A few centuries ago the Black African slave trade was considered an acceptable practice―it was known as the “trade in ebony.” In writing about slaves, the historian Anthony Pagden said that a slave’s chores are no different than those of a beast of burden and that one seizes a slave as one would the spoils of hunting. These days, slavery continues to exist in many countries where children are sold for labor in factories or in fields, and young girls, for prostitution. However, in general, slavery is considered an abomination.
     During the American conquest, in both the South and the North, the conquerors massacred the local inhabitants, sparing neither children, nor women, nor the elderly, and they would mutilate them as they pleased, treating them like beasts in a slaughterhouse. Barely over a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), a Harvard anatomy and physiology professor, found it natural that a White person would hate an Indian and hunt him down like a wild forest animal so that this sketch in red pencil be erased and that the canvas be made ready for a man who is a little more in the image of God.
     It would be good to ask why we see a distinction between the way we treated slaves then and the way we treat animals now. Charles Darwin noted, “Those animals we have reduced to slavery, we do not like to consider them as our equals.”
     According to French civil rights, animals are “personal property,” and according to European legislation, “farm produce.” We use them for our food and our clothes, we manipulate their reproduction (castration of males, insemination of females), we prevent newborns from drinking their mother’s milk, and we use them for our entertainment―from bullfights to dog fights. We decide when, where, and how animals will die.
     Each year in France 1 billion animals are killed for human consumption.
     What do people, nations, do when they are exploited or oppressed? They organize themselves, they form a union, they revolt. Animals are incapable of this and so are exterminated. Since the organs needed for language have not evolved in animals, we claim the right to exploit, for our own pleasure, those of this Earth “without a voice.”
     Let us remember the words of the philosopher Charlie Dunbar Broad, “A large part of the cruelty that decent people applaud or tolerate is applauded or tolerated solely because these people are too stupid to imagine themselves in the victims’ position or because they deliberately refrain from doing so.”
     The arguments used to justify our concentration-camplike exploitation of animals are similar to those that were used to justify the massacre of “sub-human” indigenous people, the slavery of “animallike” Black people, and the extermination of “ratlike” Jews. We dehumanize people and relegate animals to the ranks of objects or property.
     The Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer deplored such an attitude by observing that everything happens as if “[a]ll other creatures were created merely to provide him [Man]  with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
     Leonardo da Vinci wrote in one his notebooks, “The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”
     Is the right to live the sole privilege of humans?

To read: Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Lantern Books
To see: Earthlings, the definitive documentary on the subject, by Shaun Monson, at www.earthlings.com

Matthieu Ricard