There’s a letter by Syed Rizvi in today’s DAWN about dwindling victoria carts, in response to another letter published a few days ago. He writes:
APROPOS of the letter, ‘Dwindling victoria carts‘ (Sept 8), writer Seema Khanum Pashamby lamented the disappearance of horse-drawn carts from Karachi’s marketplace. It seems Ms Pashamby was not thinking in the interest of animals when she wrote those lines.
We often tend to moan and groan at the demise of some of our traditions, but in fact not all traditions are good traditions. It is a good thing that our increased ethical values and advancement in technology are resulting in the abolishment of the exploitation and suffering of animals.
Speciesism, a prejudice against other species, is not different from racism or sexism that we abhor today. To my knowledge, no one has said it better than the great African American feminist writer, Alice Walker, “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.”
I have every hope that today’s norm of animal exploitation will be a thing of the past just as slavery and subjugation of women no longer is considered a norm today.
Syed is the President and Founder of Engineers and Scientists for Animal Rights (ESAR) and a board member of animalsandsociety.org in the USA.