Introduction

The Truth About Speciesism: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Legal Personhood

Every society tells itself a story about who counts.

Sometimes that story is explicit, written into law or scripture. Sometimes it is whispered through culture, absorbed unconsciously through the words we use and the assumptions we never think to question. But always, beneath the surface of any civilisation, there is a dividing line between those who are recognised as persons and those who are not.

History shows what happens when that line is drawn narrowly.

When Jews were labelled untermenschen, or ‘subhuman’, the machinery of genocide followed. When enslaved Africans were declared “property,” entire legal systems rose to defend their exploitation. When Roma, Tutsis, Armenians, Indigenous peoples, disabled people, and countless others were cast as “less than,” atrocities became not only possible but socially acceptable.

The pattern is so consistent that it borders on formula. First, a group is linguistically diminished. Then, culturally distanced. Then, legally excluded. Finally, violently controlled.

We look back on these chapters with horror, convinced that we would have stood on the right side of history. Yet every generation has its blind spot - the group whose suffering is normalised, whose exploitation is invisible, whose personhood is denied so thoroughly that even raising the question feels strange, provocative, or absurd.

For us, that blind spot is nonhuman animals.

We live in a world where billions of sentient individuals are confined, mutilated, inseminated, separated from their families, and killed on an industrial scale. Their bodies are processed in facilities whose architecture mirrors the darkest moments of human history. Their suffering is sanitised through language, hidden behind euphemisms, and justified by appeals to tradition, convenience, or taste.

And almost no one questions it.

Not because people are cruel, but because they have inherited a worldview in which nonhuman animals are not persons. They are “livestock,” “stock,” “units,” “it.” They exist, culturally and legally, as objects. Property. Commodities.

This book challenges that assumption at its root.

It traces the long history of how societies decide who counts as a person, and how those decisions shape the moral landscape. It examines the language that makes exploitation feel natural, the psychological mechanisms that keep us from seeing what is in front of us, and the philosophical frameworks that either protect or endanger the vulnerable.

It explores the science of animal minds - the cognition, emotion, autonomy, and self-awareness that make the denial of their personhood increasingly untenable. It looks at contemporary cases like Veronika, the cow whose escape and tool‑use forced the world to confront the intelligence and agency we pretend not to see.

And it argues, plainly and unapologetically, that the time has come to recognise nonhuman animals as persons under the law.

Not because it is kind. Not because it is fashionable. But because it is just.

The truth about speciesism is not comfortable. It asks us to confront the possibility that we are participating in the very pattern of oppression we claim to abhor. But it also offers something else: the chance to expand our moral circle in a way that future generations will look back on with gratitude rather than disbelief.

Once you see the blind spot, you cannot unsee it. And once you recognise a person, you cannot justify their exploitation.

This book is an invitation to look clearly, think honestly, and imagine a world in which justice is not limited by species.

Continue to Chapter 1