Untruths that cause animal suffering

Much animal suffering is linked to old beliefs

Animal Freedom wants to expose untruths that cause or maintain animal suffering. Some examples of "untruths" are:

• Man is superior to animals.
• Children grow big and strong from eating meat.
• Milk is good for your bones (1).
• Animal testing is necessary for the development of medication (2).
• Meat (protein) is a healthy and necessary part of your diet (3).
• Pets are good for stimulating children's sense of responsibility.
• Animals lack something humans have.
• Consumption of (parts of) dogs and/or other animals gives potency and love.

If you want to know why, click these links for more information.

In the following 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. For them this practice is just as normal as eating pigs is for us.

Pigs are more intelligent than dogs, but does that matter?

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? Can animals think?

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.

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 reports 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 fate.

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.

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.

Now that humans really no longer need the submission of animals for their own survival, and are still maintaining it to reap economic benefits, it's time to give back to animals what was taken from them: to be equal habitants of this planet, with the same rights we allow ourselves.