Are Animals Persons?
Do animal have rational communication and freewill

Adapted from Daniel O'Connor's monumental book "Only Man Bears his Image"

This is one of 4 articles on the role of animals in the coming deception.

Obviously animals are good, but they are not persons.

Animal personhood has gone mainstream

PetSmart no longer refers to you as a dog owner. You are "adopting" your animal, and you are its "parent".

petsmart adoption

The PetSmart web page on courses they offer says:

Therapy: ...This 6-week course ... prepares both the dog and pet parent ...

This might seem like a campy fun marketing ploy, but when we look at the pervasiveness of this position in society, we see that it is no joke.

Cultural havoc commencing from "animal rights"

Anti-human environmentalist groups pressure governments to lay massive burdens on struggling people to help a few birds, turtles, or other animals. While millions of humans languish in extreme poverty (across the globe, over half a billion)
Pit bull attacks kill or disfigure hundreds of people (often children) each year in America alone. Governments are intimidated to do nothing. The “inalienable rights” of these beasts are being violated.
Humans convicted of animal abuse are often given life distroying severe disproportionate punishments.
Attacks on meat-eating from “zero carbon” agendas, or PETA.
PETA also lobbies companies to not test their products on animals, which makes humans the new guinea pigs.
It is difficult to find volunteers for soup kitchens and homeless shelters, while armies of volunteers help cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, whales, and other irrational animals.
Many news stories about "heroic" individuals who risked their lives to rescue an animal in a burning building or tornado. As if a human being’s life is on par with an animal’s. Many of these individuals died.
While entire populations of humans languish for lack of proper housing (or any housing), untold millions of acres near them are absolutely off-limits as “wildlife refuges”.
Dangerous, carcinogenic, noisy industrial establishments (dumps, landfills, factories, etc.) are built adjacent to heavily populated residential (poor) neighborhoods to protect animals in these “refuges.” Human beings, made in God’s image, suffer, while animals with no intrinsic or infinite value, who exist only for the sake of human beings, are the sole beneficiaries.

Indeed, even if we ignore the apocalyptic dimension of the Animal Personhood Deception, we are still left with a grand delusion that is being counted in human lives.

The roots of animal personhood

The 1800's was a bad century for the occult. There were mainstream discussions of extra-terrestrials, Ouiji, transmediums, and Time Travel. The Animal Personhood Deception, began with the 1877 publication of Black Beauty. From that novel onwards, there has been a steady stream of exhortations in popular culture not merely to respect animals as gifts from God (a noble thing to encourage), but to treat them as if they were really persons (a diabolical deception).

What's it like now

As people choose fewer (or no) children, many seek to fill the children-shaped hole in their lives with pets. Increasingly, owners label themselves as “pet parents”, spending tens of thousands of dollars on cancer treatments for dogs and cats, while millions of children across the globe continue to die from lack of basic food, water, medicine, shelter, and sanitation.

Children’s movies where animals are “the good guys” and humans are “the bad guys” is a growing trend. Many owners get “therapy” and antidepressants for their animals. A popular doormat says:

I’m family, you’re not. They love me, they’re only friends with you. To you, I’m just the pet, but here, I’m their baby — Charlie.

There are massive and well-funded movements which fight for animals to be given human rights. For example, in 2022, New York State’s highest court heard arguments seeking to grant personhood to a certain elephant in the Bronx Zoo. Although the elephant was not granted personhood, two of the seven judges dissented.

What about here in the Catholic Church?

This perversity has infiltrated the Church. Some Christians don't evangelize human beings buy worry whether their cat will be in Heaven with them. Even popular “orthodox Catholic” authors are buying into “studies” that show animals are capable of rational communication, and only await our ability to “unlock their language.” They say we should “acknowledge that God gave us animals.”

Refutation of animal personhood

Catholic philosopher, Dr. Peter Kreeft, astutely delineated ten reasons:

Animals have absolutely no signs of religion, of an awareness of God or immortality.
They are conscious of the world of objects but not of themselves as personal subjects. Their consciousness is not self-reflexive.
Though they can be trained to behave in ways that humans find acceptable, they have no moral conscience (they have social shame but not individual guilt).
Their creativity is routine and circumscribed by their instincts: e.g. a given species of bird will always build its nest in exactly the same way.
Their languages are not articulate, not invented, and do not change or progress through time.
Their thought is concrete, not abstract. They have precepts but not concepts.
They have immediate intuition but not demonstrative reasoning.
They do not produce technological inventions, because
They do not formulate scientific theories.
They have no sense of artistic beauty, or beauty for its own sake.

To Dr. Kreeft’s list above, we can add several other observations.

Even from ancient history we read of incredibly advanced human civilizations and their stunning feats. From the great pyramids of Egypt to the resplendent hanging gardens of Babylon, to the awe-inspiring Greek monuments, to the unimaginable Temple of Solomon, to the stunning lighthouse of Alexandria.

Animals—lacking free will—cannot sin. Any scolding of a dog is undertaken purely to steer its instincts in a certain direction, hoping to render that animal’s usual behavior more amenable to domestication. Impressive feats can be achieved through such methods (as anyone who has watched a dog show knows), but they are categorically distinct from punishment.

