Animals Were Created by God and Have Rights
Human Confusion: Why There Must Be Justice for Non-Humans
Conservation is at its core an anti-colonial struggle. Its job is to dismantle these structures of exploitation and control and to do justice in our relationships with other species.
I agree with the above post: “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men. This is the gist of Ms. Spiegel’s cogent, humane and astute argument, and it is sound.” —Alice Walker, Introduction in Spiegel (1988: 10).
“What do they know—all those scholars, all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for animals it is an eternal Treblinka. And yet man demands compassion from heaven….” —Isaac Bashevis Singer (1948: 270).
Over the last twelve millennia—since agriculture first emerged—humans have increased their exploitation and efforts to control other species and to colonize the Earth. Human on human hierarchy and colonization of other humans follows on the colonization of the natural world. The task of conservation is to undo that colonial relationship. We have been causing the extinction of other life-forms, including hominid species, since we left Africa at least 60,000 years ago. In the last 50 years, or just about two human generations, nearly 68% of all vertebrate animals have disappeared due to human activity (WWF 2020). Humans go into an existing biological community and reorganize it for the benefit of the invaders. We simply take what we want—the homes and lives of others—like the British did in India, the Spanish in much of the Americas, Japan in East Asia; like Mesopotamian cities did to agricultural hinterlands, and like the Aztec did to many of their neighbors.
Because we are cultural animals we have a need to justify our violent efforts to colonize and control—efforts which Walker and Singer eloquently and steadfastly reject. Whether we seek to displace other species or other humans, it’s almost invariably about resources, but we imagine a moral cause—a civilizing mission, historical progress, democracy. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians and Blefuscuans fought and rested their superiority over the other on which end of an egg it was proper to open. We chuckle knowingly but have learned nothing. With such weighty matters as egg-opening to focus on, it’s easy to see how we humans can be so self-absorbed and ignore our myopic destructiveness toward the larger world”.
Every living thing was created by God…. from to the smallest insect, each has a soul and a purpose
