Reply To: Stop defaming animals

Animals don’t lock up animals in cramped space and deny them proper food and companionship. People do.

By acting like a plant, a human being confines his neshama, keeping it from rising, deprives it of companionship with Hashem, and fails to keep it fed via spiritual growth. That doesn’t make plants evil or make it an insult to call a person a plant.

The sins for which people are called “animals” are not of the types of actions that animals do. They are of the exclusively human evil variety.