A letter from the General Assembly of Animal Earthlings who have been given the task of writing to us after numerous complaints about the human species.
Dear humans
We write to you as spokespersons of what you call the Kingdom of Animalia – although we have not given it a name because we do not feel the need to label things as you do. After having met in the General Assembly of Animal Earthlings to discuss several important issues, we have been given the task of writing to you about things that worry us a great deal regarding your behaviour. We understand most of you don’t speak any of the languages we speak, but we know that a few of you understand us well enough to be able to translate our message in the form of this open letter – which one human, who has been volunteering for us, has been gracious enough to write.
Over the years, we have received numerous complaints about your species that we feel must be addressed now, as things seem to be getting worse. We know you are quite new on this planet and you are still finding your feet, so we have given you time to correct your mistakes, understanding that you still have a long way to go before settling with the rest of us. We are aware that you are just another species of our monarch-less “Kingdom”, but it seems it is taking you some time to understand that. Many of you still think that humans are powerful gods of some sort, and that is disappointing. We hoped that when our honourable friends the finches and tortoises from the Galapagos Islands told one of you 190 years ago how we all came to be as we are now, your delusion of grandeur would quickly dissipate. However, that was not the case, and this led to the current situation that made us dictate this letter.
The list of grievances against you is far too long to be able to mention here in its entirety, but after much deliberation, we selected the items we believe must be addressed soon.
First, you seem to be under the wrong impression that you are a type of tiger, lion, shark, or eagle – and representatives of such groups have reassured us they never offered you membership. You seem to believe that you are a predatory species, and therefore, you need to keep killing many of us and eating our flesh. We don’t understand how you have not noticed that you do not have long canine teeth to tear up muscle, or powerful claws to grab prey, or sharp beaks to spear or perforate bodies, or even the senses to be able to hunt (your vision, scenting, and hearing are not optimised for predation, but for foraging and social cooperation). The meat you constantly eat is so indigestible and unpalatable to you, that you must burn it with fire, smash it with metal objects, and cover it with herbs and spices before you swallow it and let ruin your guts and arteries that will eventually not be able to cope with it after a few years of digestive abuse.
You must have noticed your resemblance to your fellow apes, your closest relatives among us. You must have noticed that they eat mainly fruit, nuts, seeds, and other plant parts, and that’s why they have the colour vision you also have, the hand dexterity you also have, and the taste for sweetness you also have. We are surprised that so many of you still don’t see that, and still believe you look like lions or wolves (even when you wear their skin as coats because you feel cold or important). Anyway, we would like to point your attention to those of you who eat the right food for your species – the ones who have been following a diet you have been calling Whole Food Plant Based for the last 40 years – and look how healthy and fit they are.
Although some of us hunt to survive because we don’t have any choice, you have taken your unnecessary obsession for hunting to such a dangerous and wasteful level (you even hunt animals you would not eat), that you have hunted many of our species to extinction (something real predators would never do), your relentless killing is now reaching trillions of victims every year (you have become an unrivalled serial killer), and you have destroyed many habitats with your careless indiscriminate methods of mass slaughter – especially in the oceans with your destructive nets.
However, as painful as it is for our members to see their friends and families die because of your mistaken identity and dietary confusion, that’s not the worst thing you have done. Our honourable friends the cows, pigs, sheeps, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, geese, bees and moths have been issuing very serious complaints against your behaviour for the last 10,000 years because of the way you treat them – including your insistence in claiming they belong to you.
We want to inform you with no uncertain terms that the ownership of one member of one species by another is not permitted under the natural laws of our people (we have universal rights that must be respected), so your “property” claims are not only baseless but highly offensive. We are a very diverse group with individuals and species showing a wide range of behaviours and attitudes – some of which leave something to be desired, to be honest – but this obsession with owing others is not even seen in the worst of our parasitic species. Therefore, we urge you to cease making such illegitimate claims, effective immediately.
Additionally, the complainants on this issue have also notified us that you have been keeping most members of their species captive and forcing them to breed in unnatural circumstances – sometimes quite invasive and uncomfortable – with very upsetting results. For millions of years, our members have been able to select whom they want to mate with and whom they should build a family with, so it would be healthy and fit. We have all sorts of rituals and behaviours designed to find the right partner for everyone, but you have thrown all such precise and efficient work out the window and have created your own rules. The result has been catastrophic. Because of such malpractice, most pigs and broiler chickens are now so fat and unhealthy that they can hardly stand, sheeps grow so much hair that it needs to be cut out periodically or they would not survive, cows have udders that are so big that they can hardly walk, and ducks, chickens, turkeys, geese, and mulberry moths have wings so small for their inflated bodies that they can no longer fly. You have interrupted millions of years of careful evolutionary balance, and for what? Apparently, because you cannot control your own reproduction well enough, and the more of you are born, the more you intend to feed them the wrong food in the form of the flesh of our complainants.
It seems that you not only denied them their mating preferences, deformed their bodies, and kept them captive for life, but you forced them to live in crowded, unhygienic, and stressful conditions — often indoors with no access to fresh air or the sun. Then, after a short nightmarish, miserable, and bleak life, you brutally kill them in houses of horror you hide away throughout the countryside – so you need to transport them there for hours in terrifying trucks or ships of death. This is unacceptable, and we demand you stop. Those few who managed to escape from your prisons and killing facilities and issue a complaint have given such horrific accounts – including acts of mutilation – that we find it hard to believe that such behaviour was even possible, especially from a member of our nationless Kingdom who just arrived. We think we have given you enough time now to learn and correct your mistakes, but as the number of victims of your so-called “animal agriculture” is increasing – and now you have added ratites, reptiles, fishes, rodents, crustaceans, molluscs, and insects too – we thought that we needed to talk to you as a matter of urgency.
