Question

Reading 7.1, pg. 371, Question 2: Describe the human practices that most clearly demonstrate speciesism.

Answer 1

• Speciesism: a prejudice or bias attitude toward the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species
• Suffering/enjoying happiness is the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration
• Suffering & enjoyment – prerequisite for having interests
• This happens in a variety of ways. Nonhuman animals are consumed as food, used for clothing, tormented and killed for entertainment, exploited for work, and raised and killed so their body parts can be used as raw materials in cosmetics and other consumer products. They are, essentially, slaves.
• Killing animals for our food – the suffering we inflict on the animals while they are alive is perhaps an even clearer indication of our Speciesism than the fact that we are prepared to kill them
• Certain animals are discriminated against not in comparison to human beings, but in comparison to other nonhuman animals. For example, one can have more respect for dogs than pigs, or for mammals than other animals, even in situations where the less respected animals will be harmed as a result. We do not kill dogs because we don’t eat them – kill pigs because they serve as food (purpose)
  
• For example, one can reject the use of dogs and cats for food (an acceptable practice in some countries) but accept the consumption of, say, chickens and fishes. This is also a form of speciesist discrimination, since all sentient animals have an interest in not being harmed regardless of the species to which they belong.
• Speciesist discrimination is so commonplace that most people don’t think to question it except in cases where the type or degree of discrimination is unusual. As a result humans exploit nonhuman animals in the course of everyday life, using them as resources.
• A common form of speciesism that often goes unnoticed is the discrimination against very small animals. In general, we have a psychological disposition to care less about small animals. Many people consider a horse much more deserving of consideration than, for example, a mouse, simply because of their relative sizes.We have a tendency to think that smaller animals are less conscious, when this is not necessarily so.
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