Humans raise mink in horrible conditions just to be slaughtered so we can make a fashion statement. Then, when the very conditions we created become an inconvenience to us, we slaughter them and fail to make even frivolous use of them, rendering their tortured lives even more pointless and sad.
After all that you have to be pretty callous and self-important as a species to think "Humans > Minks"
You're giving human measures of value undue precedence here. It's the same way racists give precedence to their own race, colonialists give precedence to their own culture, and how most humans give precedence to their own species.
You belong to a certain group, in this case humans, and your tendency seems to be to apply measures of value that reward the traits at which your group naturally excels. Which all reduce to physiological traits which were no choice of your own.
If you can't judge one race superior to another for physiological differences (e.g skin color), then how can you in good conscious judge one species superior to another for the same thing, i.e. physiological differences?
I'm always surprised that people generally reject sexism, racism, nationalism, and various other forms of tribalism yet speciesism never seems to register as directly analogous and similarly worthy of condemnation.
Fully agree with you. But this is inconvenient to think about and a lot of people will make you feel like you’re an idiot for challenging our torturing of animals because it makes them uncomfortable. In a way it’s similar to how the most homophobic men are the ones who are the most afraid of their feminine side.
Great comment. Speciesism is just another form of bigotry similar to racism. Bigots try to justify this by pointing out some differences between humans and other species, but differences exist within human species and they are not the basis for discrimination.
I can't prove that a sufficiently impaired mentally disabled human can reason, think, or have values.
But I suppose if I wanted to raise thousands of mentally disabled humans in cages for the purpose of skinning them and selling their hides I would probably justify it to myself by asserting my inherent superiority based on their potential inability to replicate certain biological processes in the fatty organ within their craniums.
That was my point. Humans celebrate themselves for possessing the ability to reason, think, or have values. But judging other species by this standard is a preposterous notion. Just as a dolphin judging humans inferior for our limited ability to catch fish in our mouths via echolocation.
But if one can't judge species according to their own natural abilities we can still judge them according to their interactions with other species. This is where humans, come out looking poor. Mink do not negatively impact humans, and would have essentially no interaction with humans, but humans willfully imprison and brutalize millions of mink for frivolous pleasures.
It's a dismal reality, but the fact that they shouldn't have done this in the first place doesn't have an iota of bearing on what has to happen now. Good luck selling anyone on a rationale that asks them to risk human lives to buy a couple more years for the world's most miserable minks. Ergo, Humans > Minks.
Why are you putting the blame on the whole of humanity? Go place the blame on well off white western women, who are probably the main consumers of such products.
I literally never owned anything made of out fur, let alone mink fur.
The ACTAsia report "China's fur trade" points out that China is the world's largest importer of raw furs, and also consumes 80% of finished fur goods domestically. (https://www.actasia.org/resources/)
If you've got something that says otherwise, let's have it.
When you jump to conclusions you don't describe the world at large, you only describe yourself.
After all that you have to be pretty callous and self-important as a species to think "Humans > Minks"