Zenyatta is the talk and the toast of horse racing circles. The six-year-old mare was undefeated until last Saturday, when she ran her last race before retirement and finished a close second. Her career tally is 19-1.
Breeders, owners and other keen judges of horseflesh laud Zenyatta’s conformation, height and stamina as reasons for her success in a field typically dominated by stallions.
But the horse’s immense popularity with the public revolves around Zenyatta’s supposed “human” characteristics. Her way of posing for cameras. Her placement on Oprah Winfrey’s most powerful women list. Her taste for Guinness beer after a workout.
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It seems that public liking for animals is proportionate to the number of human characteristics imagined and assigned to them.
This very thing is a reason behind the success of animal rights activists in staking out the moral high ground to fight animal agriculture. The more we pretend that animals are like people, the more morally repugnant it becomes to use them for food.
To put it simply, animals are not people. It’s arrogant to assume that the more human-like the animal, the more worthy it becomes.
We can celebrate the excellence of Zenyatta, in all her equine glory, without the anthropomorphism.
Similarly, cattle producers celebrate bovine excellence in calf production, feed conversion, body type and beef yield.
Mike Smith, who writes for the website truthinfood. com, encourages livestock producers to defend themselves on the same moral ground as their opponents.
“Every food chain decision is now going to be viewed through a moral prism. That requires a moral defence,” Smith writes.
“Until everyone in agriculture can articulate what is ethically right in the tools you select to feed the world, you risk falling back on defences that rely only upon pointing out what’s wrong with the other guy. Ultimately, it will diminish us all.
“Farmers must reclaim their authority based not on science and economics, but on their ethics and morality.”
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