Sacred Activism in the Service of Animals
It’s unusual to find someone who combines a deep, mystical love of the Divine with a stark realism about how we humans are bringing on a…
It’s unusual to find someone who combines a deep, mystical love of the Divine with a stark realism about how we humans are bringing on a…
If you haven’t read the shocking, eye-opening report by the New York Times on the secret, government-operated US Meat Animal Research Center and its “one overarching…
In the first part of our interview with Stephen Cave, he talked about how, once we decide that we are fundamentally different in kind from the…
In previous posts we’ve talked about how our relationship to our fellow animals and the way we treat them is driven by our anxiety over the fact that we’re animals, too, and our denial of our own animal nature.
In his book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization, Stephen Cave discusses the chief ways in which we persuade ourselves that we’re not really animals, that we can avoid death altogether, or at least that some part of us will live on in some way after we’re dead. Here’s the trailer to the book:
In the first of two posts, Cave explains how, once we decide that we are fundamentally different in kind from other animals, we can then view them as having a lower moral status. And that, in turn, opens up "a whole world of possibilities for how we treat them."
Starting around 9,000 years ago, the agricultural era brought about the large-scale domestication of animals and a fundamental shift in our relationship to them. Less and less beings of great mystery and power, they were becoming, instead, commodities.
(Fourth in a series about how and why our relationship to our fellow animals has deteriorated to the point of an unfolding mass extinction.)