The Brutal Truth About Slavery Nobody Wants to Hear

In the journals of David Livingstone, a woman is found tied by the neck to a tree — dead. Her master had decided she was no longer worth owning. A week later, another woman lies stabbed on the path, discarded by the man who paid for her. These are not isolated horrors. They were routine.

For thousands of years, human beings were treated as commodities — not people, not persons, but property. Even Aristotle, the architect of Western ethics, believed some were born to be slaves: “living tools” to be used and discarded. The Dred Scott case, the human zoos of Europe, the Bronx Zoo’s captive pygmy Ota Benga — all reminders that moral blindness was not a glitch in history, but its operating system.

We tell ourselves we would have stood against it. That we would have spoken out. That we would never have condoned such cruelty.

But as Captain Paul Watson said: “If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.”

Today, nonhuman animals are still treated as property. They are bought, sold, imprisoned, experimented on, and killed — not because they lack sentience, intelligence, or emotional depth, but because they are not human. The same justification used for centuries to enslave our fellow humans is now used to deny rights to other beings.

To suggest moral equality across species is met with outrage, ridicule, and violence. But so was the abolition of human slavery. So was the idea that Black Americans were people. So was the idea that women deserved to vote.

The question is not whether you would have opposed slavery in the 19th century. The question is: Where do you stand now?

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