US AND THEM: Why be surprised when we treat humans like animals?
Many animal rights groups have long pressed companies and agencies to adopt alternatives to animal testing. The agencies say they’re phasing out primate experiments, reducing animal experiments, maybe both. Still, today, monkeys are fastened into restraint chairs. It should be noted that the movement to stop this practice has been active since the nineteenth century, which demonstrates the limits of crafting law and policy. Unless human beings experience a deep-down moral shift — one that understands all living, feeling beings as worthy of respect — this dastardly practice will go on until the last monkey is caught and there are none left but the ones born in cages
COUNTER PUNCH: We, humans, treat animals like animals, so why should we be surprised when we treat humans like animals? If only we could bring ourselves to like animals. Now is a good time to mention that we are animals. Scientifically speaking, we and the other great apes are all in one big family, within the greater primate community.
Who tortures their relatives? We do, alas. Other animals (nonhuman primates and human primates among them) are constantly at the receiving end of the torments invented by Homo sapiens. Do you know what goes on in the business parks, in the buildings owned by the pharmaceutical and chemical companies and their suppliers?
I’ve held onto a restraint collar given to me years ago by a primate sanctuary operator. Formed out of metal and thick, impact-resistant plastic, it was placed around the neck of a macaque monkey, who wore it all the time in the laboratory.
What do we mean, when we cry out “No Kings!”? Who are we to talk? We, the Homo sapiens, king of the living world. Others must be sacrificed again and again for us, every minute of every day as the Earth turns. What royal pains we are.
Cruelty Free International, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Rise for Animals, the National Anti-Vivisection Society, the American Anti-Vivisection Society, the International Primate Protection League, Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!, and other groups have long pressed companies and agencies to adopt alternatives to animal testing.
The agencies say they’re phasing out primate experiments, reducing animal experiments, maybe both. Still, today, monkeys are fastened into restraint chairs. For many private companies, entire profit models depend on poisoning and pulling apart nonhuman animals. It should be noted that the movement to stop this practice has been active since the nineteenth century, when women’s rights advocate Frances Power Cobbe founded the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.
That demonstrates the limits of crafting law and policy. Unless human beings experience a deep-down moral shift—one that understands all living, feeling beings as worthy of respect — this dastardly practice will go on until the last monkey is caught and there are none left but the ones born in cages…
Man has appointed himself lord and master over everything that breathed, said Donald Watson, a founding member of The Vegan Society, at a 1947 conference. “[A]nd he had filled the world with millions of creatures for no other purpose than to exploit them for personal gain and kill them when it no longer served his purpose to keep them alive”…
Where did the urge to dominate the other en masse ultimately take humanity?… Our drive to conquer it is ecologically bizarre and culturally disruptive; and it makes a mockery of the golden rule or any storied ethical principle you want to pick. The proof is in our pudding. LEE HALL
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