DOMINION: Humans kill kill kill, while blindly killing themselves
An animal’s death is fast and visible — a kill floor, a truck, a plate, over in a day. A customer’s death is slow and invisible — engineered cravings compounding quietly for twenty years until it finally announces itself as a heart attack, an amputation, a diagnosis he cannot afford to treat. It is the same blindness twice over. The customer who will not picture the animal’s fear on the way to the counter is the same customer who will not picture what that meal is doing to his own arteries on the way home. Me, me, me. Some of that is ignorance, cultivated on purpose. Some of it is plain indifference. Ignorance and indifference spend exactly the same at the register.
JOHN STONE: “Let them have dominion.” (Genesis 1:26). It claimed the whole of creation as property before property even existed. No other species ever wrote that sentence. No other species needed to. Wolves and big cats kill. That is not in dispute. But look closely at what they kill for, and the difference from man is total.
A wolf pack takes what feeds it and protects its young — nothing more. It does not kill for entertainment. It does not leave the body to rot for effect. It does not organize a war party against another species out of ideology, land hunger, or profit. Predation in nature is transactional, limited, and finished the moment the need is met.
Rhinos want to be left alone and are threatened by nothing except man. Elephants grieve their dead, remember individuals across decades, and are — for an animal capable of killing anything on the savanna with ease — fundamentally gentle. Squirrels, rabbits, beavers, and birds without number live entire lives incapable of the kind of harm humans commit before breakfast.
Humans are the only species on Earth that kills in surplus — beyond hunger, beyond safety, beyond any need at all — and the only species that has ever organized an industry, a bureaucracy, and a doctrine to do it at scale…
777 animal species have gone extinct since 1500, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. That is the confirmed number — and it is almost certainly a fraction of the truth, since the IUCN has only formally assessed about five percent of the world’s known species. A 2022 analysis in Biological Reviews, extrapolating from estimated invertebrate losses and explicitly describing the extrapolation as bold and dependent on its underlying assumptions, calculated that perhaps 150,000 to 260,000 known species may have disappeared since about 1500…
Evidence of humans and their ancestors consuming animal foods reaches back millions of years, while preserved hunting weapons appear much later in the archaeological record. How much animal food came from hunting, scavenging, or other means at different periods remains an active scientific question.
Modern great apes demonstrate something narrower. Gorillas eat overwhelmingly plant-based diets. Chimpanzees also obtain most of their food from plants, although they sometimes hunt and eat other animals. They do not prove that ancestral humans never needed meat, and this audit should not claim that they do…
Whatever helped a prehistoric human survive bears little resemblance to a modern industrial system that breeds, confines, transports, and slaughters billions of animals while consuming enormous amounts of agricultural land to sustain them. Evolution may help explain why humans came to eat animals. It does not establish that the industrial system humans subsequently constructed is biologically necessary…
An animal’s death is fast and visible — a kill floor, a truck, a plate, over in a day. But for poultry and pigs, the death isn’t the worst part. Broiler chickens are slaughtered at around 47 days old, against a natural lifespan of seven years or more. Sows are locked in gestation crates so narrow they cannot turn around, for months at a stretch, cycle after cycle, for years. A customer’s death is slow and invisible — engineered cravings compounding quietly for twenty years until it finally announces itself as a heart attack, an amputation, a diagnosis he cannot afford to treat.
It is the same blindness twice over. The customer who will not picture the animal’s fear on the way to the counter is the same customer who will not picture what that meal is doing to his own arteries on the way home. Me, me, me. Some of that is ignorance, cultivated on purpose. Some of it is plain indifference. Ignorance and indifference spend exactly the same at the register. SOURCE
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