Wednesday, December 17, 2008

An egg to start the day

So here’s the state of things at present. We have billions of humans wanting foods produced by animals, who are unwilling to reform their diet or consider the feelings of animals. Perhaps, justification wise, there are other concerns pushing animal rights onto the back burner - money worries, family concerns, job insecurity, global warming and ill health … it’s all too much. In fact our worries can be so overwhelming that making our daily life more bearable is ALL we might want to do. So we open the fridge and choose our favourite food, for pleasure and diversion. But if we do escape this way, by eating, we know there’s a negative health pay-back plus a sting in the tail - another tiny death to some part of our conscience.
After sunrise at the abattoir the killing begins. And in a way it begins when we wake, when we’re eating our breakfast, lifting a small spoon to crack the shell of our breakfast egg. This reminds us of the same egg we saw on TV last night – when a group of animal liberators went to rescue some hens at a battery farm, who were living in squalid conditions … and here, as we sit eating an egg we notice it’s the last one in the carton, reminding us to buy some more from the store. And so the cycle continues.
We use products containing eggs (which are always from caged hens). We follow appetite, we don’t follow conscience, and the oftener we do it the less attention we pay to it … and then the conscience ceases to function altogether. So we see the animal cruelty on TV and immediately forget it, because we want eggs and we’ll soon be buying some more eggs. We can always rely on our habits to we get us what we want.

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