insertUsername2

Depressing.

The subtitle even says: "Animals are more human than we’d like to admit"

So all humans are animals but not all animals are humans which is correct. You could also say "human" in this context is used as in "human behavior". Not sure.

However, I as well would have greatly have prefered: "Humans are more animals than we’d like to admit"

I don't think the intent of the article is to indicate that we are not animals but to point out that we should apply more of the way on how we treat other humans to how we treat animal because the difference we thought were between animals and humans are really much smaller than we thought and in many cases we are much closer than many of us want to belive.

Hmm. I'm kind of surprised nobody brought up the "nature" argument more strongly.

First of, yes, if you are starving you eat everything. You basically fall back to the level of tribe behavior or below.

However, two things:

One, we are very very far from needing to hunt here in the west. Second: I find it very strange that usually the people who reject the idea that we are coming from and still in many ways are animals are the ones arguing with that it is natural that we eat meat and treating animals like we often do even though it would not be a necessity. "It is how nature does it"

I on the other hand really hope that humans get away from nature (not in the way of disrespecting, disconnecting form it, but in the way nature handles most things like eg. violence, problem solving, cooperation, long term impact vs short term dopamine reward) and really evolves to be a totally different thing not by selection but by intellect, chosen behavior and technology.

I agree that policy could have an effect. But it does not explain all of it.

For example, I do not think that "the wealthy" could make slavery fashionable in a medium, lets say two generations time frame.

This is because we have, at least in most places, accepted on a cultural and moral level that slavery is deeply wrong.

I do realize that you can argue with eg. cases in Bangladesh or children in African cobalt mining, but to bring back slavery in Europe or the US would take a massive cultural shift over generations.

I agree with the sentiment of starting with yourself but I do not think any kind of "attack" will be helpful. Reasoning, maybe, but only in a few cases.

I do not think awareness is the problem. It is part of culture, upbringing etc. which makes it very deeply routed in people. Even if they understand on a intuitive or intellectual level that it is probably bad (see farmers who work with animals and often have deep connections with animals, or my example with the antique slavery, in which I'm pretty sure 98%+ of the people back then would have seen that "they" are somewhat human and beating and enslaving them is not really right (they even had "some" laws protecting them a tiny bit so they clearly "saw" the problem))) people still do things which they in principle find bad.

Changing our approach to animals will need a lot of time. And pressure will only generate backlash. If not in the west, then have a look at China.

At least that is how I see it at the moment.

On every turn we discover that animals have more cognitive ability's and are closer to the specific primate branch that is us than we previously imagined. But a mix of convenience, prejudges and ""culture"" will make sure nothing about the way we handle animals will change for a long time.

Sometimes I feel like on staying in the middle of Rome looking around at all the slaves and thinking why the f### does nobody care?