Animals: The New Holocaust?

Lest Orson Scott Card's misguided rantings on gay marriage and atheism cause us to forget that he has expressed plenty of perfectly liberal ideas, too, here's a sampling from his novel Lovelock (coauthored with Kathryn Kidd). It's a fairly elegant statement of the case for animal rights. This is from pages 280 and 281, where the protaganist contemplates killing a female monkey whose continued existence poses a danger to him.

[...] she was an animal, right? She didn't have feelings, right?

That was humanist thinking: Because animals aren't exactly like us, they are infinitely different, wholly other. Thus we can treat them however we like.

But animals are not wholly other. Their consciousness steps down from ours in infinitesimal steps, just as there is infinite variation among us. Who is to say that the most intellectual and creative of chimpanzees is not above the level of the most stupid and brutal of humans? And behind chimpanzees, other primates, and behind them, perhaps, dolphins or dogs, whales or cats. None of them wholly different from us, but rather differing only in degree. Capable of love, of feeling, of knowing, of remembering. And so if it matters how you treat humans, then it matters how you treat animals.

A perfectly rational argument, and yet one against which our emotions instinctively rebel. That's absurd, we think, without really thinking at all.

But why is it absurd? Because I gain so much benefit and pleasure from eating animals' flesh? Because I don't know them, I have no investment in their well-being, I never have to see their pain, so I can pretend it doesn't exist?

The arguments for human rights look so self-evident to us today. We look back with disdain at previous racist generations. The racists were blind to the suffering of blacks because they gained so much benefit from keeping the blacks enslaved, because they didn't know or care about the blacks personally, because blacks were considered inferior. The same rationalizations we use to assuage our guilt for our treatment of animals.

Of course, one might object that blacks aren't inferior, whereas animals are. Well, what if blacks had been inferior? Would that have justified slavery and torture? Are we justified in tormenting children, the elderly, the crippled, the mentally handicapped? These people really are inferior according to some standards of measure. It's no accident that in the Holocaust the handicapped were among the first to go. Did their physical or intellectual inferiority give Hitler the right to systematically exterminate them?

Will future generations look back at McDonald's and Burger King and see a Holocaust? Will they be horrified at how we blinded ourselves to intolerable suffering, just to fill our bellies and satisfy our cravings? Do I sound crazy and paranoid yet? Maybe. Or maybe just unsettled by a thought experiment that led me places I wasn't quite prepared to go.