“None of It Is Pretend” by Bentham’s Bulldog

Crosspost. Picture a knife cutting into your stomach. Don’t just register the words. Actually take a moment to think about what it would be like. What the first moment it occurred would be like, how the pain would get deeper as the knife cuts more deeply into your flesh, the way the blood would drip down your sides and you would cry out in pain. Intense agony has a way of cutting through idealizations and rationalizations—so that the world is on fire, alight with nothing but pain. Andy Masley has an article called Animal Suffering Isn’t Pretend. It's easy to go through the world thinking it is pretend, implicitly if not explicitly. It's easy to think of animals as meek little animatronic robots who we shouldn’t be overly cruel to, but merit a somewhat second-class ethical status. They merit nice statements about compassion, rather than any kind of deep sympathy—of imagining things from their perspective. It is easy to go through life never thinking about what it's like to be an animal. But animal suffering is not pretend. There is something it is like to be an animal going through the myriad horrors we inflict on them. To pick [...] --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO .