The question every animal advocate has heard
"Why worry about animals when there are still so many humans who need help?"
The most common answer is: "Helping animals doesn't stop anyone from helping humans." That's true, but the author goes further.
Comparing the situations
Think about three facts:
- many animals live in a situation much worse than most humans;
- the number of animal victims is enormously larger than the number of human victims;
- far more people already work to help humans than to help animals.
If all the victims were human, with these same numbers, nobody would say the smaller, less affected group should come first. We'd say the opposite.
The impartiality test
The author suggests: imagine you don't know the species of the victims of each problem. You only know how many there are, how much they suffer, and how many people already help. Which problem would you think is more urgent?
Very likely, the animals' problem. The idea that humans always come first only seems normal because of speciesism.
This doesn't mean abandoning humans
The point isn't to stop helping people. It's to recognize that the situation of animals deserves much more attention than it gets today, because it's very serious, it affects a huge number of individuals, and almost nobody is taking care of it.
In short
- Animals are far more numerous, suffer a lot, and get little help.
- Without knowing the victims' species, we'd see this as urgent.
- Automatically putting humans first is one more form of speciesism.