New Age Luddites

Fire may have been among the first real creations of man, but it was perhaps not the most epic!



First, what are animals?  Here is Google's definition:

a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli.

The definition of the word "living" in there is somewhat ambiguous.  In fact, biologists do not even entirely agree.  The most common technical definition is something like "a property of a chemical system that makes it self sustaining."  This makes bacteria, protozoa, plants, and animals living, but viruses are not technically living.  The important parts here though are that animals are first, living organisms, and second, have nervous systems, sense organs that allow them to respond rapidly to stimuli.  That second part is what distinguishes them from plants, at least mostly (many carnivorous plants have specific sense organs and many respond rapidly to stimuli, and most plants can sense sunlight, but I am not aware of any with nervous systems).

Second, where did animals come from?  This is a trick questions.  Vegans and animal rights activists will say they came from nature, through the process of evolution, but that is only valid if houses built by humans came from nature.  Perhaps the original animals came from "nature" through evolution, but claiming that modern animals also did shows a distinct lack of understand of most of human history.

There are a lot of various explanations about where animals came from.  The purely secular answer is natural evolution.  Some people claim that God did it.  Some believe both of these.  But it does not matter, because for many animals that ended tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Many modern animals are man made.  Yes, it is true that natural evolution or God or something other than regular humans created the DNA and life of animals, but that is not relevant here.  The matter we all rely on for pretty much everything was made in stars, but we don't say nuclear weapons were created by stars.  Trees evolved or were created by God just like early animals, but we don't say nature created all of our houses.  This can be argued with anything.  We rely on nature for all of our raw materials, and they were all ultimately created in stars.  Man was created by nature or God.  We could then justify saying that everything we do and make is attributable to nature or God.  And within this view, modern animals are completely natural.  But this is absurd.  If we call houses, cars, buildings, computers, and anything else man made, then so are many animals.

The first domesticated animal that we are aware of was the dog, but we can't really claim that the original domesticated dogs were man made.  It was their choice.  It is believed that the domestication of dogs began with wolf packs that followed nomadic human (or pre-human) tribes.  These wolves followed humans, because humans left behind food scraps that they would eat.  Some of these wolves would approach human camps and act violently, so the humans killed them.  The more aggressive of these wolves would get killed, while the less aggressive would survive, and thus natural selection ultimately breed domesticated dogs.  Of course, since the first domesticated dog was kept as a pet, humans have used selective breeding extensively to create customized dogs, separating dogs as a species entirely from nature and turning them into a completely man made thing.

Sheep and goats came next.  Sheep were breed to be incredibly docile, and while we have ideas, we don't actually know what animal domesticated sheep were originally breed from.

After sheep and goats, we domesticated horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and fairly recently, turkeys.  None of these animals can reasonably be considered the product of nature.  They are all man made animals, and there are many more man made animals as well.

Animal husbandry throughout human history has been an endeavor of creation.  Humans did not just create new breeds of existing animals.  Using existing animals as their raw resources, they created entirely new, man made animals.

In the fringes of the vegan movement is a deeper movement that believes animals are sacred.  They believe that animals deserve the same rights that humans have.  In their zealotry to give animals complete freedom, they advocate either killing or just letting die out (by removing the reproductive freedom, which they strongly advocate for, from these animals) all domesticated species that have been breed to rely on humans for survival.  (I would like to draw a connection here between this and human genocide.  Their argument to support this xenocide of entire domesticated species (which they argue deserve the same rights as humans) is that they are not natural animals, because they are incapable of being free.  Isn't this "not normal" the typical argument for every human genocide?  They are not like natural or real humans?  Welcome to the dark side of veganism!)  Aside from this seriously violating all of their own declared ethics about animals rather horrifically (think about someone suggesting this for substandard humans, which is more or less what they believe they are doing, because they claim that animals are no less valuable than humans), this reveals their true motivation.

Vegans are Luddites.  The original Luddites were a group of people who burned a bunch of automatic looms in Europe, because they feared automation would hurt the weaving industry (and they were right, but it created enough other industries to make up for it).  "Luddite" has since become a word used to describe people who oppose technology or actively support tearing it down.  And in case the above was not obvious enough, domesticated animals are some of our earliest human technology.  Cows are not the product of nature.  Cows as a species belong to humans.  We created cows just like we create houses, cities, cell phones, and anything else.  These extreme vegans are advocating that we destroy some of our most epic creations, because they have nervous systems.  Around a decade ago, some scientists said that Pentium 4 processors had about the same computational power as guppies.  Modern computers are even more powerful.  Should we destroy all of our computers too, because they have central nervous systems and the ability to think at the same level as some animals?  They are at least as dependent on humans for survival as most domesticated animals.

The fact is, most animals are little more than biological robots.  Some argue that even humans are.  We only know of two classes of animals capable of competing with humans on intellect.  These are cephalopods (squid and octopi) and dolphins, and we don't actually know exactly how they compare.  Every other animal is at least an order of magnitude less intelligent than humans.  Yes, this even includes primates, which are probably around one order of magnitude less intelligent.  Chickens, cows, and sheep are incredibly stupid (yes, I have experience).  Pigs are a bit smarter.  Goats are a bit smarter than pigs.  Domesticated turkeys may be the stupidest animal ever to exist (yes, stupider even than the dodo bird, which at least managed to reproduce without human intervention).  None of these is incredibly intelligent.  If their origin species were more intelligent (they probably were, and in the case of turkeys, which we know originated from wild turkeys back in the U.S. colonial era, their origin species is quite intelligent), humans have very successfully breed that out of them.

In other words, vegans are essentially arguing for robot rights.  Yes, it might make some sense to argue that the most intelligent animals, like primates, dolphins, and cephalopods deserve a bit more freedom  than we tend to give them.  Arguing for the freedom of domesticated animals is inane.  We are talking about what is perhaps the biggest, longest running, and most successful human project ever, spanning hundreds or thousands of generations, and these vegans want to just dismantle the program, commit xenocide against everything it has produced, and pretend like all animals have the cognitive capacity to even understand freedom.  And these animals are not even ones that they can reasonably argue should be free, because we have literally breed so much intelligence out of them that they bear more similarity to computerized microfactories than naturally occurring animals.  If you are going to be an anarcho primitivist Luddite, at least own it, instead of hiding behind veganism.