In response to my previous post on true libertarianism, I received a bit of positive feedback and a majority of commenters who simply didn’t get it.
To those who would make an argument like Anonymous on the post – Who has decreed that government force should only protect human liberty? Furthermore, how do you define human, and why does an animal have any less interest in being protected by government force than these humans you speak of? Here are refutations of pretty much all possible arguments you could put forth here.
1.) “Animals are not as smart as humans.” – What about a severely mentally retarded infant? What about, for that matter, a newborn baby, which certainly has less of a capacity to think than any factory farmed animal. What about an 80-year-old with Alzheimer’s disease, compared to the great apes or dolphins which have been shown in studies numerous times to have a huge capacity for sentience? What about any cow/dog/pig compared to Terri Schiavo, whose brain had absolutely no function nor hope of it, yet she had the legislative body of the most powerful nation on Earth falling all over itself to protect her right to life?
If the idea of subjecting any of the above-named human groups to a slow, prolonged death gives you a shudder, perhaps you should give a single thought to the literally billions of animals that are more intelligent (and possibly more capable of understanding pain) and put to death every week.
Anonymous, if you would classify a severely mentally disabled person as property, perhaps you can then state that animals should also be declared as such. But otherwise, there is no reason animals should necessarily be treated simply as property, as if they’re a bicycle or a chair.
Secondly, what if, for example, IQ tests showed that men are not as intelligent as women or white people are not as smart as black people? Would that be a sufficient reason to deny rights to men or white people?
2.) God created humans in His image, and they are therefore superior.
If you’re as much of a Jew or a Christian as you imply making this argument, take a look at what actually happens in factory farming and see whether that is part of God’s plan or if that is maybe part of humans’ evil free will that needs to be eradicated. Did God say “He makes me lie down in excrement”? Certainly not. A Christian who makes arguments involving God and animals should, at the very least, be a vegan or vegetarian and have nothing to do with factory farming, which is the antithesis of what happened on Noah’s Ark.
3.) It’s always been that way.
Any libertarian should be justifiably suspicious of something that has always been, and know that this is not a symptom of whether something is correct or not. In fact, it’s probably the opposite.
4.) Humans have “earned” our way to the “top of the food chain” due to evolution.
There are many animals that will eat humans if given the chance. I assume that you are in favor of tearing down all zoo walls and just shrugging any time you hear of a shark “attack”? (we’ll rename it a shark lunch, with the shark just having a delicious human sandwich)
By bringing evolution into the discussion, anyone who tries to use this argument also runs up against a few pesky facts: our DNA is extremely close to other primates, way more than, say, dogs, which are granted special protections by the law.
5.) Humans are different than animals, due to some sort of magic unspecified in the arguments above that I can’t give any arguments for.
Of course, this is the silliest argument of all, and goes straight to the [fill in the blank with random insult] Hall of Fame. It’s right there next to “giving more money to education will increase the graduation rate, although it never has it will still somehow magically happen nationwide next year” and “running the country into unprecedented deficits is really a sign of my fiscal responsibility, trust me it’s just magical, re-elect me and you’ll see”.
In other words, these arguments are all inherently idiotic (the next-to-last, when made by any meat-eating Christian) and unsupported by evidence.
Phoption and Rachel made similar comments: “I took a turkey’s life; you took a plant’s life. What difference does it make? For a human to live, life must die” and “plants are alive, and capable of both stimuli and thought” — these two commenters are missing the point entirely. It does not matter that animals are alive, humans are alive, or plants are alive. It matters that humans and animals are sentient. Plants are not, they do not suffer, (for that matter, they are not subjected to long, excruciating deaths in veal crates and battery cages, why not try that out, Phoption and Rachel?), and therefore they do not deserve to be put on the same plane of consideration as humans. That, above all else, is clear, and these comments were pretty disappointing to me.