Comment by teekert
2 days ago
This is a rather new stance, history books may one day label it as enlightened (I believe they will). We are not there though, and your stance is not obvious to the majority of people. I do experience that this is sentiment is growing. I personally see it as the moral high ground (both from the animal well-fare as the environmental perspective), whereas I didn't only a couple of years ago.
It's just as hard to prove that it's a new stance as an old one since people didn't have any way of writing down their feelings about it in a way that we'd know (or the time to do so)
I think there are quite a few ancient civilizations which clearly had great respect/reverence towards other animals and often gods have features or personality traits of particular animals
The fact that the old testament specifically states that humans have dominion over other creatures means that it needed to be said - even back then there had to be people who didn't think so, or felt guilty about it