Please enjoy this article from the latest issue of our magazine, PETA Global. To begin your subscription, become a PETA member today!
I wonder what it would be like to have a watch that, instead of telling the time, told you how little time you have left. Like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, I believe there’s no time to waste if we want to get things done. So, let’s push the envelope before it’s time to push up daisies.
Slaves to Habit
I’m enlisting your support to help end human supremacism. If, as Thomas Henry Huxley said, we “[s]it down before fact as a little child,” we must recognize that speciesism is as offensive as any other discrimination and as unjustified as any other exploitation. It’s simply privilege manifested as domination and a bias rooted in denying others their self-worth.
PETA’s mission statement reads, “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way” – acknowledging that those who happen not to have been born human are individuals, too, with their own desires, needs, and complex lives. They have the right to live in freedom and don’t exist simply to serve humankind. They aren’t ours to do with as we please, even taking away their very lives just for a sandwich or a pair of shoes.
Most humans wouldn’t dream of treating their dogs the way factory farmers treat pigs, even though both species experience the same pain, joy, and fear. Many humans wear coats stuffed with feathers yanked out of the skin of a screaming goose, yet they’d never consider ripping out fistfuls of a parrot’s feathers.
And it’s speciesist to suggest that animals in laboratories don’t have the same capacity for suffering that we do, both psychologically and physically, or that they don’t tremble when the laboratory door opens – for they do. Why, then, are animal experimenters not charged with cruelty for violating their victims’ rights? Why do they still tear infant monkeys away from their loving mothers, implant electrodes in cats’ brains, and force poisons down the throats of mice?
There is no justification for raising chickens in crowded sheds reeking of ammonia, for punching and stomping
on sheep while stealing their wool, or for treating dolphins like surfboards by balancing on their faces as is done at SeaWorld.
Justice Begins With Just Us
To end speciesism, we must take a hard look at our personal choices and change all those that harm others. We can go vegan to combat climate change or to clean out our clogged arteries, or we can do so because it is simply wrong to exploit, hurt, and kill other sentient beings for food.
There is animal-free clothing everywhere, from high end to bargain basement. We can choose personal care and household products that aren’t tested on animals and donate only to health charities that don’t conduct animal experiments. And we can avoid circuses that treat animals as living props. Making kind choices isn’t hard at all, although even if it were, the extra effort would still be worth it.
Animals aren’t like us – they are us. They deserve equal consideration, regardless of anyone’s opinion of them.
If we just shrug off speciesism, we show ourselves to be not superior but small-minded, self-centered, and mean-spirited.
At 51, I’ve worked at PETA longer than I haven’t. I’ve seen a lot of progress, but we still have far to go. I’m challenging everyone to examine their own prejudice toward animals, of whom we are but one kind.
Please join the call to #EndSpeciesism, end animal slavery, and make future generations proud.
Written by Tracy Reiman, PETA Executive Vice President.
