Humans have done the impossible. They have performed an impressive magic trick. They have managed to pillage the natural world whilst claiming to be in awe of the planet, true stewards of the earth delighted by the beauty they observe in every branch, leaf, and butterfly. They have also managed to create unnatural animals with which they can do whatever they please whilst claiming that animals are the real uncivilized beasts, vengeful, unjust creatures on the hunt for clout. They’ve made other claims: that what they do to these animals is natural, normal, and necessary. They’ve claimed that they need certain nutrients from the bodies of these animals - from their flesh, their eggs, their milk. They’ve claimed that they are doing these animals a favour - they’ve given them the gift of life, of being born. 

These are animals they have artificially bred into existence by the billions, solely to be used as property, as objects. Humans own animals. Humans have managed to control every aspect of their lives, from the exact sample of semen from which they will be conceived to the very date of their execution. Their body parts, their bodily functions, their personalities - every aspect of the animal is deemed useless unless it can make humans money. Whether animals will have the right to their bodies, their reproductive systems or their sexualities. Whether their testicles will be intact or whether they will be sliced off. Whether they will lay a hundred eggs a year or three hundred eggs a year. Whether their babies will be able to drink the milk that was intended for them - but even this simple fact is too outrageous for the anthropocene. Of course, the milk of a cow was created for human consumption. What else would it be for?

These animals do not have a reason to be on this planet other than to be slaves to humans - and this is reflected in the barbaric ways they are treated. Humans have claimed they kill them and treat them nicely, compassionately. Humanely enslaving them, only they never actually used the word, “enslave”. How dare they be so honest? They’ve claimed that if they were to stop the slaughter of these creatures — the mass holocaust of these animals by the billions — they would take over the world and there would just be too many cows, chickens, and pigs running around the streets. They’ve made other absurdly evil statements and sincerely convinced their societies that it’s possible to be a good person while paying for impoverished working-class citizens to torture, murder, and butcher animals. 

They’ve managed to wage a war so enormous against these creatures — beings that they’ve modified and selectively bred exactly to their liking — that the average human being wouldn’t even notice that there was a war going on. With the average human effectively conditioned and perfectly ignorant, human beings have managed to justify the unjustifiable. And what else could they do? Extreme brutality and lunacy require extreme rationalization. After everything they have endured, only a brief examination of the relationship between humans and animals depicts the undesirable truth: humans have so much power over animals that they do not even recognize the crimes of their authority. After all, animals are not deserving of the status of victimhood. Animals cannot be considered victims if they are to be victimized; humans cannot be considered oppressors if they wish to oppress.

But to animals, humans are violent tyrants, thirsty for bloodshed and hungry for the power to dominate, decimate, desecrate, and mutilate. They are emaciated until they can taste supremacy on the tips of their tongues, starving until they can gorge on feasts of superiority.