English philosopher Jeremy Bentham writes, "The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny" (757). As a culture, we are obsessed with rights. This country was founded on John Locke's idea of natural rights that all humans have. Can we assume then, that all living creatures have rights as well? More specifically, do animals have rights? If they do, then there can be no doubt that we are a world bent on animal oppression, but if animal's don't have rights, then I guess we can wash our hands and continue to trek on in the name of science and pleasure.
Let's take a quick look at slavery. What was it? Oppression of one human by another in order extract some form of work, pleasure, or entertainment. Why did it exist? People believed that they had the right to force their will upon other people they thought to be inferior to them. That being said, is our treatment of animals comparable to slavery? I want to say yes, but I have a serious problem with comparing animals to humans, because...quite frankly, animals aren't humans. Does this justify the mistreatment of animals? Of course not, but I can see no way in which a cow or a horse is like a human in a real, natural way.
I believe that as a human race, we are, for the most part, disgusted with cruelty to animals when we are the ones being oppressive. We react to it in weird ways. Alice Walker writes, "And we are used to drinking milk from containers showing "contented" cows, whose real lives we want to hear nothing about, eating eggs and drumsticks from "happy" hens, and munching hamburgers advertised by bulls of integrity who seem to command their fate" (761) We lie to ourselves constantly about things like where the food we eat comes from. I think books like The Giving Tree have completely skewed our idea of survival. Thomas Hobbes, philosopher, writes that in a state of nature, life is nasty, brutish, and short. Life is not a pretty thing, but we like to put bright stickers and catchy slogans on our food to trick ourselves into thinking it was freely given. This is something that makes sense to me, but it is so strange to me at the same time. Eating is natural. We do it, animals do it. Everything does it. Why do we like to candy coat it so much?
What I'm getting at is this: we are disgusted when we see humans hurting and oppressing animals, but we could care less when we see animals eat each other. Well, obviously we have our biases, but I think it is safe to say that we all admire some animals ability to hunt. The other day I was watching Life (the new Planet Earth style documentary on Discovery). They had a segment on cheetahs, showing a pack of three cheetahs hunt and take down an ostrich. I wasn't offended in the least. If they had shown three humans taking down an ostrich, I would have probably stared at the TV in disgust for a few minutes, then felt bad about the human race for the next week or so.
Assuming that we are, in fact, guilty of maliciously oppressing animals, Alice Walker says that our sense of guilt and regret is only a first response. "What we do with our heightened consciousness is the question" (764). I feel like this is a safe thing to say to anyone, regardless of whether or not they believe that animals have rights equal to humans. It was clear, or at least it is now, that slavery was a twisted institution. Are animals so essential to our survival as a human race that we MUST oppress them in the cruelest ways possible? If the slave owners of colonial America had understood what we understand about human rights now, would it have been right to abolish slavery then? This is me rambling because I wrote a 13 page paper last night... I have completely forgotten what I was trying to say. I'll get back to this later...
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