If You Oppress Animals, Why Should Anyone Care if Someone is Oppressing You?

African Americans with a history of slavery become insulted when exploited and abused animals are compared to slaves. Jews whose family experienced the Holocaust are outraged when factory farms are compared to death camps.

 

Women, who point to a long history of sexist oppression, resent it when the forced artificial insemination of cows is referred to as rape. In her essay, “Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots,” Joan Dunayer notes, “when a woman responds to mistreatment by protesting ‘I’m a human being!’ or ‘I want to be treated with respect, not like some animal,’ what is she suggesting about the acceptable ways of treating other animals?” She is suggesting that what would be intolerable treatment of a human being is acceptable treatment for beings deemed inferior. She is also demonstrating a total lack of empathy.

 

When human beings lament their own history of suffering and then distance themselves from or participate in the abuse and exploitation of nonhuman animals, we see the worst face of speciesism.

And every time the victims become the bullies, they disgrace themselves and diminish their credibility.

–Marcia Mueller

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are none so oppressed as animals. Jews, blacks, women, disabled, LGBTs, etc, have nothing on the oppression that animals endure. I would argue that any group wishing to bitch about their own plight should first demonstrate that they are vegan. To deserve sympathy for their own oppression they should be free of oppressing others, including animals.

Members of an oppressed group who oppress animals are morally as bankrupt as are their oppressors. 

The Nazi Holocaust was horrific, its cruelty unfathomable. Six million Jews were exterminated over several years. It’s scope continues to daunt us.

But the Animal Holocaust takes as many lives as did Hitler EVERY HOUR OF EVERY DAY.

African Americans were enslaved in the US for almost 400 years. Even with emancipation and civil rights, blacks are shot down in the streets and incarcerated out of proportion to their population. Over those almost 400 years, millions of blacks were enslaved. To put that into modern perspective, about the same number of animals are born into slavery EVERY SIXTY MINUTES.

Women were legally the property of their husbands under the Common Law. One hundred and fifty years after the founding of our republic, women were finally granted the right to vote. Women are still exploited by the system, earning less per hour than men, and having to fight for reproductive rights against a patriarchal society which attempts to control them. But for all the outrage about workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, and being forced to carry unwanted infants to term, most women are complicit in the rape, infanticide, and enslavement of the females of other species.

The LGBT worker who loses his job because bigots are free to fire those they do not like, thinks nothing of the animal that lost its life so he could eat dinner or wear leather.

There is a hierarchy of oppression in which the oppressed in turn oppress others.

And at the bottom of that hierarchy are the animals that are oppressed by almost everyone.