Coyote on the French Prairie, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

At age seven, sitting at the dinner table with my family, I prodded my fork into a thick, squishy brown shape on my plate. My grandmother, who lived with us, had cooked her traditional Lithuanian-Jewish Litvak meal, and everyone had dug in. “What is it?” I asked. My beloved gran whispered back from across the table, “tongue.” I stuck out my tongue. “This kind?” She smiled. “Yes, darling, but from a cow, not a little girl.” It was my first moral shock. Animals are our friends, aren’t they? Certainly, my dog Bronnie was, and all the animals in the picture books and animated films I saw as a child suggested this. Do we cut out our friends’ tongues and eat them? My second moral shock came years later when I saw images of the horror of industrialized animal agriculture and factory farms. How can grown-ups allow this? What I didn’t know then was that some of the most influential thinkers in Western history had already answered these strange paradoxes. The answers to these questions, and Western society’s broad agreement, have led to the systemic violence resulting in animal cruelty we see today, which I have spent my life trying to fight.

Our toxic relationship with animals has existed for more than 2,500 years. And while it may feel like humanity has advanced and we are progressive, we have inherited an ancient school of thought that normalized animal suffering and integrated it into our social structures; it is the water we swim in today.

Around 88 billion land animals were slaughtered globally in 2024. Meanwhile, people catch trillions of fish each year. These figures show a huge surge in meat consumption since reporting systems were established in 1960. Sentient Media reported that “poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, [as] the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg—an increase of almost 600 percent.”

Despite decades of animal protection advocacy, suffering keeps growing. Sentient (feeling) animals are subjected to what many consider torturous lives: impregnated, separated from their young, caged, mutilated, and killed daily. Their suffering is not only legal but also unremarkable, part of the systemized functioning of our industries, institutions, and daily meals. Animals are legally classified as property, and many governments do not consider them sentient or as having inherent moral value. They are objects under our control.

Scholar Lori Gruen distinguishes between two kinds of anthropocentrism, or human-centered thinking. One is inevitable, given our human vantage point. The other kind, which she terms arrogant anthropocentrism, rests on the claim that humans are superior to all other beings. It is this belief in human superiority that justifies animal exploitation and is the focus of this article. We begin by asking, where did this idea come from?

Humans have eaten animals and used them for labor for time immemorial. This was supported by several ancient influencers and thinkers, almost all of whom were European men, who sanctified their use in the Western worldview. This moral permission structure has been carved into the bones of our laws, institutions, pedagogies, and civil societies. Philosophy didn’t invent our use of animals, but it justified and normalized that use.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose work reflected views similar to those of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, believed that human life is deeply social and that we each inherit ways of thinking from the culture and society we are part of. Bourdieu said, “In each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result.”

Ancient Foundations

Scholars tracing the historical origins of the ideas that shaped our treatment of animals often arrive at the same starting point: the ancient Greeks. Their rationality and reasoning provided the human-animal hierarchy with its philosophical backbone.

Plato imparted his teachings to Aristotle, and their ideas accumulated into a tradition that became foundational and ingrained in every aspect of life. Plato argued that rational men possessed immortal, superior souls, while enslaved people and barbarians lacked the capacity or strength for reasoning, and animals had inferior souls driven by desire and emotions. This theory shaped the rationale behind our worldview and was used to determine the moral worth of humans and nonhumans. Today, we can recognize this hierarchical thinking as the kind of overlapping inequality examined through an intersectional lens, which Merriam-Webster describes as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or........

© CounterPunch