A Less Heated Look at Animal Rights

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Vegans, vegetarians, and proponents of the animal rights movement disagree with me on basic fundamental aspects of human being's relationships with animals. To me, a human being is the ultimate apex predator, a tropic level we rose to that enables us to do whatever we want to with animals. They have no say in what we do to them, positive or negative. A vegetarian who objects to eating animals based on moral reasons has, I believe, a skewed view of ethics and morality.

The animal kingdom (of which we humans belong to) is built upon the foundation of a complex web of inter species relationships. Some species are prey, some species are predators. That is the way it has been since the onset of life on this planet. Is is therefore unnecessary and useless to apply moral issues to the fact that we eat animals. Any animal exhibits pain and the will to live, but how much of that is a conscious feeling or simply instinctive reactions to specific situations? We will never know, and it will never actually matter in the web of life.

Morality only applies to interactions between human beings. Even before humans entered this world, the lion has always mercilessly stalked the zebra, the newly hatched chick of a sea bird has always pushed out its weaker siblings from its nest as their mother watched, the wasp has always layed its eggs in a spider as its offspring eat it alive. Nature has no room for morality when it comes to animals eating each other, and it never will.

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I'm not saying that people can have personal relationships with animals. Or that humans need inflict unnecessary pain on any animal. Ted Hughes beautiful description of a captive jaguar, whose worn down body is adorned by his head, which "is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar. (Course Anthology 376)," sent shills down my spine. In fact, I've had many personal relationships with animals myself. But it in the same way that I have never once felt compassion for the terrorist our army mercilessly destroys, I will have no empathy for the cow who had to be slaughtered for the meat I eat for enjoyment and nourishment. The relationships I have with animals are different than the relationships I have with people. I care about Dimitri because I care for him, I am responsible for his well doing, and I think he's cute. But I would never for once consider him as being the same level as my family or deserving of the same treatment. If he was a random tortoise with no relationship to me, I would do nothing from preventing a fox from cracking his shell and eating him. That's how nature works, and I will do nothing to change it, and I value animals from a purely "elementary, unreflective level (Coetzee 110)."