How to hurt animals

An animal is a free creature, predator or predated, self-feeding, a social being, with no interest in concrete structures or helping humans have a more comfortable life. But to many humans, a free animal is an animal wasted, a waste of good money. And it means nothing to them to capture and incarcerate them - they’re just money, a resource, and of course they are supported in what they do by their customers.
Humans hurt animals. We not only use physical force to make them pull a plough or race around a track but we take away their freedom of movement by putting them in pens, cages and behind barbed wire … and we do it to make them manageable, to make profit, to guarantee food supply. It isn’t questioned unless in economic terms. As competition bites, people in the animal business cut corners to stay ahead of the opposition, who could be an overseas producer. And again, the animals bear the brunt.
In a way, what we do to animals we do to ourselves. We act like Barbarians: we’ll stop at nothing. We’ll cut off tails, horns, beaks and testicles, even their very sentience when necessary. We’ll do anything. We put them behind bars, behind glass as exhibits at zoos, we treat them as things, no more. The evidence is everywhere in the countryside, mostly on farms where we can find equipment for mutilating (‘marking’), tools for cutting bits out of their bodies and trucks to cart them off to their deaths. The psychological cruelty alone would be bad enough but the slum conditions on all farms adds up to monumental cruelty. The more one discovers what happens on farms, the more one’s breath is taken away. But people in general know almost nothing about this – they are ignorant or pretend to be. We most of us live in towns and cities. We never go to the country and when we do we see the scenery, a cosy farm nestling in trees and paddocks. We never see behind the scenes nor want to. If we get to know, from pictures or TV footage, that the animals are kept like this and we know our food comes from these places, we still don’t act. We aren’t aroused to the possibility there’s anything wrong. We aren’t allowed to check out conditions on farms, for if we did it would be a case of once seen never forgotten.