Advocates of eating “humanely raised animals” often describe the imposed death of an animal as “just one day” in an otherwise happy life. Forget the fact that this comment embodies the absolute worst manifestation of human arrogance, an arrogance so acute it casually confers to us justification to end the life of a sentient being. Let’s take it a bit further than arrogance, though.
Push advocates of “humane killing” (the phrase just galls me) to justify the legitimacy of that “one day” argument and they’ll usually say that animals have no sense of the future and, as a result, it’s okay to end the game of life whenever a human feels like doing so. They have no idea what they’ll be missing. It goes without saying that these so called compassionate carnivores would never apply this logic to human beings, which makes them, of course, blatant speciesists, a designation no more flattering than to be called a blatant racist, sexist, or homophobe. But, again, let’s take it one step further.
Ask these “ethical butchers” to prove that the animals that they’re so mercifully killing don’t in fact have a sense of the future. Push them on this. What you will find is that they cannot support that case, primarily because it’s unsupportable. Three questions is all it takes to reveal this ignorance: Do farm animals make choices? Yes. Do they make these choices arbitrarily? No, they have some goal in mind. Does that goal exist in the past, present, or future? Future. Conclusion: farm animals do have a sense of the future, so to kill them is to deny them of a future they understand. And that’s not humane. That’s cruel.
By denying to animals their sense of the future we “bespeak a prejudice,” to quote Tom Regan, “rather than unmask one.”
