Animals are people too

Gerry H.
5 min readOct 23, 2019

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My cat has such an awesome personality, he is happy, friendly, affectionate and playful. And just look how cute he is!

Everyone who has a pet and/or a brain knows it: animals have feelings and emotions. Knowing that, is it okay for us to kill animals, do we have that right? We do not. Just because we have power over them that does not give us the right to hurt them and destroy the environments they depend on.

Some years ago (like about 20) my wife and I were at the Folsom Zoo, and they had a cougar there. A happy, purring cougar. Turns out cougars are the biggest of the cat family to purr. He had been in captivity from a young age we were lucky enough to be there when the person who raised him came by. Wild animals have emotions too.

Affectionate lion at the Dean Schneider Wildlife Sanctuary

Two thousand years ago people thought that watching other people get killed was entertainment. Two hundred years ago (some) people thought it was perfectly find to keep other people as slaves. Fifty years ago people thought it was normal to treat others as second-class citizens, based on race. The majority thought discrimination and even hatred based on sexual orientation was “normal” and “okay”. Throughout history people have been really quite ignorant and very often wrong. Even in our so-called “modern times” ignorant people think it is okay to hurt animals. Wrong again.

Humans (homo sapiens) did not evolve from apes — we are apes. In our taxonomy we are part of the “great ape” family hominids. We are animals. For most of homo sapiens existence we were just another species of many. Now we are by far the most self-righteous, destructive and cruel. Stop thinking of “animals” as different from us. They bleed and feel pain, care for their young, and have emotions just like we do. Maybe they haven’t invented nuclear bombs, but that doesn’t make them unimportant.

I love all animals and wish we treated them as special as they are.
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Sometime in the future (and I hope it is soon) people will realize we do not have the right to harm earth’s amazing creatures. They are not here for us to abuse. If we really are intelligent then we would be protecting them, not hurting them!

Orangutan playing with otters at the Belgium Zoo

People claim “it’s natural for us to eat animals”. Yet 5000 years ago the people of what is now Spain ate little meat, and that makes a lot of sense considering how much easier it was to obtain calories from plants. Long ago there were millions of people and billions of animals. But guess what, now there are billions of people and millions of (wild) animals.

Wild raven’s playing, rolling in the snow, video

We need to change. No more hunting, especially disgusting trophy hunting (trophy hunters are a small step up from child molesters). We need to eat less meat, right now. Stop doing what the meat-marketing industry tells you to do. It would be better for your health, better for the world we live in, and simply the right thing to do. Restaurants: stop pushing meat all the time, have more non-meat and less-meat options!

About 130 million chickens are slaughtered every day for meat, and 4 million pigs. By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild.

Support the African Wildlife Foundation at https://www.awf.org

Related articles:

Man befriends wild octopus
Eating red meat significantly associated with cardiovascular disease
Humans behind rapid extinction of other mammals, and here
Global wildlife populations in free fall
Rare porpoise saved from becoming food
Dolphins form friendships much like people
Bats communicate by singing
Cats and dogs on the menu in Malaysia
Half a billion animals perish in Australian bush fires
Trying to save the last white giraffe from poachers
Rats learn the rules of hide & seek, enjoy playing
Cambridge proves people want more veggie options in restaurants
170,000 year old human diet rich in vegetables
Depraved hunters kill pregnant and very rare wolf in Belgium
Horses feel the same pain when whipped as humans
Industrial farming: 70% of the world’s farmland controlled by 1% of farms
Stray dog protects abandoned kittens
Rat trained to detect landmines
Crows are even smarter than we thought and can think
Why is fur farming still a thing? Because humans are ignorant

Starving lion in Sudanese zoo
Foxes waiting for their tortured lives to end by electrocution up the anus

One emotion animals know very well (thanks to humans) is fear:

Bull killed by an ignorant asshole, witnessed by ignorant people who thought it was “entertainment”. Makes me want to fucking puke.

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Gerry H.
Gerry H.

Written by Gerry H.

Programmer and avid reader. I have moved to gerryha.gonevis.com because they have a much nicer editor. Google wons Medium.com and censors people.