Thoughts prompted by Salt of the Earth.
Some points frequently made about priorities are bit like saying “You should contribute to Muscular Dystrophy instead of to Cystic Fibrosis.”
But here are few more thoughts on the more serious side of the question, when it comes to human and nonhuman suffering:
1. Although they are not always enforced or obeyed, there are nevertheless formal laws to protect humans against enslavement, torture and murder. No such laws protect animal victims.
2. On the contrary, almost all the horrors that are outlawed (and relatively rare) with human victims are allowed and done, every minute, with countless animal victims.
3. And apart from (some) medical research and subsistence cultures where meat eating is still a vital necessity, what is being done to animals, with impunity, everywhere, is definitely unnecessary for human health or survival.
4. Could it not be that as long as we do not outlaw our needless, monstrous cruelty to helpless animal victims we will not lose the inclination to keep doing it to human victims too?
In other words, I think the (quite natural) intuition that “humans are more important” is a non sequitur here: The wrongs we do to humans are illegal; the wrongs we do to animals are not. To help humans is to enforce and comply with the laws that already protect them: animals are not only suffering in incomparably greater numbers and intensity, but they are not even protected by laws.
And whereas most of us don’t know — apart from contributing to charity — how we can help the victims of Boko Haram or ISIS, most us are still collaborating, every single day, in animals’ suffering, even though we don’t need to, and could stop at any moment.
Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur