The Ethos of Human and Animal Rights
Iranian animal rights activists in Iran recently staged protests over the governments brutal slaying of street dogs in the cities, towns and villages. Human Rights often sail in on the wings of compassionate initiatives for animals, where abuses somehow seem much easier to recognize. From this threshold compassion (from the Latin “con-passio,” meaning “with passion”) grows the ability to apply the same standards for treatment of dogs, cats and farm animals to women, children and disenfranchised or sub-dominant, lower-ranking men. In actual fact, the world’s first monotheism with a doctrinal, encoded ‘Golden Rule’ grew from such roots, in ancient Iran itself, Great Persia, where Zoroastrianism advocated for humane and respectful treatment of animals.
(Significantly, prior to the world’s first patriarchal monotheistic state religion, or Zoroastrianism, it was not a case of there being no “Golden Rule’ in practice. It’s just that it wasn’t thought necessary to encode it or make it a ‘rule.’ The early basal Indigenous world view, carried over into early agrarian Neolithic societies, was that we ARE all the animals —and not only are we each all of the animals, but we are all relations on the Tree of Life, all intimately connected in the Circle of Life — a perspective evident in the many metamorphic and zoomorphic art pieces and sculpture.)
