If you love cats or dogs but eat chickens, you might as well eat cats and dogs …

I sign a lot of petitions, not that I honestly believe they will inspire meaningful change (maybe a few do), but because it’s easy and fast, what with the efficiency of technology and pre-filled fields. A couple weeks ago I received yet another anti cat-dog meat trades petition asking for my digital support to end the practice of cat and dog meat consumption. I signed it, with little optimism: don’t get me wrong, I detest the cat and dog meat trades, the footage I force myself to watch will haunt me forever, and judging by the volatile comments, a LOT of people who are predominantly NOT vegan, do as well. This is understandable. We are a nation of animal – cat and dog – lovers; we’ve been raised in a society that places value on cats and dogs (not just a financial sort for those who profit from their forced breeding, but I digress) but also based on our positive emotions and feelings towards them. We love cats and dogs and want to protect them.

Anyway, back to the petition: there were manymanymany angry, violent comments, some wishing karma, including pain and death, on people who kill and consume cats and dogs, ironically-enough written by people who consume pigs and cows.

Why? Cognitive dissonance is the short, easy answer, but the actual reason is speciesism, the global construct deeming non-human animals as being unworthy of their own bodies and lives, considered only worthy as human benefits via food, entertainment, vivisection, fur/skin, etc. Speciesism is all related. The speciesism YOU embrace to legitimatize eating eggs or fish or cheese directly fuels the speciesism that other people embrace to legitimatize eating cats and dogs (which aligns with THEIR social status quo). Who are you to vehemently attack other cultures, countries, people as “barbaric/imbeciles/evil” while you do the EXACT SAME THING to other animals? If, as so many people often do, you want to scale it, you really are no better. If you want to get verbally angsty and aggressive regarding cat and dog consumption, you need to be verbally angsty and aggressive towards the people who burn, bury, macerate, and eviscerate the animals socially accepted as “food” where you live. Otherwise, you’re just a hypocrite pretending that dogs are special so you can feel morally robust while eating baby cows’ food.

And before you go off about deliberate torture often inflicted on cats and dogs, do remember that years ago it was exposed that chickens are routinely boiled alive in the USA (and NOTHING has changed except lines are now faster resulting in more torture), where all animals exploited for food are EXEMPT from the (meaningless) Animal Welfare Act, and where undercover investigators and whistleblower employees have continuously revealed the horrors endured by animals being stabbed, gutted, and dismembered while the animals are still fully conscious. Indignantly screaming that, “It’s not supposed to be like that!!!!” doesn’t negate that it IS like that. And even the “quick” death validation so many people exploit while NOT KNOWING or accepting the evidence demonstrating the opposite, STILL doesn’t make killing another acceptable to the other.

Society doesn’t define ethics, it just makes it fluid, timely manipulating the words used to define the abject suffering and violent experiences inflicted on others to inspire people to feel rationally good about violently killing pigs while verbally condemning killing dogs, ie., you support the “humane harvesting” of pigs while verbally assaulting the “deranged monsters for torturing the innocent, screaming, terrorized dogs”. Mitigating via Webster isn’t actually meaningful to Webster’s victims.

The foundation of animal exploitation is global and caused by all acts of exploitation regardless of whether your status quo includes a few as “family members”… Do remember, many animal farmers boast that the animals they subjugate and kill are treated better than “family members”, a disturbing association that typically gets thumbs-up-mentality congrats from the people who would sue and prosecute/imprison anyone who treated a cat or dog like animal farmed “family members”.

If you’re not vegan, don’t wear that moral badge concerning some animals, it doesn’t work that way. If you won’t reject all animal suffering, your words are about as meaningful to worthy victims as they are to unworthy victims. It’s like the masses who praise future regulations that will “gift” animals two inches of extra confinement space prior to their still-violent and fearful butchering: if you honestly believe a future environment will be “humane” why won’t you stop participating in the “inhumane” environment now? Or is it just wordy praise showing off your abundance of empathy? You’re so considerate you need to boast about your overly-generous paragon-of-kindness nature to ……. other people, yet not to the actual victims of your paragon-of-kindness nature. Correct?

Nobody ever answers that question. It doesn’t actually help animals when you praise a fairytale utopia of kindly killing, animals still suffer and die regardless of the delusions society holds as current events when meaningful to humans, but never to the animals.

How about this one: since you are capable of caring, of exercising morality and empathy, will you make it consistent? Because the animals are denied all opportunities to defend what is fundamentally theirs: their bodies and lives. The most vulnerable beings who are forced to endure the most hellish conditions and fear and pain, are the ones YOU can defend the easiest. SL

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People pick and choose what aspects of religion, societal mores etc and compassion towards other species that fit into their world view.

They adhere to whatever preprogrammed notions were instilled in them.

Thinking out of the box, for many, is too frightening and challenging.

Time to build a new box , framed by kindness and constructed with empathy

Karen Lyons Kalmenson