On the original issue of skinning animals alive, who is most responsible for creating the demand for such things to happen? Is it not mostly Western fashion houses selling to Western women? And also the indifference that most people have towards cruelty to animals that make all this possible?
Animal rights and human rights are ultimately the same thing. The mindset we adopt against animals – that they are not one of us – is the exact mindset we adopt against people who are not one of us. We stake a claim to being special compared to another entity, human or animal, which governs how we treat them. All the violence you see in the world right now is because people separate along false and arbitrary national, political, religious, socio-economic or some other line, where the person on the other side becomes “not one of us” and therefore an enemy we need to get rid of.
We only pretend to get along and act as standard bearers of civilisation and mouth platitudes about peace and democracy in the developed countries because our bellies are full and we live comfortable lives, because we control the vast majority of the earth’s resources, and for the time being, this control is not threatened. If our way of life was threatened - and it will be in the coming decades when energy, water, food supplies will become acute – wars will break out, bombs will be dropped, whole swathes of populations wiped out. So much for being civilised.