Commentary A couple of years ago, Vegans produced a large poster featuring three photos: a human baby, a piglet, and a lamb. The caption read: “Equal but Different.” The thinking behind this is absurd, for it implicitly denies the distinctiveness and the responsibility of human beings and proposes a view of the world that is driven solely by wishful thinking and sentiment. We can have no quarrel, of course, with the word different, but to assert the equality of all living creatures is to ignore both common sense and the empirical evidence of our own eyes. Most of us enjoy the company of animals and recognize the good they can do. Guide dogs are an obvious example, but lonely people are comforted by the companionship of a dog, a cat, or even a cage bird, and most of us recognise that the higher animals, at least, have the capacity to …