3. Space exploitation is not vegan and is an extension of speciesism
If we as a race can offer our animal friends only pain and exploitation, how do you suppose that we would treat alien life, in whatever shape of shade or shell, we find it thriving in the bloom of life, its very own life?
Forms of non-terrestrial life are not ours to decide whether we can use them for their beauty or just a taste.
Laika was a stray dog living in the streets of Moscow and the first Earth being sent to space to die for mankind's quest to conquer space.
Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die:
“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it ... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”
All arguments for the colonization of other planets embrace the notion that humans must be saved from extinction, without question. Do we need or deserve a safety net that we have never offered any other living beings whose extinction we have caused?
On October 18, 1963, France launched Felicette the cat aboard the Veronique AGI rocket. Felicette had electrodes implanted into her brain. A second cat, unnamed, was sent to space on October 24, 1963. There was a delay in the recovery of the capsule, and this cat was found dead. Felicette was the only cat to survive these French space experiments, but was killed and dissected a few months later in the name of science.
This is a partial list of our animal friends that NASA has carried into space:
Crickets, mice, rats, frogs, newts, fruit flies, snails, carp, medaka, oyster toadfish, sea urchins, swordtail fish, gypsy moths, brine shrimp, jellyfish. And Ham, the “Astrochimp,” who was forced to enter space on January 31, 1961. He survived, but upon his death in 1983, his body was turned over to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for necropsy with a plan to have his corpse stuffed and placed on display at the Smithsonian. The Soviet Union planned to do the same thing with space dogs Belka and Strelka. This plan was abandoned after negative public reaction.
In case you don’t know the basics of animal rights, here they are:
- No experiments on animals
- No breeding and killing animals for food, clothes, or medicine
- No use of animals for hard labor
- No selective breeding for any reason other than the benefit of the animal
- No hunting
- No zoos or use of animals in entertainment
Manned space exploration has already included almost all of these abuses in its treatment of our animal friends.
It is important to acknowledge that traditional indigenous peoples live within hunting/gathering societies not party to Western exploitative animal treatment, abuse, and diets.
