“Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.” — Thrasymachus in Plato’s, The Republic.
Photo was taken at the Toronto Pig Save vigil recently where activists pay respect to the pigs in transport trucks on their way to the slaughterhouse.
Non human animals are born into and trapped inside of a human-dominated world by no choice or fault of their own. For our own species we say we believe in justice for all. For all others, we operate under the principle of “might makes right.”
Might makes right, or, as some like to call it, survival of the fittest, explains why anything goes today: treating other species like things, killing them off when they become invasive or get in our way, destroying their habitat so we can play golf and shop at strip malls, artificially breeding still others so we can use them for target practice, poisoning their water and air and soil, taking away their babies and breaking up their families so they can entertain us in a zoo, breeding billions of others artificially only to destroy their lives in their youth in a slaughterhouse to satisfy our tastebuds, emptying our oceans of trillions of sentient life forms so we can buy a can of “dolphin-safe” tuna, and then subjecting millions of others to torture in laboratories intended to help us find cures for the diseases caused by eating them.
We create our own conflicts with animals. We create a staged competition with other species to use as a pretext to destroy them for our own “protection,” profit, and pleasure.
When faced with the truth of the suffering that is entirely caused by us and preventable only by us, many people choose to ignore it or invent excuses for continuing to pay people to enslave and kill animals for the products they claim they must consume. But like any atrocity, there comes a time when the injustice can no longer remain hidden away and will no longer be tolerated. In Nazi Germany, the German population eventually transcended their collective, deep denial over the Holocaust.
Eventually, the animal liberation movement will reach a tipping point, and eventually our current carnist culture will condemn the ongoing atrocity against animals as Leonardo da Vinci predicted centuries ago. In his words, “The time will come when men such as I condemn the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”
