Unseen Prejudice E-Book

Rebecca Hall

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

History is filled with examples of people denying certain groups of people respect for their intelligence and emotional capacity so they can justify oppressing and exploiting them. We use the same reasons to justify our exploitation of animals today as we did to oppress and exploit groups of people in the past. Now we know what we did in the past was wrong, how do we know we’re not making another mistake?

Leseprobe

Rebecca Hall

Unseen Prejudice

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER

THE UNSEEN PREJUDICE

Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Hall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

INTRODUCTION

Prejudice has affected many groups of people throughout history. A lack of intelligence, emotional capacity and even demonisation have been used to justify exploiting or oppressing these groups. Although there are some differences, these same justifications are used to exploit animals today.

Comparing human and animal suffering can understandably be a contentious issue. This book isn’t about comparing animals to people, claiming that they can suffer equally or that they are of equal importance. This book is more about the parallels between human and animal discrimination. Whether you believe it’s justified or not, there’s no denying speciesism is a form of prejudice just like sexism, racism and ageism. It’s a group of those slightly different to the rest of us who are deemed less intelligent and less feeling. Because of this, people can justify treating them as they please.

At it’s worst, when discrimination of a group has become widely accepted by society, this can lead to the oppression of that group which is exactly what has happened to animals. As we now know the oppression of groups of people in the past has been so wrong, how do we know we’re not making the same mistake by using similar reasons to justify the oppression and exploitation of animals today?

DENIGRATING THE VICTIM

“If an animal does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.” Will Cuppy

Before we started to farm animals, mythology and totemism, portrays a kind of kinship we had with animals; we would eat them but respected them at the same time. As soon as we started to farm animals, we began to denigrate them. Maybe it’s a form of detachment as we were no longer simply hunting them, we were holding them captive, taking away their freedom, their control and their young. In order to carry out these more cruel and controlling acts, we’d needed to denigrate animals to justify our treatment of them. We still do it today; most animal-based insults are derived from farm animals.

In 1917 Sigmund Freud put the issue into perspective when he wrote: ‘In the course of his development towards culture, man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom.’

A Shocking Experiment