In a word — No.
I wish to share a brief thought with you today.
If we wish to lead a nonviolent life, a good place to start is to stop participating in the torture and murder of sentient beings. We need to stop using animals for food, clothing, entertainment and other reasons. One would think this would seem obvious, yet due to our deeply entrenched speciesism, using animals as property is taken for granted. Despite our claim we are for social justice and nonviolence, many will defend animal use and make up many excuses – to the point of being irrational. Underneath it all, we know what we are doing is wrong and the more we protest, the more we deny the obvious truth.
“Compartmentalization is the separation of persons (including nonhuman persons), things, ideas, attitudes, or behavior into categories or compartments. Sometimes it is epistemically rational to compartmentalize (e.g. biology); other times it is epistemically irrational to compartmentalize (e.g. race or species prejudice).
Speciesism (like racism, sexism, and heterosexism) is the epistemically irrational prejudice of favoring one or more species over other species without a morally relevant characteristic providing justification. From the standpoint of irrational, unjustified prejudice, ignoring the morally relevant characteristic of intelligence in preventing certain classes of humans from obtaining an education is the same as ignoring the morally relevant characteristic of sentience in exploiting and killing nonhuman animals for food, clothing, research, and entertainment (all of which are unnecessary). Speciesism is one form of irrational, prejudiced compartmentalization.
An example of speciesist compartmentalization is when we pet and love a dog while a pig’s full body and head rotate over a fire pit. Why isn’t it the other way around? Better yet, why don’t we pet and love both the dog and the pig?”
Excerpt from UVE Archives “Single Issue Campaigns, Speciesism, and Compartmentalization“For more reading on this issue: Rational Ignorance and Rational Irrationality
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