Drunk man slaughters a human instead of a goat at animal sacrifice festival

Animal sacrifices are not new to Indian festivals irrespective of religions they are done in the name of. At one of such events organized at the local Yellamma temple in Andhra Pradesh, a drunk man(Chalapathi) cut the throat of another man(Suresh) who was holding a goat for cutting her throat. Chalapathi has been arrested and the police proceedings will go through the legal route.

However, this raises an ethical question of why it was then okay to kill a well-grown and fully conscious goat? Eminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has raised the question of automatically assumed gaps in morality applied to nonhumans and humans.

The 'worth' of an animal's life, is just its replacement cost to its owner — or, in the case of a rare species, to humanity. But tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible, embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, uncomputable value. - Richard Dawkins

Dawkins beautifully articulates the parallels between white supremacists who draw the arbitrary moral lines on racial differences and our discrimination on the basis of species differences. If one is to agree with biological evolution (evidence of which renders it as a truth beyond any doubt), it is quite clear that “species” are only taxonomical arbitrary lines drawn for academic purposes. To discriminate on the basis of those is not only undarwinian but highly unethical.

“Speciesism”, a term coined in the 1970s was further refined by Peter Singer in his seminal work  “Animal Liberation” in which he illustrated very convincingly how discrimination on the basis of the “species one is born into” is just an extension of discrimination done on the basis of the “skin one is born in” or the “sex one is born with”. 

Opposition to speciesism is fundamental to Animals Rights movements and to Veganism. It is for this reason and not just the emotions of “kindness” and “love”, that we as vegans ought to raise the questions on “normalized” practices of slaughtering nonhumans on purpose as opposed to the outrage and legal actions(rightly done so) for slaughtering a human even by accident.

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