Why I am not an animalist

Bullfight in Benavente
in honor of Philip I.
Attributed to the Flemish painter
Jacob van Laethem

I have written two previous posts in this blog (this one and this one) attacking animalism in its inflamed form, which occasionally makes its way into the media. These two posts have given rise to many comments in their Spanish version, as some of my readers identify themselves rather with the animalistic position than with mine. In this post I’ll try to explain some of the reasons why I think as I do.

First, as my readers know (for it’s the subject of the most read post in this blog, about 35,000 visits), I don’t consider man as just another animal (as some, but not all, animalists think, and they use this argument to deny that man can have more rights than other animals, or to assert that animals should have the same rights as we do).

The political correctness of animalists

John Maxwell Coetzee

In an article in the Spanish major newspaper La Vanguardia, the writer Quim Monzó recalls a campaign organized by the City Council of a Catalonian village to move people to collect canine excrements, with a poster where a pig-like dog appeared to tell its master: "I am your dog. Don’t make me look like a pig. Collect my excrements." The poster provoked numerous complaints from local animalists, who considered it an insult to pigs. Quim Monzó adds the following comment:

As expected... we are now hearing the slogan that the time has come to eliminate all phrases that trivialize the suffering of animals. [The animalist association] proposes that we stop using expressions like "kill two birds with one stone" or "be treated as a guinea pig”... We must not say "take the bull by the horns". There is also an English expression "bring home the bacon," which should not be used either.

Monzó has given his article a significant title: Idiots, idiots everywhere.

I would not dare to call animalists idiots, but I must accuse them of irrationality. Do they really believe that some pig was offended by the campaign for the collection of canine excrement, or that whenever we say don’t be a pig (or any of its synonyms) to rebuke a dirty person? I am afraid that pigs are not even aware of our use of language. The only ones who bother about this are animalists, and until proven otherwise, we must assume that they are human beings.

The anthropomorphism of animalists

Flag of the animals in
Animal Farm, by George Orwell

A year ago I published an article in which I showed with multiple arguments that man is not just an animal, despite attempts by materialists to reduce us to that level. In fact, many animalists seem to do exactly the opposite: they inadvertently raise the animals to the human level. They do this even with insects, as when they speak of the horror suffered by a caterpillar being devoured by a hymenopter larva, although they reserve their special compassion for the higher animals: birds and mammals.

In their campaign against animal acts in circuses, animalists use the following motto:

A circus is a prison

They usually say the same of zoos, even though modern zoos have little resemblance to those of the early twentieth century, the so-called menageries.