Outdated perceptions [persist] that a death is humane if the killing is done in a manner that prevents or diminishes suffering with instantaneous or near-instantaneous unconsciousness to render the individual insensate to pain. […] [Yet,] the individual who was surprised by an unexpected death does not have to realize it was an injustice—because we do. We are responsible for that lethal act, so our knowing that injustice, that taking of a young unfinished life, is not humane. It wouldn’t be called humane if you killed me with a sudden death when I was ten, or now. It is an artificial distinction if you make it true for humans and not for individuals from other species (a case of speciesism).
Will Anderson @GreenVegans, author of This Is Hope: Green Vegans and the New Human Ecology
Who owns the definition of humane lies at the core of what many of us are challenging: a corruption of the animal rights movement by many of the larger organizations (see http://www.humanemyth.org). We are undercut with outdated perceptions still in common use that a death is humane if the killing is done in a manner that prevents or diminishes suffering with instantaneous or near-instantaneous unconsciousness to render the individual insensate to pain. There is little accounting for the psychological state of suffering in confinement, little accounting for the suffering of others who lose the presence of the one killed, little accounting of the extensive cruelties that remain throughout their lives, and no weighing of the harm caused when domesticated and wild life are taken unnecessarily before their natural life ends.
As witnesses we know this harm well. The individual who was surprised by an unexpected death does not have to realize it was an injustice—because we do. We are responsible for that lethal act, so our knowing that injustice, that taking of a young unfinished life, is not humane. It wouldn’t be called humane if you killed me with a sudden death when I was ten, or now. It is an artificial distinction if you make it true for humans and not for individuals from other species (a case of speciesism). An unexploited right to life free of human violations is one of the “rights” we share with individuals from other species.