Animal Freedom wants to expose untruths ("conventional wisdom") that cause or maintain animal suffering. The links refer to our own articles or to other sites.
Some examples of "untruths" are:

	Milk is good for your bones
	Meat (protein) is a healthy and necessary part of your diet
	Man is superior to animals
	Pets are good for stimulating children's sense of responsibility
	Animal testing is necessary for the development of medication
	Children grow big and strong from eating meat
	Consumption of (parts of) dogs and/or other animals gives potency and love
	Animals lack something humans have

If you want to know why, click these links for more information.

In this text we will (briefly) touch upon the prejudice that animals lack certain qualities that people have.

5 dogs on their way to the market where they will be sold to people who will butcher and eat them.

In Asia (China, Korea, Vietnam) people have always kept dogs for consumption. Lately this practice has started to assume factory-farming-like proportions.
For them this practice is just as normal as eating pigs is for us. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs, but does that matter?

Do animals have properties such as: intelligence, awareness, pain, language, responsibility, and self-control? Do animals have relationships, do they have feelings like nervousness, love, anger, guilt, fun, sorrow, fear, can animals stand up for themselves?
Can animals think?

Realizing your own mortality

Others think that animals do not realize their own mortality and point to the phenomenon that animals passively go to their deaths in the slaughterhouse. Newspapers regularly publish report about animals that do not want to die and try to escape. Sometimes these animals receive a "general amnesty" and are cared for by other people. It's safe to wonder whether those animals that passively go to the slaughter aren't consciously choosing to end their animal-unworthy existence. Maybe the imprisoned mother animal that bites her young to death is not so crazy. She is protecting her young from her own faith.

Awareness

The Dutch Volkskrant of 27th November 1999 discusses the theory by neurologist Antonio Damasio, who says that only living beings can have awareness, and that organisms are aware of themselves and their relationships with the outside world. The basis for this is the development of a self in the brain, which is necessary to maintain the image of the organism. This is a need for self-regulation and self-representation that is deeply anchored inside the organism. From this theory we can conclude that even animals have awareness, and also that computers will never have it.

Communication

In the Dutch magazine "Dier" of Nov/Dec '99 researcher Salee Yasry Eden, who obtained his doctorate on a thesis about language experiments with animals, says that animals in their own way are intelligent and civilized individuals with often refined social behavior.

For a list of other arguments that point to prejudices and deliberate misleading by opposers and supporters of animal rights, please see non-valid arguments.

Is man superior to animals?

In our history these capacities have been "reasoned away" by people who found it necessary to place people above animals. From this self-constructed position they could justify their immoral behavior toward animals. They would not have this justification if they had to recognize that people are basically a species of animal.
Now that humans really no longer need the submission of animals for their own survival, and are still maintaining it to reap economical benefits, it's time to give back to animals what was taken from them: to be equal habitants of this planet, with the same rights we allow ourselves.