Most of us were taught to treat others as we would want to be treated. Ethics really is that simple. If, as a feeling being, you would not want to be made to suffer unnecessarily, then don’t cause other feeling beings to suffer unnecessarily. I don’t know of anyone (aside from sadists) who would argue that it is okay to cause unnecessary suffering. Yet many otherwise moral people argue that it is okay to kill other animals for food even though eating meat isn’t necessary for human health.

I’m always amazed at the lack of reasoning ability apparent in the human species and yet this prevailing myth that human beings are rational. In my experience, the majority of the human species is incapable of rational thought. They are very good at “rationalizing” which often involves logical fallacies, unreasonable worldviews and invented fictions. But rational thought seems elusive to most human beings.

I read through some of the anti-amimal comments at “Should Animals Have The Same Rights As People?” and these people are absolutely stupid. One “expert” claims animals are basically instictual machines. Has he ever met an animal? It is obvious to anyone who has ever met a dog that these animals can think and feel and make decisions. And dogs aren’t the only animals who can act beyond mere instict.

It’s odd how animals always get lumped together in these debates as if chimpazees, dogs, rabbits, worms and fruit flies all have the same mental capabilities. Odder still that one would argue that mental capabilities has any role in whether or not sentient beings should be treated kindly. Do they forget that humans are also animals and that there is very little difference between us an other animals when it comes to being able to feel pain and to suffer?

I’ve heard so called rational humans get incredibly offended when people compare cruelty to human animals with cruelty to other animals. People get livid when one dares compare the Holocaust to the slaughter of animals, yet even Holocaust survivors will tell you that they were treated “like animals.” Even the word holocaust originally referred to the slaughter of animals and was used to describe the Nazi’s slaughter of Jews because of the obvious similarities between the way farmed animals are treated and the way that Jews were treated. But don’t dare make the Holocaust comparison in reverse.

I read an article recently in which the author was angry that PETA compared the killing of a human being to the slaughter of animals. PETA decried both acts as immoral. The author angrily declared that you can’t compare people to animals. In the same article the author defended eating meat by saying that humans are animals and that other animals eat meat so it was okay if people do too. Obviously, the human animal comparisons can only go one way in these small minds. Obviously, the author neglected to mention that human beings share much more in common with other primates (who are predominatly vegetarian) than they do with lions and tigers and bears.

Yes, I don’t think that reason is a human characteristic. Obviously, there are some differences between humans and other animals, but reason is not one of them. I think perhaps our ability for abstract thought is one such difference. Humans are capable of understanding that the word “tree” (both phonetically and written out) can be used to represent an actual tree. Of course, some animals can be taught this too.

But humans can also think abstractly about a wide range of concepts including gods, the distant future, the distant past etc. This is an incredible ability and it has allowed us to develop a complex and rich language and pass incredible ideas down through the generations via spoken and written word. It has allowed us to develope art and music and poetry. But, this ability to think abstractly does not equate to an ability to think rationally.

We are an incredible species, but we are not a rational species. It’s too bad. Until people become proficiently rational there will continue to be these absurd questions about if animals should have the same rights as humans and there will continue to be absurd (ir)rationalizations to justify elevating humans to the status of God and denegrading all other animals to the status of dirt.