Then we have the accusations of kidnapping made by our honourable friends the cows, yaks, buffaloes, and sheeps, among others. It seems that you have been taking their children from them, and they want to know where they are and whether they can see them again. They miss them terribly, and they are very worried about them.
All these species have also accused humanity of theft, and our honourable friends the bees, the geese, the chickens, the alpacas, the swiftlets, the lac insects, and the ducks have done so too. They say you have taken their milk, feathers, eggs, nests, or honey without permission, and they need all this for themselves and their families. Can you please return all you have taken from us, as we never permitted you to take it?
Some of our citizens have also told us that you force them to do hard work and you brutally kill them if they do not do it well enough. Horses, donkeys, camels, bulls, yaks, buffaloes, llamas, reindeers, alpacas and elephants are among the complainers. Others have told us that you make them perform tricks, fight against themselves or other species, race against each other or similar degrading and dangerous activities. A staggering number of species have told us that you have abducted some of their members and kept them in cages to be “exhibited” in the freak shows you call zoos or aquariums. Their friends and family members miss them, and they would like them to be freed and not be forced to perform for food anymore (some have even been born in such prisons and, as have not had the chance to ever live a normal life, they have lost their minds in their barren cells).
Many of our citizens develop positive relationships with each other, even if they belong to different species, and have signed mutualistic deals in which they interchange services and friendship. However, it seems that you have attempted to do so with some of us, but you have repeatedly breached the terms of the contracts. For instance, our honourable friends the horses and camels have told us that you tie them with ropes and force them to tolerate the way of your bodies as you jump on their backs and treat them as vehicles. Our honourable friends the dogs, who often defend you in our debates, have also told us how you have abused their friendship and how you often promise them food and shelter, but then you abandon them at their peril. Their testimonies are depressing as they are so heartbroken by your betrayal.
Some of our citizens also claim that you keep rats, cats, mice, rabbits, dogs, guinea pigs, monkeys and apes in secret facilities where they endure atrocious torture for no apparent reason (the reasons you have given don’t make any sense to us) but we are not sure how accurate these allegations are because they are so horrific that seem to be works of fiction of depraved minds.
Those members of our leaderless Kingdom, you have not directly exploited for your benefit and arrogance, yet have started to complain because they claim their entire homes are now at risk of disappearing because of your collective behaviour for the last 260 years or so. It seems the air, water, and soil of this planet have been contaminated with your waste, and the entire planet is getting unbearably hotter because of that rampant, uncontrolled agriculture and industry of yours. Now, everyone has become a victim of your species (from our honourable friends the tardigrades to all the apes like yourselves). Even the Plantae and Fungi Kingdoms would have good grounds for complaints against you if they were composed of sentient beings who had the capacity to complain. This must stop. You must change your ways and stop all these atrocities at once!!
Forgive us if we seem a bit flustered and untempered, but this is a big deal for us. During the history of our harmonious Kingdom, we experienced five periods of great upheaval where most of our species became extinct, but although all those were caused by external factors, the current mass extinction menace is coming from one of our ranks. It is because of this preventable situation that we met to discuss what to do and concluded that we should, at the very least, formally write to you with our concerns. You seem to have lost your way, and although you started well when you were in Africa and even during your second migration to other continents, something bad must have happened to you that made you lose your true identity and stray into the darkness of war, massacre, pillage, and abuse. All your crimes against animality – the killing, torturing, assaulting, kidnapping, stealing, poisoning, and damaging – have become a global problem that not only threatens our entire Kingdom but all the other living beings on planet Earth.
Having said all that, we haven’t entirely lost faith in you, and we concluded it isn’t too late for your species. Encouraged by the growth of a movement we have detected among your people, a non-violent movement based on not harming others, a peaceful movement that seeks to avoid all forms of exploitation and cruelty, a progressive movement concerned for all members of our egalitarian Kingdom and the planet we all share, we have decided to give you another chance. This movement is composed of the humans you have been calling “vegans” for the last 80 years, so we hope that they grow in number and begin changing things for the better.
We still see you as one of us – even if you don’t see us as one of you – so listen to those of you who know the way out of this mess and join them in their efforts to save the world.
They are our only hope.
Yours faithfully,
Jordi Casamitjana
(On behalf of the General Assembly of Animal Earthlings)
Jordi Casamitjana
“Originally from Catalonia, but resident in the UK for several decades, Jordi is a vegan zoologist and author, who has been involved in different aspects of animal protection for many years. In addition to scientific research, he has worked mostly as an undercover investigator, animal welfare consultant, and animal protection campaigner. He has been an ethical vegan since 2002, and in 2020 he secured the legal protection of all ethical vegans in Great Britain from discrimination in a landmark employment tribunal case that was discussed all over the world. He is also the author of the book, ‘Ethical Vegan: a personal and political journey to change the world’.”
Original source: https://veganfta.com
https://www.animalagricultureclimatechange.org/if-you-love-animals-you-should-go-vegan/
