Treating Animals Ethically

Byline: Peter Singer For most of human history, animals have been seen as beings of no ethical significance, or at best, of very minor significance. Sadly, this way of thinking has been particularly prominent in Western thinking. Aristotle thought that animals exist for the sake of more rational humans, to provide them with food and clothing. St Paul asked "Doth God care for oxen?" but it was a rhetorical question - he assumed that the answer was obviously no. Later Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas reinforced this view, denying that the suffering of animals is any reason, in itself, for not harming them. (The only reason they offered for not being cruel to animals was that it may lead to cruelty to humans; the animals themselves were of no account.) In the East, although the Hindu and Buddhist traditions did not recognize the same kind of gap between humans and animals as did the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, in practice the treatment of animals was no better, and sometimes even worse.