If a dog has strewn the garbage about the house, no owner will “ground” it for a week. On the other hand, if a child does something particularly immoral, a diligent parent may well mete out such a punishment. This gives the child time to reflect on what he has done, and strengthen his moral intention to never do the same thing again. But as no animal can reflect, no analogous “grounding” of it in response to a “misdeed” is ever called for. It will not reflect, because it cannot reflect.

Instead, it must be “punished” by being given an unpleasant experience quickly after it commits the “misdeed,” or at least as it is in the sense-discernable context of that “misdeed” (such as a dog groveling upon its owner’s return home next to the mess it had made). Similarly, we do not imprison animals, regardless of what they have done. We do one of the following:

Ignore the “offense”
Remind or punish its owner
Move it to a more secure or safe location
Return it to the wild
Put it to death

Since animals cannot sin, they also never do those things that can only flow from sin. For example, they do not, wage war, commit suicide (contrary to unproven claims that some species do this). Nor do they engage in behaviors that are obviously (as far as they can tell) detrimental to themselves, never act in pure malice (although we may interpret certain hunting or playing techniques as malicious, this is only our own errant personification of their behavior).

Animals have no sense of humor—any video supposedly showing a chimpanzee “laughing” is only labelled that way due to a human interpreting certain sounds and facial configurations on the monkey as laughter. In fact, animals find nothing ironic. All animals develop extremely quickly—precisely because there is no understanding or wisdom to be gained.

Everything in their behavior is instinct, therefore only a relatively brief period is needed to give their biological development ample opportunity to actualize those instincts. It will not work to argue this is due to their shorter lifespans—even animals with far larger lifespans than humans do the same. Tortoises, for example, can live to be almost 200 years old; yet, a baby tortoise reaches adulthood after only about 5 years. While a few exceptions can apparently be found, family in general means little or nothing to animals. A parent (almost always the mother) keeps young nearby, caring for them until they reach maturity, but in almost all cases nothing past that happens between them.

Even in those species that congregate into herds, packs, colonies, etc., tend to see individual families assimilated without distinction into the larger group. In humans, family always remains extremely important—regardless of whether the offspring are adults or the family itself is part of a larger social group (the individual human family always supersedes, in importance, the larger group; unlike in the case of the “more social” animals).

Among the “most intelligent” of the beasts, we find nothing more exciting than an ape bashing around with a stick.

This infinite divide between humans and man represents a categorical difference; not just a difference in degree, due only to some environmental circumstance or biological trait.

Contrast this with the Bible:

... like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and killed
(2 Peter 2:12)

The Book of Genesis details the creation of the animals, but reserves personhood for man. After creating the animals and seeing them “good”—as indeed they are—God said:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them...and God said to them, “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-28)

Fr. Ambrose Agius, O.S.B.

Some [who] would be friends of animals are often their worst enemies, ‘heaping excessive affection on animals and bestowing on them what has been denied to our fellowmen.’ ... Further, animal lovers are sometimes cruel in their kindness, destroying the health and fine instincts of their animal companions by excessive pampering ...

The Church, therefore, is careful not to (as Cardinal Gasparri says) ‘disturb the admirable order of Creation by despoiling man of his royal crown to cast it down at the feet of inferior creatures.’... Man was created in the image and likeness of God: animals were not. Man is rational, animal is irrational ...

Man therefore is a person; animals are non-persons. Man is a person because he is an end in himself, and not a mere means to the perfection of beings of a higher order. Animals are not persons or moral beings, because devoid of reason and free will (and so of responsibility) and because they were created for the service of man, and as a means (if properly used) towards his perfection ...

Scripture says:

And only after creating man does God finally say that what He had done in creation was not only good, but “very good.” (Genesis 1:31)

Prominent Christian extraterrestrial promoters try to deny that the Bible puts humans above anything else in createion. A prominent Anglican theologian and clergyman, was commissioned by NASA to theologically study aliens. He wrote in his 2023 book:

“...Genesis 1...does not mean that [man bearing] the [Divine] image consists in a difference from every other creature and thus can only apply to one species...”

God is not seeking to deceive us. Genesis leaves out the notion of extraterrestrials (because they do not exist), so too it leaves out the notion of beasts bearing the Divine Image (because such creatures, also, do not exist).

We can only honor God in accordance with the order He has created. To “honor” food by overeating is gluttony; to “honor” an individual saint by regarding him as Divine and infallible is idolatry; to “honor” sex through promiscuity is lust. And in the present matter, the order God created is entirely unambiguous:

Of all visible creatures, only human beings bear His Divine Image. (Cat §357)

There are no exceptions. To violate that truth under the pretense of “honoring His creation” is to sin against His order which can become a means of diabolical instruction.

“Friendship cannot exist except towards rational creatures, who are capable of returning love, and communicating one with another in the various works of life ... The love of charity extends to none but God and our neighbor. But the word neighbor cannot be extended to irrational creatures, since they have no fellowship with man in the rational life. Therefore charity does not extend to irrational creatures.” (St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. I. Q19. A12. and II-II. Q25).

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Are Animals Persons? Do animal have rational communication and freewill