An email to a friend – on respect & diversity

Old C.,

If one looks down upon some of his own fellow humans, in his mind there must be some lesser human forms; and naturally all other animals are seen in his eyes as lesser life forms. He is thus unlikely to have respect for any animal, let's say, a pet dog for example. Yet he might keep a mongrel and love it more than his mother and wife. This is a sort of love, or desire, or attachment, or possession, or use. Whatsoever you may call it, it is certainly not respect. Such love develops in the context of the mammalian hierarchy, or just pecking order in the case of the wolf pack. Or you may call it an upward one-way respect, in which an individual of the lower rank respects only those of the higher ranks, but not those of the lower. This is definitely not the kind of respect we are talking about.
In the case of the above mentioned dog keeper (owner) and his mongrel, the canine respects its keeper (master), but not vice versa. Once the dog owner's love for the mongrel is over, he might dump it to the SPCA, or elsewhere, or in the worst case, make a dish of it illegally.

Respect doesn't necessarily build on equality, but sometimes quite on the contrary.
Modern Western values arbitrarily assume that people are born equal, so as to justify mutual respect. A giant who embraces such values doesn't look down upon a dwarf half his height and a quarter of his weight, and a member of the Royal Society who embraces such values doesn't look down upon an illiterate illegal immigrant. This is the kind of respect we should be talking about!

When it comes to the so-called food chain, you don't need to justify it with diversity. It is a reality of nature, just as is bio-diversity itself.
Who would need to scare himself to death by imagining that all 6 billion humans on earth are his identical twin brothers?! I never would.
We also don't need to justify the existence of multi-billionares alongside the starving with the food chain mechanism, do we? This certainly isn't the kind of diversity we should be talking about, is it?

To talk about the food chain we may have something very different from the social context. There is an aeon of evolution history that can't be altered. The human species has evolved very much to an omnivore. Many humans even get really sick by taking in too much animal protein and fat. Yet some people have changed their diet to include less, or even exclude meat. Of course vegetables are still live forms after all.
Even though mankind may be one of the creatures on top of the food chain, we are supposed to respect the animals we eat. That's why we don't butcher animals in the way it used to be, and we employ humane slaughtering process. Modern animal husbandry is supposed to treat livestock well.
By the way, I would like to mention here a singular creature. This wonderful creature is prey to many predators, yet it doesn't eat a single other animal or plant to survive. It helps many plants to reproduce. Without its presence many species including us humans will go hungry, while some may even go extinct. It's the lovely hardworking honeybee.