The double standards of speciesism

THE term has been around since 1970, but I’ve only recently learned how to spell it. S-p-e-c-i-e-s-i-s-m. You know, assigning different values to different creatures depending on what species they belong to.

We do it without realising. Obviously, we have put our own species at the top of the heap, because we are the cleverest – and also the most dangerous and destructive, but we gloss over that.

So anyway – speciesism was massively in the news recently, not by name, but by the actions of certain members of the British royal family, and then by the reactions of everyone else. You’ll be aware that elephants are being illegally hunted for their ivory, and that they are now endangered. Like most people, Princes Charles and William think this is terrible, and have been making lots of noise about it. Save the elephant, they implore. Great. Who could argue with such an idea, other than the most monstrous ivory-coveter?

Yet the day before the princes launched their inter-generational campaign to leave elephants alone, they went out shooting other species in Spain, just for fun. Deer, boar, that kind of thing — smaller herbivores that do not possess ivory and are not endangered.

Cue outrage. What hideous hypocrisy, thundered everyone. Even the toadiest royal reporters flustered about how this latest royal faux pas would be interpreted by commoners everywhere. Clue: not very positively. How dare the royals bang on about one species while not 24 hours earlier they had been taking potshots at another? What sort of message was that sending out?

Not a very coherent one, that’s for sure. Yet you can bet your ivory keyboard many of the outraged were, while not condemning royals for their absurdly mixed message, planning on having sausages for their tea. Or burgers, steak chicken or fish.

This is speciesism. We deem elephants more important than cows. Cows more important than chickens. Dogs more important than pigs. Why? Pigs are more intelligent than dogs – it’s been proven, over and over – yet we treat one species as companions, the other as dinner. The dinner species have, therefore, a life so hellish we prefer not to even think about it, and so we don’t, even as we drive our dogs to the pet shop to buy them winter coats and chewy toys and then we go home to our sausages.

In cultures where dog is on the dinner menu, we utterly freak out about it. We have always thought the French a bit iffy for their open appreciation of horsemeat – horses are for gymkhanas, cows are for dinner. That is the natural order of things. Is it? Actually there is nothing natural about speciesism, other than the supposedly cleverest species deluding ourselves.