When he was alive, it was common for any old psychopath to be able to call himself a "scientist" and show how smart he was by literally nailing dogs and such to tables, out in public, and slicing them open while alive (vivisection) to show how they discovered things like the circulatory system and the like. Needless to say, the public hated this.

So, to bolster public opinion of scientists, along comes Descartes (a philosopher, NOT a scientist, mind) saying that non-humans had no souls, no thoughts, and no feelings. So people got bullied into agreeing with this, lest they be seen as "backwards" or "unscientific" .. and that attiude is still common today, especially outside of the West, and it's what Fauci and his ilk still use, though people used to know better, and modern research is proving that humans are NOT alone in having minds and sensations and emotions - and hell, not all humans have internal dislogues - they don't think, so according to Descartes, they'd have no souls and therefore, no rights (and, well, if "intelligence" and understanding duties is what gets you rights, then the headbanger retards ought to be in the labs, not dogs, or rats.)

Oh, and "irrational", to the ancients and medieval people, didn't mean "mindless". It meant "emotional" - think of the Apollo vs Dionysus thing, or Spock (logic) vs McCoy (emotion).

Oh, and the same sort of people who promoted the "cartesian machine" view of non-humans, also used to think that blacks and the poor weren't as prone to feeling pain as the elite (think The Princess and the Pea).

When he was alive, it was common for any old psychopath to be able to call himself a "scientist" and show how smart he was by literally nailing dogs and such to tables, out in public, and slicing them open while alive (vivisection) to show how they discovered things like the circulatory system and the like. Needless to say, the public hated this.

So, to bolster public opinion of scientists, along comes Descartes (a philosopher, NOT a scientist, mind) saying that non-humans had no souls, no thoughts, and no feelings. So people got bullied into agreeing with this, lest they be seen as "backwards" or "unscientific" .. and that attiude is still common today, especially outside of the West, and it's what Fauci and his ilk still use, though people used to know better, and modern research is proving that humans are NOT alone in having minds and sensations and emotions - and hell, not all humans have internal dislogues - they don't think, so according to Descartes, they'd have no souls and therefore, no rights (and, well, if "intelligence" and understanding duties is what gets you rights, then the headbanger retards ought to be in the labs, not dogs, or rats.)

Oh, and "irrational", to the ancients and medieval people, didn't mean "mindless". It meant "emotional" - think of the Apollo vs Dionysus thing, or Spock (logic) vs McCoy (emotion).