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Animal Freedom
wants to expose untruths
that cause or maintain animal suffering.
If you want to know why, click these links for more information. In this text we will (briefly) touch upon the prejudice that animals lack certain qualities that people have. |
5 dogs on their way to the market where they will be sold to people who will butcher and eat them. In Asia (China, Korea,
Vietnam) people have always kept dogs for consumption.
Lately this practice has started to assume factory-farming-like
proportions. |
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Do animals have properties such as: intelligence, awareness,
pain, language, responsibility, and self-control? Do
animals have relationships, do they have feelings like
nervousness, love, anger, guilt, fun, sorrow, fear,
can animals stand up for themselves? Do they dream? |
Nobody can deny that animals
possess most of these traits, and for other traits we
have thought up different names, so that they appear to
be different. The affection and care a mother displays
for her offspring is called "instinct" in animals,
as if to say that animals, like some sort of machines,
"display maternal behavior". Don't be misled:
animal behavior toward their offspring is characterized
by almost all the same things as human behavior. Anglers mistakenly justify their animal abuse by denying that fish can feel pain, fear or stress. |
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Realizing your own mortality Others think that animals do not realize their own mortality and point to the phenomenon that animals passively go to their deaths in the slaughterhouse. Newspapers regularly publish report about animals that do not want to die and try to escape. Sometimes these animals receive a "general amnesty" and are cared for by other people. It's safe to wonder whether those animals that passively go to the slaughter aren't consciously choosing to end their animal-unworthy existence. Maybe the imprisoned mother animal that bites her young to death is not so crazy. She is protecting her young from her own faith. |
Awareness Neurologist Antonio Damasio says that only living beings can have awareness, and that organisms are aware of themselves and their relationships with the outside world. The basis for this is the development of a self in the brain, which is necessary to maintain the image of the organism. This is a need for self-regulation and self-representation that is deeply anchored inside the organism. From this theory we can conclude that even animals have awareness, and also that computers will never have it. |
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Is man superior to animals? In our history these capacities have been "reasoned
away" by people who found it necessary to place
people above animals. From this self-constructed position
they could justify their immoral behavior toward animals.
They would not have this justification if they had to
recognize that people are basically a species of animal. |
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This article is part of a series on falsities and demagogy |
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Non-valid arguments (deceptive arguments) for different groups: |
Some arguments used in debate on the topics in the title simply are invalid. That goes for pro and contra. We selected a few of the most rigid arguments from different situations and placed an appropriate counterargument. Because a more clear and honest way of reasoning helps improve the circumstances animals live in. Mail us if you encounter other or new (counter)-arguments. Apart from the specific issues there are the types of arguments in general. Fallacies are deliberately or accidentally used in a debate. So be aware of the principles and the integrity of an opponent. Click here for tips on how to react to animal-unfriendly behavior of others. |
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