By Varda Mehrotra (Executive Director, FIAPO)

The last few months have seen an onslaught of new policies and retaliatory citizen protests across the country. We live in uncertain times – changes that impact the very fabric of our Indian constitution and society. And animals, of course are very much a part of it. As animal activists, when we demand that society includes animals in its discourse, we need to be open to responding too, by being affected and participating in the wider citizen spaces around us. Animals will be isolated as long as we continue to isolate them.

It’s now impossible to have a conversation about animals without talking about religion. In case you missed it, the Kerala beef fry controversy this month is an excellent example of how every aspect seems to be discussed about the issue except – the animal that was killed for his body, and the injustice of it all. Religion, after all, is what you do when the prayer is over. Most animal advocates are now tired of animals being used as pawns and no longer engaging with the issue – at our own peril. It’s no surprise then, when the animal rights movement is seen as an elitist and isolated issue – that of kutte billi.

Yet, it is not difficult for us to build bridges. After all, of all movements, our circle of compassion is probably the widest, including all living beings. So injustice happening to any one, is injustice for all and needs to be resisted. We stand against oppressors, we stand in solidarity with any marginalized or relegated sections of the society that need support. We stand against violence and oppression. We stand for respect, equality and justice of all habitants of the earth, across religion, caste, creed, colour and of course, species.

The same compassionate impulse that led us to support animal rights leads us to support liberation for all human beings. We all belong to the commonwealth of sentient beings, and it is to this commonwealth that we owe our loyalty. There can be no question of there being a pecking order of sentient beings, and deciding that one—say human beings- to take the most obvious example—have a moral precedence over others because they are supposedly “more aware,” or have a “richer” interior life. The pain caused to a chicken is as agonizing to her as a human’s pain is to him. It fills her consciousness, seizes her life, and extinguishes her peace in the same way that a human’s would. And for that simple, basic reason alone, avian pain must be accorded the moral concern as human pain. As holds true for EVERY other sentient being.

This view, expressed by Doctor Kaplan in his 2003 book “The Universal Ethical Principle,” was first stated some twenty-five hundred years ago by the ancient sages who created the very concept of morality. The idea that exploiting and killing nonhuman animals for human benefit is morally wrong first appeared as part and parcel of the same movement that gave birth to the idea that exploiting human beings is morally wrong. The creation of this ethical worldview, a worldview in which ethics was based on morality rather than on ritual purity—as had been the case prior to this—and in which all sentient beings were included on an equal basis, happened in three different places—India, Israel, and Greece—almost simultaneously. This radical transformation in human thought occurred during the uniquely fertile and creative period that 20th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers dubbed “the Axial Age,” the period between roughly 800 and 200 BCE in which human thought pivoted, as if rotating on an axis.

To phrase it anachronistically, but accurately, animal rights and human rights originated simultaneously as part of the same movement and represented, at their inception, coequal applications of the same principle. One struggle, one fight might well have been a motto of Lord Mahavira, the Buddha, the Hindu sages, Pythagoras, and the Latter Prophets.

And yet, when modern scholars and religious leaders—at least in the West—consider the Axial Age, they invariably overlook the inclusion of animals in the morality of the great sages.

Given this moral blind spot in our society, perhaps it should come as no surprise that activists in the various human rights movements have lost the connection with the ancient beginnings.

However, as Thich Nhat Hnah put it, “There’s a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the earth. Our personal and collective happiness and survival depend on her”.

Because there is one thing that is very clear: as inhabitants of the earth, we need her – the earth doesn’t need us and there shouldn’t be any misperception about that.