Dehumanizing humans: Why animal rights should matter to us all
By Ari | Oct 21, 09 11:11 AM
When I read Ian Perl's piece on on health insurance reform, I Am Not a Dog (Huffington Post) I kept thinking, if we treated animals with respect and compassion, calling a human an animal wouldn't be quite so dangerous.
Perl has muscular dystrophy and has been a target of discrimination:
Our lawsuit uncovered insurance company documents that confirmed my suspicion that I'm a target of discrimination. The documents revealed Guardian had compiled a "hit list" of its costliest members, including patients with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, and paralysis. Guardian executives referred to us all as "dogs" and "trainwrecks," and they debated how and when to dump us from the rolls. Laws prohibited the cancellation of the individual members with serious chronic health problems, so Guardian opted to cancel the plan for all members of this specific health plan in New York, an action that violates federal law.
Human beings have a history of using animal names and comparisons to justify the exploitation and oppression of other human beings. We can call a woman a "cow" to justify raping or abusing her. We can call people we want to exterminate "cockroaches," people we want to enslave "monkeys," and people we want to ignore "urchins." And we can call a man to whom we want to deny medical care a "dog." We can call humans all of these things, minimizing that which makes them worthy of our concern - their humanness - to justify treating them inhumanely. The animals who bare these names are, of course, even less worthy of our concern. Animals are not just denied medical treatment or abused, they're routinely forcibly inseminated by the billions so we can torture them for a short time before slaughtering them to fill our bellies.
In one of his novels, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." Isaac saw that when we treat one sentient being as an object, we open the door to treating others in the same way. Leo Tolstoy too said: "As long as there are slaughterhouses... there will be battlefields." Will we one day realize, as a species, that our treating any feeling creature as if they can not feel pain (or as if their pain doesn't matter) is just not morally acceptable?
For some painful but illuminating perspective into the issue of treating people "like animals" and what that means about our treatment of animals themselves, please read:
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