From various FB interactions

A long discussion erupted in the wake of the Arizona shootings on Facebook that touched on issues of animal rights and speciesism. Some of my reactions to the matter...

Re: I'm a (lacto-ovo) "vegetarian" AND an "animal rights activist..."

If you still eat eggs and dairy, you're still contributing to intentional animal killing. No hens or dairy cows in the US are left to die of old age. There's no difference, simply as a matter of causing suffering, between eating a steak and drinking milk or eating cheese; there's no difference at all.

Re: How come you place less value on human life?

In this culture, all of us, men or women, have internalized sexism. All of us, black or white, have internalized racism. And all of us, from the most apathetic meat-eater to the most hardcore vegan ARA, all of us have internalized speciesism. WHY is it that we consider the deaths of humans "off limits" as a matter of taste or preference, but we - all of us - are blase about the deaths of a *million* pigs? Again, as a matter of total suffering caused, the deaths of six humans - however regrettable - does not begin to compare to the billions of dairy cattle that will die as a result of "lacto-ovo" vegetarians who fund the dairy industry, and so on, and so on.

Re: One man was a holocaust survivor for God’s sake...

And has been famously said, our treatment of nonhumans is a holocaust for animals. Only what we're doing isn't to six million humans, sixty years ago. It's to millions of nonhumans each and every day. Which is the greater tragedy? Which is more deserving of our moral outrage?

Re: I loathe Asian society for their inhumanity towards any and all animals...

It's hardly limited to one human culture. It's everywhere. For the million pigs buried alive that you saw on the news one day, millions of dairy cattle will be slaughtered each and every month. It's not limited to "asian" culture; it's human culture. It's everywhere. And if we say we care about the rights of nonhumans (not just their welfare, how we use them), we have a moral obligation to take ourselves out of that system of exploitation, or no matter how much we say we're "animal rights activists," we are part of the problem.