Killing An Animal is Morally Worse Than Fucking Them

It sounds crazy, but it is true

Let us consider the process it takes for your juicy chicken to hit your plate from the point of view of the chicken. This chicken steps out of his shell into a world where it is already predetermined that it will die to garnish someone's plate. Its parents and every other chicken it knows are held in unending slavery by an entity that is foreign to it. This does not matter to the chicken, however. Sometimes life is tough, and the chick goes about its day and focuses on the chore of surviving to adulthood. And then one day, the chick realizes that its siblings are being mass kidnapped while still in shells and taken off the farm. But again, this is just the regular course of events. Sometimes life is tough—what are you going to do?

Next, the chicken sees the farmer taking its mom from the shed and slaughtering her, right in its front. This obviously sucks, but we can also hope that the chicken ignores this. After all, it isn't smart enough to realize what is happening. One day, after all of that, the farmer grabs the chicken, who's now grown and healthy, and puts a knife to its throat. This chicken's three-year life span has been extinguished just like that.

If chickens could reason, they would obviously consider human beings to be psychopathic monsters that stories should be told about. We would be mythical monsters in their folklore, and they would imagine us to be the embodiment of evil. Think about it. What do human farmers do to sell chicken? They enslave them, practice eugenics on them, and then commit the most psychotic version of genocide on them just to cannibalize their flesh. If we found a group of humans who did the same thing we do to chickens to other humans, we would most likely murder them and pat ourselves on the back for doing it. But yet we do all of this, on a large scale, to animals.

Let us consider the process of bestiality. The rapist takes an animal—let us say a goat—to his backyard and rapes it. Maybe the goat screams during the intercourse, and in maybe a minute or two, the fellow is done. After that, he sets the goat free (or does he? I am not familiar with the ways of goat fuckers). The bottom line is that the goat lives to die another day and can go on minding its business and living after the incident.

From the above, it is more than obvious, I should hope, that from the point of view of the animal, the people who eat its meat and grow it for that purpose are worse than those who inflict temporary pain on it through rape. Despite this conclusion being so obvious, our current moral establishment is so out of sync that we reach the opposite conclusion. Eating animal flesh is okay and mundane—we don't think much of it. While the lesser evil, from the point of view of the animal, is treated as some gross abomination that is evidence of extraordinary depravity. The question isn't whether raping an animal is morally better than eating them; the question is why the heck we ever thought it wasn't. It goes against every notion we seem to have about morality. Everyone agrees that killing someone is worse than raping them. So why don't we vilify people who eat goat meat more than people who fuck goats?

The answer is simple: our assumptions about the basis of our morality are incorrect. For example, why is bestiality so bad? Two hundred years ago, the answer would have been a simple quote from the Bible, or an argument talking about how unnatural it is. That was because western moral notions (which I have had to buy into) used to be about objective divine moral rules and appeals to tradition. Today, that tradition is largely dead. Westerners (and young people in the third world—to the extent that I relate to them) seem to be functionally atheist even if they do not profess atheism and go to church on Sundays. As such, it is not okay to merely assert that some moral rule comes from God. Now, we have to provide a full dose of moral reasoning.

Rape, for instance, isn't bad because God says rape is bad. Rape is bad because the victim does not offer consent and it violates very personal boundaries. What God thinks of rape, in this case, is quite irrelevant. Since bestiality can no longer be opposed on the grounds of the divine—because most people no longer believe in the moral pronouncements of the divine—we also have to oppose it based on custom moral arguments. The argument here seems to be twofold. The first is that animals cannot meaningfully consent to sex, and as such, any form of bestiality is de facto rape. And since rape is bad, according to the already established moral rules concerning rape, the rape of animals is even doubly bad since they have no recourse to the law or society. A raped goat will never tell your secret and will never give you a goat-human hybrid. It is the perfect crime, which supposedly makes it extra reprehensible.

