In the short story Degrees of Death, Rifaat brings to light the fact that humans view some forms of life as being innately more valuable than others. The little girl in the story becomes attached to rabbits but not to the other farm animals like chickens and geese. When her nanny kills her beloved pet rabbit, she is devastated. Why is this the case? Well, in some respects it is logical. An amoeba is a single cell organism that has neither feelings nor any pretense of a conscience. Surely a dog is more valuable than an amoeba, is it not? The immediate answer is yes, but upon further reflection, one must ponder, why is this the case? All life forms are composed of essentially the same material, mostly carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. The dog contains more of these elements, so one can assume that we simply value more mass. But what if we compare a million amoebas to a dog. Both may have the same mass, be made of essentially the same matter, but yet most people would still value the life of the dog. This suggests to me that humans have no real rhyme or reason to what we assign greater value to. We simply pick things that we find more aesthetically pleasing. Thus a mouse is of more value than a tarantula, a bird more valuable than a snake.

Finally, the egotistical nature of man is made all the more obvious in our arbitrary judgment that of all living things on the planet, we are the only ones with a ‘soul’. This automatically puts us on a pedestal, giving us the right to command and destroy lesser forms of life as we see fit.