Should We Recognize Genocide and Terrorism as Crimes Perpetuated Against Other Animals?

The powerless and most vulnerable of living creatures deserve moral consideration and protection.

“Ecocide,” or mass environmental damage, is being proposed as a crime under international law. It would cover acts that cause severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment. Unlike other crimes recognized by the International Criminal Court (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity), ecocide might even cover ecosystem destruction in the absence of harm to people.

Let’s take environmental justice one step further. Why not make it a crime to inflict horrific acts on other life, not just on an environment or ecosystem? More specially, why not apply terms such as genocide and terrorism to non-human victims as well?

The vacuous view opposes such protections (or rights) for other animals because they are not human, meaning that they differ from us in appearance, intelligence, behavior, etc., or that they cannot socially or morally reciprocate like humans do. That belief system has been long promoted by many religious leaders and western philosophers (see my rebuttal) and unfortunately has, for the most part, been adopted by society.

But there’s no solid reason why the crimes of genocide and terrorism shouldn’t be applicable at some level to more than human life, particularly at a time when humans so thoroughly dominate and harshly impact the living Earth.

I think the easier term to apply is genocide because it connotes gene extinction which is precisely what occurs when species or their populations are exterminated by humans. There’s little hope of ending the global extinction crisis unless causing extinction becomes an international crime.

Terrorism is more problematic but should at least be considered when humans exert unequivocal psychological fear and stress on naturally occurring animals by depriving them of habitat, or by constantly attempting to kill, capture, or harass them. The weight of scientific evidence indicates that humans are not unique in attributes that generate consciousness.

I raise this matter because of its relevance to this newsletter’s scale down theme. The evil of exterminating or tormenting other life is certainly within our moral purview in a time of humanity's massive overgrowth, what many now call the Anthropocene.

Scaling down our abuse and exploitation of animal life is essential to the preservation of our very humanity, and ultimately I believe to our survival. The powerless and most vulnerable of living creatures deserve a good deal of moral consideration and protection.