Ratan Tata, crusader against speciesism

Ratan Tata has benefited many fellow humans through his many enterprises. He has also benefited much from them. But beyond these largely transactionary exchanges, Tata has been an exemplar of viewing 'vasudhaiva kutumbakam' - world as family - not narrowly confined to humans but to all living species. Tata Trusts' announcement last week of the launch of a state-of-the-art healthcare centre for animals in Mumbai is firmly in line with this world view. Tata's personal fondness for non-human animals - especially dogs, whom he refers to as his friends, and not pets, underlining liberte, egalite, fraternite in the truest of terms - is based on a larger, political belief of ownership of Earth by all its inhabitants.

Like sexism, racism and casteism, speciesism - a term coined by psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970 to describe the belief that humans are the hierarchic apex of all life - is deeply ingrained in almost all societies, leading to treatment of non-human animals as 'sub-creatures'. Studies have shown that like with other -isms, young human children are bereft of speciesism, and this anthropocentric bias is developed by societal beliefs over time.

Even as Darwin onwards, rational humans have come to realise that, biologically-speaking, there is no 'magical essential difference' between humans and non-human animals, why, then, do humans, in Ryder's words, 'make an almost total distinction morally'? It is the need to empathise beyond one's own group - whether family, caste, ethnicity, nation and, indeed, species - that made Emperor Ashok grant, in one of his edicts, all non-human animals rights of citizenry, providing them equal protection as to his human citizens. Tata's announcement of quality healthcare to non-human animals is, in this sense, Ashokan. And it is a much-needed, tangible step towards resisting the pervasive speciesism among us, co-inhabitants and co-owners of this world, one among many Earthlings.