Why Don't Cows Just Escape the Abbatoir?

I've been thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement as well as veganism. Many people are offended if you compare black people to animals, but there are undenable parallels, and the reason why they are offended by this is because they view animals as inferior, which proves the point of widespread speciesism. Imagine you lived in the eighteenth century when slavery against blacks was rife and you saw a poor white person who is being oppressed by his king. You suggest to him that the monarchy is oppressing him in a similar way to the way black slaves are being oppressed. Maybe this white peasant is offended by being compared to a black man, yet this offence is the product of racism. The white peasant views blacks are inferior and so does not want to be compared to blacks. It is the same idea today except rather than having widespread racism (which we still do have) we have even more widespread speciesism.

Something else I've been thinking of is the widespread belief people have that we have equality of opportunity when in fact we don't. There are three groups I'd like to talk about: first home buyers, black people, and livestock animals. First let's look at livestock animals such as a cow. Imagine a cow in an abbatoir or CAFO who is about to be slaughtered with a captive bolt gun put to its head. Now imagine this cow can talk and speak to you. You go up to this cow as it is about to be slaughtered and you hear the cow complaining about being killed. You then say, "Why don't you just escape the abbatoir?" The cow might say, "How can I? There are walls all around me. What can I do? I am trapped." Then you say, "Why don't you just organise with your fellow cows and kill all the CAFO workers and then escape?"

It is clear that this is ludicrus. You cannot expect a cow in a CAFO to escape because there are huge barriers to escaping, and the cow may simply not be able to escape. A cow is just a cow, not a well-connected billionaire military general. The cow cannot escape. This highlights the idea of "privilege" and shows that for many groups of creatures there are significant barriers in place preventing them from exercising freedom and personal autonomy.

Another example of this is first home buyers. There is widespread concern that many young people today are priced out from buying or even renting a home. A free market would indeed fix this problem. If there is a high demand for homes, then companies will build more houses and apartments to meet this demand, but the problem is that there are regulations put in place to cap the supply of homes e.g. there are restrictions on height of buildings and so forth. In order to make housing cheaper, prices actually need to go down, yet whenever there is a housing downturn (which is needed to make housing cheaper), there is quantititative easing, which inflates the cost of housing. This is done because home owners and investors are a powerful voting bloc. So young first home buyers face huge barriers, just the cow in the CAFO. There are institutions in place that prop up the property market to enrich investors so that they can get rich off people renting or paying interest to the bank. To say that there is equality of opportunity for the first home buyer or the cow is just not correct. The two face barriers that are inherent in the system, with the cow facing even more barriers than the first home buyer.

Black people face a similar problem. A billionaire military general could probably escape from a CAFO or human concentration camp but a cow cannot. Likewise, many black people do not have too much resources or wealth, so they are disadvantaged from birth and when you add discrimination due to racism, it is only worse. There are policies that can help e.g. government policies that educate children for free or even employment quotas for black people. It is analogous to the problems of the first home buyer and the cow. The only difference is the degree of oppression. The cow is clearly the most oppressed being with other beings facing less severe oppression.