Many people continue to believe that God created animals to provide food for man. If this is indeed so, why should animals scream and howl in pain when they are slaughtered? Perhaps you will argue that they have not read the scriptures!
A holy man I know tells his disciples who still want to eat meat, “Fine! But don’t buy the meat. Kill the animal yourself and eat him.” Many of us continue to eat flesh only because someone else does all the killing and the bloodshed, and the meat is brought, beautifully prepared to our table.
Do you know how animals are tortured before they are slaughtered? I suggest you watch the video titled, ‘Meet your meat’ which is widely available on the Internet. Let me warn you: it is horrifying! Just to get the momentary pleasure of taste, just to indulge the palate, people turn a blind eye to the cruel slaughter of innocent creatures’ day after day and only focus on devouring their flesh.
The phrase ‘sanctity of life’ embraces concepts of religion, ethics, morality, and law. It is based on the idea that all life is sacred, and the right to life of every creature is inviolable. This also implies that all life is to be protected and all attempts to violate or endanger the life of any sentient creature amount to a violation of the sanctity of God’s creation.
Of course, man is the crown of the creation, the undisputed sovereign of planet earth. Of course, human rights is a worthy cause, and human life is precious. But the stand taken by animal rights activists and humble advocates of the ideal of reverence for all life like myself is this: we object to the arbitrary discrimination that non-human lives are expendable and can be freely sacrificed to satisfy the human palate; we think it morally and ethically wrong to inflict needless pain and suffering on dumb and defenceless creatures just because they do not belong to our human species! Our understanding of the sanctity of life teaches us that oppression and exploitation must end wherever they are allowed to occur.
“No nation can be free, until its animals are free. The world cannot be at peace until all forms of exploitation cease!”
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