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Animal Rights

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James Brown, poet laureate of Funk, once opined, “it’s a man’s world.” He would have been more accurate had he said that it is a human’s world. The countless and unknown numbers of fauna that populate Earth are here as secondary citizens to the almighty God of humanity and bend and break at his whim. Put simply, their planetary function is to serve mankind. Be it under the yoke, the scientist’s scalpel, or peppered with steak sauce on the infinite dinner plate of time, animals are treated as functionary beings here but by the grace of humanity deigning it so. At any time, that right to life can be revoked. There is only a single, logical conclusion how this hierarchy came to pass: when humans formed/were informed by their respective God(s), their respective religions placed them above the beast (Hinduism being the exception that proves the rule.) As a result, the concept of God and the associative religion is responsible for the needless wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent animals every year. Before religion, there was an inarguable need for the killing of and eating of animals. First, animals posed a serious threat to the evolutionary fitness of human beings as they evolved. With the world un-girded and untamed, the interactivity between man and beast of serious consequence was at a much higher ratio. Second, the protein and amino compounds found in meat allowed for the human brain to advance at a level that it very well may otherwise been unable to (Wilcox, 2014.) So historically, there is a precedent. But as the human brain evolved, complicit with were the concepts of cosmology and epistemology. Soon (in the scientific sense of soon, meaning eons), humans needed to make order out of the chaotic gloop that slathered existence. They begin etching pictograms into cave walls detailing their relationship to the cosmos and the Sun (an early frontrunner in

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