A Tradition of Neglect
In 2014, a British woman named Laura Cunliffe reportedly threw her kitten Mowgli in a microwave oven for a minute, cooking the cat’s organs from the inside. The lady was punishing the cat for eating her goldfish. After the cat was taken out of the microwave, the poor creature lived for another 90 minutes yowling in pain until it died. The woman was jailed for 14 weeks.
In 2008, two Australian men kidnapped a puppy named Peanut in the night from his owner and proceeded to torture the animal to death at a nearby park. The two men recorded the incident while they cut the puppies’ limbs, nose, and eventually it’s head off. The men laughed throughout the recording. The two men claimed that it was an act of revenge against the dog’s owner.
Even though these animal abuse cases are of an extreme nature, animal abuse happens every single day around the world. Animals are tested on, slaughtered for their meat, fur, or other organs, and forced to fight or race for people’s amusement. People forcefully inbreed animals to create the “perfect pets”, cage them for our observation, and much more.
To say that humans think that they can do whatever they please with these creatures and the Earth around them is an understatement. One of the main ways humans take advantage of their less intelligent counterparts is through breeding animals to eat. People eat animals because we have always eaten them. It has often been thought that humans can’t survive without the protein that meat supplies the body but scientists have proven that there are many ways humans can obtain protein.
What gives us the right to do these things? Peter Singer, an Australian moral philosopher, once said, “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?” With that being said, there is no question that humans believe they are entitled to the Earth and all the creatures that inhabit it.
Dylan Root, a senior at Morningside College, is a vegetarian and an animal lover as he puts it. A vegetarian is a person that doesn’t eat meat and sometimes other animal products especially for moral, religious, or health reasons. Dylan decided to become a vegetarian two years ago because his sister was a vegetarian. He says that it doesn’t feel right eating other sentient beings, or beings with consciousness.
“I feel like animals are just as valuable as human beings maybe even more valuable. If you think about it, when human beings do violent, hurtful things it’s usually thought out but when animals do these things it’s based off of instinct”, says Dylan. When asked if human beings feel entitled over the earth, Dylan agreed wholeheartedly. He states that we might even be a little too intelligent if we can kill animals without any remorse or thought.
Dylan thinks that people feel like meat is needed for a healthy diet but he says that he gets by just fine with a mostly plant based diet with some seafood and protein. He says that he feels so much more healthier now and rarely gets bloated or sick.
“It’s hard to fall out of tradition and it’s easy to turn your eyes and not look at what really is going on in front of us. It’s hard to see the truth because it’s hard to take in,” says Yvette Jurado. Yvette has been a vegan for about a year and a half. A vegan is someone who does not eat or use animal products. A personal choice she made after she was introduced to the cattle industry. She claims that the industry is inhumane; she believes killing animals should be looked at for what it is, murder.
Yvette thinks that humans have other options than eating animals; she feels that the land that we use up to mass breed animals for slaughter could be used as farming ground instead. She realizes that eating animals is very normalized now but she says that, “we should go beyond ourselves and do what’s best for the Earth and the animals around us”.
Yvette thinks that animals are treated very poorly around the world. “They have no voice so there’s no way for them to fight back. Why is our life greater than their lives?” she says. When asked if she thinks that things will ever change she believes it will but very slowly. “When people see animals being treated poorly, we don’t want to see it; one by one we can change the world” says Yvette.