The man-animal arbitrary divide justifies the worst form of atrocities that humans commit on animals. It leads to a mindset that then turns viciously on mankind

In Nobel prize-winning author JM Coetzee's The lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello, the principal protagonist, said during a lecture, “let me say it openly, we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing, which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed, dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”

She was referring to the meat-processing and catering industries' practice of breeding living beings for slaughter but her entire speech in the novel dwelt on human treatment of animals, the essence of which she summed up at one place as “man is godlike, animals thinglike”. Charles Patterson makes same point in, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, “The main coping mechanism that humans employed [to justify their treatment of animals] was the adoption of the view that they were separate from and morally superior to, the other animals….The relationship of humans to other beings became what it is today — one of domination, control, and manipulation — with humans making life-or-death decisions concerning what were now ‘their' animals”.

From here, it was a small step to the mindset that demands genocide of an animal category — frequently stray dogs — on the ground that they might bite or otherwise harm people. Incidents of stray dogs killing — or even attacking — human beings are far fewer than those of humans killing others of their species. Nobody, for that reason, calls for their mass slaughter or deportation into forests. Instead, there is a growing cry for humane treatment of human murderers and even the abolition of death penalty.

In the case of stray dogs, even an allegation, however false, leads to a chorus for mass slaughter or exile, or action like the Vadodara municipality's order for the eviction of all stray dogs from the premises of its school, which blatantly violates the Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules, 2001, the law of the land, which lays down that stray dogs can only be removed for sterilisation and vaccination and, both done, have to be brought back to where they had been taken from.

The actual incident in Vadodara, it is becoming increasingly clear, was very different from what was projected in a section of the media which has been carrying a murderous campaign against stray dogs. The girl, who had allegedly been mauled by a pack of stray dogs, had accidentally stepped on the tail of a sleeping dog. The latter barked suddenly and jumped in self-defence (which resulted in the minor injury), in response to which four other dogs started barking. The girl ran in panic (not chased by any dog) and hit her head against a tree resulting in an injury.

Media's distorted coverage of the incident is a result of bias and hatred, and the unquestioning acceptance of their version by a majority of people is attributable to their ignorance — and consequently fear — of animals and the tendency to regard them as a category distinct from, and less than equal to, humans who could do with them as they pleased. The same approach was in evidence in the indescribably savage manner in which pigs were caught by policemen in Kolkata, dumped into trucks and removed to the city's dumping ground for rubbish, where some of them were found dead presumably because of overcrowding during transportation.

The pigs were thus exiled because they were ‘hosts’ of the Japanese encephalitis virus, an outbreak of which had occurred in North Bengal. But even if preventive action was justified in Kolkata, was it necessary to have conducted the removal so cruellyIJ Would they have been so treated had they been humansIJ