July 22, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Species-ism
Please note to see what British activist
and novelist Brigid Brophy wrote in an article in 1965 that was published in ‘The
Sunday Times’ which is today the largest selling British national newspaper in
the “quality press” category of British print media (the term “quality press” owes
to their overall “seriousness” of news coverage in contrast to glossy or gutter
press):
“The relationship of Homo sapiens to the
other animals is one of unremitting exploitation.
We employ their work; we eat and wear them.
We exploit them to serve our superstitions:
whereas we used to sacrifice them to our gods and tear out their entails in
order to foresee the future, we now sacrifice them to science, and experiment
on their entrails in the hope – or on the mere off chance – that we might
thereby see a little more clearly into the present.
To us it seems incredible that the Greek
philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never
noticed the immorality of slavery.
Perhaps 300 years from now it will seem
equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression.”
These apparently benign and harmless lines
on the rights of other species set off a storm in England concerning non humans
and the relationship of humans with them.
This storm on settling down resulted in the
creation of Oxford Group or the Oxford Vegetarians that sought liberation of
animals and coining of a new word speciesism by the British psychologist
Richard Ryder who was a member of the Oxford Group in the 1970s.
The word “speciesism” would be better
understood if you were to break it into “species” and “ism” and place it along
with “race” and “ism” which are break-up of the word “racism”.
Just like racism implies that some race is
considered superior to others analogously speciesism is the formalization of
the general belief – particularly by the Christian fundamentalists – that humans
are special creatures and the entire world including other animals and plants
were built by the divine for their service and relentless exploitation.
The proponents of speciesism question the
following practices of humans:
They question and disagree to the practice
of putting the rights and interests of human apes over other species.
Similarly, they question the practice of
considering certain nonhuman animals superior to others for arbitrary reasons.
A very familiar case in point being (for
the North Americans) the preferential treatment accorded to dogs over cattle or
say to chimpanzees over edible fishes and other sea animals.
Analogously, some species are not merely
treated as superior to others but are simply seen and perceived to be superior
to others such as horses over pigs and sparrows over chickens.
While all these arguments are apparently
very intuitive the speciesists have a problem when their arguments are taken to
the extremes of non human spectrum.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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