as Isaac Bashevis Singer so accurately observed, “In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they’re the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”

Many (probably most) humans think of animals as completely different from us. This is completely mistaken.

Many AR/vegans seem to think of animals: “they are so much like us.” This gets the relationship right, but the direction backwards. It isn’t they who are like us, it is we who are like them. We came from them.

Everything that we think of as uniquely human is actually inherited from animals. These qualities may be more complex or refined or amplified in humans, but they are the same basic qualities.

Moral codes don’t come from God or rational thought; they come from our genes. Social animals evolved them in order to live successfully in social groups. They existed before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

For “a hot second” I started to challenge that non-human animals do not adjudicate. Obviously they do not the way we do. Our belief that they “live in the now” (“we” say this about dogs for instance) does not work with other all species, nor is it always true. I had a cat who I wasn’t very nice to when I was a kid – my sister’s cat Puff (RIP, guy) who never forgave me for putting water on him (repeatedly – I, too, was a mean child I guess). He used to every once in a while pounce on my head essentially attacking me. I would scream and freak out and my family would sort of laugh since I had it coming. I smile thinking about it now. Elephants remember the culling of their families half-centuries later, we believe, and we’ve seen them (and Sea World’s cruelty confining animals in their tanks) lash out and kill “handlers.”

There are no laws, etc., (and I’m honestly not trying to pick at your piece because it’s spot on and the fact that they may or may not have morals is just as you said as unnecessary for us to understand right now as it is for us to eat animal products). They do have some complex structures, though. I remember about 15 years ago these cats in a relatives home guarded and (we figured mourned or … had their own little anthropomorphic service) over the loss of a kitten of their colony. The kitten, I think, was harmed or killed maybe by an outsider. My memory is foggy on all of this but the important part is that the cats in the group who cared for the kitten kept the other clan away. Interesting.

And you are so right – Jonathan Balcombe’s work as groundbreaking as it is fascinating. I am eternally grateful to him for reviewing cruelty footage for Mercy For Animals investigations. He didn’t want to but his perspective is huge in what his work tells us about the realities we documented undercover.

The bar was loud, but the afternoon over a couple of beers when I got to explain to him the significance and impact as they related to the possibility that he would review cruelty footage for our cases (he had previously declined – as I think any sane person would wish to) was an afternoon well spent. He’s a phenomenal being.

Anyways Machan’s work on the PP presupposes that animals can not be moral agents (I disagree) and he only assigns so-called choice-protecting rights for moral agents and interest-protecting rights for moral patients (prey and marginal cases such as mentally incapacitated humans). Machan argues that humans owe those possessing rights positive duties of aid while maintaining that humans do not owe a duty to aid those only possessing interest-protecting rights. Cooke has, and I disagree, termed Machan’s work as a “non-speciesist” approach because Machan supposedly treats ‘likes alike’ in basing his classification for determining when a duty is owed on moral agency and by omitting dignity rights which others, such as Singer and Regan, extend to marginal cases (This was to a large degree Cora Diamond’s famous point about Singer/Regan in “Eating Animals and Eating People”). I argue that Machan can not be “non-speciesist” because his argument is premised upon a denial of animal agency.
In February, 2013 Steve Wise debated philosopher Tibor Machan at Columbia Law School concerning The Predation Problem and attempted to refute Machan’s position by extending moral agency along scientific lines to certain animals based upon cognitive research. While Wise’s work is undoubtedly an improvement in legal technology, it does not completely address the unresolved issue of agency in animals or speciesism.

Perhaps Aldo Leoplod had it right when he wrote in this essay “Thing Like Mountain”, which is ostensibly a meditation upon shooting a she wolf, that each act of predation by a trophic predator has a role in reaching equilibrium and that is a very different type of moral argument than the one size fits all confines of the PP along the lines or moral rights has to offer. Incidentally, Posthumanists would agree with Leopold and think the entire concept of the PP is ridiculous and epitomizes such limitations.