There is a second reason bestiality is bad, and this one is purely utilitarian. The argument is that having sex with animals carries an extra risk of diseases jumping from animals to humans, and that is obviously catastrophic. A good example of this, one might say, is HIV. When it first broke out in the '80s, there were rumors that the virus had broken out through sexual contact some hunters had with baboons and whatnot. Since AIDS has been so catastrophic to humanity, it makes sense to wonder why we should allow any act that might lead to an illness of the sort jumping from animals to humans.

These arguments seem sound, but it is implausible that they are the reasons we are so against bestiality. That is because eating animal flesh also contradicts both arguments. When we kill animals, we don't ask for their consent either. We factory farm them and practice eugenics on them on an extraordinary scale, and we do all of this without their input. People who think consent is the primary thing in moral engagements suddenly forget about consent when they chew on that juicy chicken leg, despite the fact that we know that animals also suffer pain and agony—just like we do—when they die. Secondly, the argument that fucking animals is inherently dangerous because of spillover events that may lead to a disease is also awful on that account. Most disease jumps from animals to humans haven't been because of horny baboon fuckers in the Congo; they have been because of hungry animal eaters everywhere else. So if we really cared about diseases from animals, we would encourage people to fuck them, not eat them. Of course, the best option would be to do neither.

It is clear that our moral arguments against bestiality aren't the reason we see fucking animals as an abomination. There is something else, and that something else seems pretty obvious: the very act disgusts us. Sex, ordinarily, seems quite disgusting. There is a reason why people don't do it in public and people say it is rude to speak about even notions of it in polite company. But sex with animals? That act, for some reason, combines all the latent disgust of sex and none of the horniness that seeing it in the wild might inspire in us.

This sort of disgust is the type a homophobe has when they see two full-bearded men going at it. In my country, this act disgusts homophobes so much that they often lynch both men when they are caught. The same punishment is often meted out on people who sleep with animals. If one is caught by a significantly outraged fellow, they get a custom lynching. This latent disgust is shared by all human cultures. There are human cultures that ritualize cannibalism and human sacrifice—there are none who ritualize fucking your dog. That, and that alone, is the reason why bestiality is outlawed everywhere. We don't outlaw it because we care about the animal or we care about ourselves. We outlaw it because it disgusts us.

Now, to you, this may seem like a fairly anodyne conclusion. Yes, fucking animals is literally disgusting. That is a good emotion to have, and it is okay to outlaw sex with animals based on that emotion alone. But if you are a young liberal person who is in lockstep with our new and fascinating moral norms concerning women and LGBTQ individuals, this would automatically refute your entire argument for those pet causes. If disgust is a rational reason for you to be against bestiality, isn't it an equally rational reason for others to be against homosexuality? What makes your disgust better than theirs? There are many people, as I have pointed out, who feel literally the same disgust they feel when they see a man fucking a dog as they feel when they see a man fucking another man. What makes their disgust-rationale bad and your disgust-rationale good?

There are more difficult conclusions to reach. If human disgust can be such a broad basis for laws, what does that tell us about our morality? Is it all just disgust reaction, and whatever reasons we invent for moral rules only serve to bury the lede beneath moral posturing? Importantly, on what grounds do we continue to kill animals and celebrate the eating of their flesh? The answer is simple: we simply believe that animals are an out-group to which our moral rules don't apply. There are some who think we don't apply these rules to animals because they are incapable of thinking and feeling; but that is false. A lot of animals have more intelligence than the average 3-month-old baby and imbecile adult, yet it isn't legal or moral to kill them and eat their flesh. They have intrinsic moral worth because they are humans, not because they can feel or think.

Ergo, the demarcating factor between animals and humans isn't reducible to mere difference in cognitive abilities, but to tribal differences in nature; the human race is the human race, and the animal race can never belong to it, no matter how smart or cognitively advanced the animal is. Therefore, the dumbest human has more worth than the smartest animal. That is why when we speak of animal rights, we often only speak of it in terms of the rights allowed to animals that humans like. A few years ago, Kurt Zuma kicked his cat and got into a lot of trouble with the British authorities for it. Why did he get into so much trouble for kicking a cat in a nation where millions of chickens are slaughtered every year? Is kicking a cat worse than killing chickens? Yes, the consensus was. And this wasn't because of stronger cognitive ability on the part of cats, but because humans have a stronger emotional connection to them. So even when we give animals rights, we do it on the basis of the emotional connection we have with them. It is difficult to think of a more psychopathic thing. And we all contribute to it every day.

