Maichael

“What does it mean to be human, when we've organized our whole identity, our whole economy, around harming our fellow creatures?”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“The reason that we treat other animals as our slaves and as commodities isn't because they have this ontologically-rooted inferiority, it's that we see them as inferiors 'because' we find it useful to exploit them, and to harm them.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“We need to stop talking about "factory farming." The problem is violence against animals. People will continue eating industrialized meat as long as they believe the myth that there is a "humane" alternative: "humane killing" discourse serves to legitimate the whole meat system.”
― John Sanbonmatsu

“What would it mean for us to come to terms with the knowledge that civilization, our whole mode of development and culture, has been premised and built upon extermination—on a history experienced as "terror" without end" (to borrow a phrase from Adorno)? To dwell on such a thought would be to throw into almost unbearable relief the distance between our narratives of inherent human dignity and grace and moral superiority, on the one hand, and the most elemental facts of our actual social existence, on the other. We congratulate ourselves for our social progress—for democratic governance and state-protected civil and human rights (however notional or incompletely defended—yet continue to enslave and kill millions of sensitive creatures who in many biological, hence emotional and cognitive particulars resemble us. To truly meditate on such a contradiction is to comprehend our self-understanding to be not merely flawed, but comically delusional...

In the nineteenth century, the animal welfare advocate Edward Maitland warned that our destruction of other animals lead only to our own "debasement and degradation of character" as a species. "For the principles of Humanity cannot be renounced with impunity; but their renunciation, if persisted in, involves inevitably the forfeiture of humanity itself. And to cease through such forfeiture man is to become demon." What else indeed can we call a being but demon who routinely enslaves and kills thousands of millions of other gentle beings, imprisons them in laboratories, electrocutes or poisons or radiates or drowns them?”
― John Sanbonmatsu, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation