redwoodalchan

H-have I mentioned how much I hate it when people act like humans are the Devil and anything not human is good?

Because there's a couple things that are very, very wrong about this kind of thinking.

First of all, arguing that all other animals are morally superior to humans is an outright lie. As an ecological biologist (sort of) I happen to know for a fact that there is no shortage of things non-human animals do which humans, as a general rule, do not because they consider them unacceptable and morally repugnant. As a general rule, human men do not gang-rape women ten or twenty at a time in order to conceive a child with them (as do dragonflies or damselflies) nor do they kill any children that are not their own (as do big cats and Hanuman Langur monkeys). Furthermore, human parents do not generally neglect all their children except the ones most likely to survive (as do members of the coot family) and human children do not murder their younger or weaker siblings so they can have their parents all to themselves (as do egrets, the Masked Booby and its relatives...). And then there are those disturbing things humans do...that non-human animals also do on a regular basis. Point being, non-human animals are NOT superior to humans--they just don't have the technology and in many cases the brains to cause the widespread damage humans have.

That's the obvious problem with the "animals are so superior" schtick. And that problem is merely absurd. But there are other problems with it too, which are far more repugnant.

For one thing, humans are hardly a homogeneous group. Sure some humans degrade the environment, abuse animals in factory farms, etc., but there are other groups of humans that respect nature and animals, always have, and (on some levels) always will. If humans are the Devil and anything not-human is good, then it follows that it's okay to (say) drive Native Americans off their ancestral homes for the good of a few populations of animals they may hunt, just because they're human. And I don't think I need to elaborate on why THAT is a world of not-okay.

But the other problem with it is that by saying "animals are superior to humans," you're implying that humans are not animals. You can cache it in terms of "Oh, but really, I think animals are SUPERIOR" all you want, but at the end of the day you're still perpetuating the divide between humans and other animals that's used to justify animal abuse in the first place. And that's not okay either.

So, yeah. It's been my deep-seated suspicion for awhile that most people who try the "animals are so superior to humans!" tack or the "humans are the Devil and everything not human is good!" tack are a bunch of rich or middle-class people who have no experience (or next to no experience) with any animals other than domestic ones, and who may at very most live or have lived on a farm. Because if you really think about animals and our connections to them, these sorts of ideas fall apart as unhelpful at best and ludicrous or even dangerous at worst.