There are even worse conclusions to reach. If we accept this arbitrary in-group argument when it comes to animals, can we complain too much when other humans do the same to us? What if Asians suddenly decide that everyone who isn't Asian ranks on the same level as a dog? Remember, if they reach this conclusion, they do not have to do it because of some special quality Asians have—they could as well do it because they believe Asians are different from others, just like we seem to have done with animals. What would be our counter-argument? What could be our counter-argument? Similarity isn't even in the question; baboons are fairly similar to us, but you'll face more problems if you murdered someone's dog than if you captured and tortured a baboon. Importantly, has this not happened before? When Arabs and Europeans enslaved blacks, they did so because they did not consider blacks as members of their own race. And that must have been easy, considering the obvious differences between races.

Interestingly, this in-group demarcation of moral rules doesn't only happen between members of different races. The Arochukwu famously did it to the rest of the Igbos by carrying on an extraordinarily inhumane human trafficking gig. The Aztecs primarily sourced their human sacrifice victims from their neighbors. And can we forget the fact that Roman citizens could not be enslaved? So, as we can see, humans have a long history of applying moral rules to members of their group and seeing outsiders as vermin.

A close consideration of these facts leads to some sober conclusions. The first is that the continued and apparently mundane eating and killing of animals means that the human race is inherently fascistic. We do not need to eat human animal flesh; we just do it because it is tasty and makes our lives a little bit better. I have no doubt in my mind that if we encountered an alien race that could think almost as well as us, we would waste no time in enslaving them and eating their flesh if they prove tasty. After all, we already do—or blithely accept when it is done to animals that have approximately the same qualities as aliens. And we do it only because they aren't humans.

The second conclusion is that our moral reasoning is often merely a disguise to hide our disgust-rationale. Bestiality is not outlawed because of some straightforward moral logic; it is outlawed because humans feel disgusted at it. As such, we are imposing our own moral rules on other humans who might enjoy sleeping with animals because—and only because—we think it is disgusting. These victims (because isn't that what they are?) do not consent to be ruled by our disgust. Yet we do so anyway, and there is not much they can do because we have the power. Ergo, our might is what decides what is right for others. And if this conclusion is true for bestiality, who says it isn't true for many other laws which are not arrived at through the same moral reasoning? Today, we can see that it is the same disgust-rationale that mandated(ed) anti-gay laws. But for some reason, we do not see that this same logic is what underpins many social conventions, and their results are then imposed upon us through force. These are somewhat counterintuitive conclusions, but they seem true anyway.

Last year, I read a fascinating book by some man named Redbeard. It was forceful, insightful, and the central hypothesis that everything—all morals, all laws, all arguments of that nature—rest on a bedrock of open force. It was a sour book, but a close analysis of our current moral establishment and what it dictates seems to prove Redbeard correct. So where does this leave us? If everything is merely a disguised struggle for power, where does that leave our internal moral compasses? Do we even have that, or is everything a result of societal brainwashing? Are our moral positions even ours?

I can only answer for myself. I don't believe in some north star of objective morality, and my moral reasoning is extremely utilitarian. When considering the trolley problem, my answer is always whatever leads to fewer deaths. Unfortunately for animals, I only apply this moral philosophy to humans—and not even completely so, at that. The life of my family, for example, is worth more to me than the lives of everyone else. Similarly, the life and pains of a chicken are worth less to me than the satisfaction I get from eating them. And the disgust I feel at man and animal sexual intercourse is more important to me than the logic that argues that my reasoning is incoherent. I am happy I live in a society and exist within a human race that is so closely aligned with my sensibilities. It is such a nice random and totally accidental coincidence, as I say. And I am glad for it. Yes, I know that killing an animal is morally worse than raping them. But I will eat animals and report you to the police for fucking them anyway. I don’t care about moral objectivity. What of it?

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