What about People?

Does promoting unalienable equal basic autonomy, ecology, and dignity rights of all animals mean caring more about nonhuman animals than about human beings?

No. Forgetting that human beings are animals, it is easy to think humans benefit when other animals suffer and die. The reverse is true. Humans' holocaust against nonhuman animals - systematically killing them, enslaving them, manipulating their genes, poisoning their air, water, and soil, and otherwise harming and oppressing them and flouting their basic interests - causes human pain, suffering, slavery, disease, war, genocide, poverty, hunger, oppression, and other intractable problems.

Just as human beings who possess basic rights today will benefit when all humans have them, human beings will benefit when all animals having basic rights.

This page shows how misleading it is for news and our other institutions to tell us that we live according to our animal nature when in fact we live according to civilization, the antithesis of nature. And why this knowledge is the basis of the kind of relationship humans should work to establish with the other animals. And why failing to reinvent that relationship, so harmful for many thousands of years, is the key to avoiding the "doom" that so many informed and concerned people anticipate.

We start with a very important article by a physician showing that human beings are natural herbivores though news and our other institutions teach the fiction that we are natural omnivores. And we recommend these two books showing humans got just about every disastrous infectious disease we can name by disrespecting other animals: Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times by Arno Karlen and A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations by Clive Ponting.

As we build this page, we welcome knowledge, sources, and suggestions. We welcome corrections, too, but if you do not study the matters at hand and rely on conventional thinking, know that we "do our homework" and consider the established relationship between humans and the other animals inhumane, unjust, unnatural, tragicomic, and unacceptable.

See other pages for humans' and other animals' plight, what Responsible Policies for Animals does to remedy it, and why popular approaches cannot work.

Posted June 2011