Animals aren't people

[Animal 0]

Appreciate animals for their animal attributes


http://www.producer.com/Opinion/Article.aspx?aid=29311
By BARB GLEN, EDITOR
11/11/2010 12:00:00 AM

Zenyatta is the talk and the toast of horse racing circles. The six-year-old
mare was undefeated until last Saturday, when she ran her last race before
retirement and finished a close second. Her career tally is 19-1.

Breeders, owners and other keen judges of horseflesh laud Zenyatta's
conformation, height and stamina as reasons for her success in a field typically
dominated by stallions.

But the horse's immense popularity with the public revolves around Zenyatta's
supposed "human" characteristics. Her way of posing for cameras. Her placement
on Oprah Winfrey's most powerful women list. Her taste for Guinness beer after a
workout.

It seems that public liking for animals is proportionate to the number of human
characteristics imagined and assigned to them.

This very thing is a reason behind the success of animal rights activists in
staking out the moral high ground to fight animal agriculture. The more we
pretend that animals are like people, the more morally repugnant it becomes to
use them for food.

To put it simply, animals are not people. It's arrogant to assume that the more
human-like the animal, the more worthy it becomes.

We can celebrate the excellence of Zenyatta, in all her equine glory, without
the anthropomorphism.

Similarly, cattle producers celebrate bovine excellence in calf production, feed
conversion, body type and beef yield.

Mike Smith, who writes for the website truthinfood. com, encourages livestock
producers to defend themselves on the same moral ground as their opponents.

"Every food chain decision is now going to be viewed through a moral prism. That
requires a moral defence," Smith writes.

"Until everyone in agriculture can articulate what is ethically right in the
tools you select to feed the world, you risk falling back on defences that rely
only upon pointing out what's wrong with the other guy. Ultimately, it will
diminish us all.

"Farmers must reclaim their authority based not on science and economics, but on
their ethics and morality."