The Mirror of Abuse: How Our Treatment of Animals Reflects Our Violence Toward Humanity

OP/ED

"When we choose not to harm animals, we are not only freeing them, we are freeing ourselves. We are rejecting the machinery of violence that has numbed us, and reconnecting with the part of ourselves that still feels, still hopes, and still cares."

If we ever want to understand why there is so much cruelty in the world, why children are starving, why wars rage endlessly, why our societies feel broken and disconnected, we need to look at how we treat animals. Because the way we treat animals is not separate from the way we treat each other. It is a mirror.

We don’t live in a vacuum. We live on a shared planet, entangled with every other living being. Yet we have built a civilization on domination. We dominate the land. We dominate the seas. We dominate animals. And not surprisingly, we dominate one another. The way we abuse animals doesn’t just coexist with human suffering. It feeds it. It normalizes it. It trains us to accept it. It dulls our compassion and makes violence routine.

Look at our food systems. Every year, over 80 billion land animals are killed for food. Their lives are short, brutal, and mechanized. Pigs smarter than dogs are confined in metal crates where they can’t even turn around. Calves are taken from their mothers within hours of birth so we can steal their milk. Chickens are bred to grow so fast their legs can’t support their weight. It is hard to overstate the cruelty that has become routine in animal agriculture. And most people participate in this without thinking twice, because they were taught to see animals as objects, not individuals.

Now look at how we treat people. We put refugees in cages. We incarcerate Black and brown people at staggering rates. We allow poverty to persist in a world of abundance. We let children die from preventable diseases while billionaires launch vanity rockets into space. We turn away from suffering when it’s inconvenient. We justify the destruction of life with economic arguments. We pass blame to “the system” but forget that systems are made of people.

These two forms of violence, toward animals and toward people, are not just connected. They are part of the same disease.

The same mindset that allows us to ignore the cries of a mother cow as her calf is taken from her is the one that allows us to ignore the cries of a mother in Gaza, or a homeless child in Detroit, or a migrant drowning in the Mediterranean. Once we’ve justified cruelty against the vulnerable, it becomes easier to justify it everywhere. The lines begin to blur. Abuse becomes normalized. Compassion becomes inconvenient. And the world grows colder.