“The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position.” - Christine Stevens.

 “The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position.” - Christine Stevens. In Michael Foc, Returning to Eden, 1980

- This is an interesting way to phrase the Golden Rule, by placing it into practice. It is only recently in the history of human civilization that we have grown to have an adoration for and a reverence of, the whole of the animal kingdom. It was a time long and dark, written and unwritten in our histories, where we with the animal fraught. Fraught over territory, over food, over shelter. Today, we still fight, still deal with invasive species in our rivers and deadly mosquitoes in the air, but on the whole, the fight is done. We do not live our regular days afraid of some lion or wolf hunting us, or desperate for a caribou or a bison to feast upon. We have, humanity has, achieved a dominance upon this planet unlike any mammal ever has before,or likely ever will again. We have killed more, raised more, and changed more generations of animals than anything in history except nature herself. Still though, with all our powers, we are in that position of second fiddle to nature, who is life and death for us all. 

The golden rule, as it is called, is an attempt to find some order within that of nature, and to extract wisdom from that order. We are advised to follow the Golden Rule not because it is right and proper, but because it, almost inevitably, turns out that, at some point, the shoe is on the other foot. It is true that, now and today, humans run the plant, but it is also the case that still and today, in certain areas and at certain times, we still fall under the heavy weight of fangs and fur. We still regret actions we have taken to 'solve' an animals problem, which only ended up hurting us in the end, like the famous issue of bringing cane toads into Australia in order to solve the problem of cane beetles feasting on sugar cane crops, toads which eventually became a bigger problem than the issues they were brought in to solve. Imagine if the species I just mentioned had been humans, and the local government had brought in a foreign population and given them land, so that they could fight the native population for them - when has that ever turned out well? And, why would we expect that the animal version of it would turn out better? That is to say, we have much to learn from how we treat animals and humans. We can learn from how we treat each kind, how we may want to treat with he other kinds. 

For example, genocide of a human population is morally forbidden, and genocide of an animal population should probably be as well - we don't know what effect such a thing would have, and the existence of those people, or those animals, has a preciousness all its own. We keep museums of vanished peoples because we don't' want to forget them, and museums of extinct animals for the same reason - If I told you that an entire people, an entire civilization, and entire language, was dying out and would soon be nothing but a museum piece, wouldn't you find it sad? This quote simply suggests that we should also find it sad if the last tiger, antelope, or fruit fly was also to die like this. One day, perhaps many years in the future, we might be in such a position, and we should hope very much if the beasts out in the dark were not cold-blooded murderous.

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