases, sins and vices) by symbolically transferring their impurities to sacrificial victims, known as scapegoats.
Often, these victims are represented as having both human and nonhuman attributes. In Christianity, Jesus is the sacrificial lamb who bears away the sins of the world… The ritual transference of one’s own transgressions and diseases to a sacrificial animal victim constitutes an interspecies rape of that victim. In both cases, the animal victim is treated as a receptacle for the victimizer’s defilement. In both cases, the animal victim is involuntarily made to appear as an aspect of the victimizer’s identity…
The boundary between animals as food and animals as sexual objects and religious appendages is thus blurred, even though the animals are not considered in their own right at all… Use of domesticated birds, goats, and sheep as literal and symbolic aspects of human religious experience reflects these animals’ primary status as consumables – beings whose value resides in their absorption into the human body and into the anthropomorphic imagination in which they are frequently cast as ennobled by their contribution.
As numerous commenters on the recent transplant of a pig’s heart into a man’s body have observed in support of this operation and its future applications, people who eat animals and drink their milk are already comfortable having animals’ bodies and fluids inside their own. Organs from other animals simply expand this comfort zone, adding even more “benefit” to humans. The superior status of humans is in no way diminished in being chimerically mingled with nonhuman animals. After all, we absorb them; they do not absorb us. SOURCE…
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