Why Do We Still Treat Animals Like This?

BY SOFO ARCHON

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said that “men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.”

I don’t fully agree with this statement, but I can understand why he made it.

Think about it: more than 70 billion land animals are killed by humans each year. Yes, you read that right—SEVENTY BILLION. This includes:

• 2,000,000+ dogs
• 4,000,000+ horses
• 500,000,000+ sheep
• 1,000,000,000+ pigs
• 2,000,000,000+ ducks
• 60,000,000,000+ chickens

And I’m not talking about animals killed indirectly by human activity, such as plastic pollution or habitat destruction. No—I mean animals killed directly, by human hands.

Some are killed soon after birth, like male chicks who are ground up alive or tossed into trash bags (considered “useless” by the egg industry since they can’t produce eggs). Others are abused for their entire lives, like female cows who are forcibly impregnated year after year, have their calves taken from them immediately after birth, and are continually exploited for milk until their throats are slit.

Last Sunday, the Yulin Dog Meat Festival began in China once again. During this festival, people kill and eat around 10,000 dogs in just a few days. And a couple of months ago, in my own country of Greece, Easter was celebrated by slaughtering and eating hundreds of thousands of lambs.

People celebrate by abusing animals and taking their lives. Can you fathom how perverse that is?

Schopenhauer was right to say that animals are the tormented souls of Earth. But unlike him, I don’t see humans as devils. I see them as victims—victims of social conditioning that normalizes the inhumane treatment of animals.

Since birth, most of us have been conditioned by culture to believe animals are inferior and that their worth lies only in what they provide us—flesh, milk, eggs, skin, and so on. Their lives are not seen as inherently valuable. Our role, we’re told, is to dominate and exploit them.

This myth of human supremacy runs deep in our civilization, stretching back thousands of years. Open the Bible, which over two billion people claim as the word of God, and you’ll find the line: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Or look to the celebrated thinkers of the Enlightenment and you’ll find similar views. The English philosopher Francis Bacon suggested torturing nature to reveal her secrets. René Descartes, the renowned French philosopher and mathematician, saw animals as soulless machines. He even nailed his wife’s dog to a board and cut it open while still alive.

Nature has long been cast as separate from and inferior to humans. This view is so deeply ingrained that we feel little empathy for it and see no problem in abusing it. Is it any wonder, then, that people exploit and kill animals by the billions? Or that scientists torture them in research, treating them as mere objects for human use?

History shows us that when people see themselves as superior, they believe they have the right to oppress others. That’s why Nazis hunted down Jews—believing themselves to be the “superior” Aryan race destined to rule the world. It’s why men, believing themselves superior, have dominated and repressed women for millennia. And it’s why racism persists: bigotry thrives on the false idea of superiority over others.

To end oppression, we must stop dividing beings into “superior” and “inferior.” Much of today’s social justice work is about recognizing that all humans—regardless of their differences—deserve equal rights. But the most neglected, and by far the greatest (and arguably oldest) injustice is the one committed against animals. Nearly everyone participates in it, no matter their ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, or political ideology. This collective attitude is reinforced by law: animals are classified as “livestock” and treated as products, making it legal to kill and exploit them through farming.

Yet as any zoologist will tell you, animals are sentient, conscious, feeling beings who experience fear, joy, sadness, and love. They avoid pain and desire to live freely—just as you and I do. So why do we strip them of freedom? Why do we justify killing them for pleasure?

Because of the myth of human supremacy, which underlies all animal exploitation and abuse. Can you pierce through it and see that it’s nothing but a lie?