The lamb

The following blogs are about two different attitudes at the heart of the animal debate. On the one side there is often a boiling anger felt by vegans, towards people who brag about their meat eating and who don’t give a damn about the animals who die for them. On the other side there’s a discomfort felt by people who feel they are being forced to consider animals when they don’t feel they need to. There’s a gulf between people over the subject of animals - not the cute, cuddly ones, the “edible” ones. Until a couple of decades ago it didn’t get a mention, but then it all came out - how animals were being treated on farms and what was going on in abattoirs.
In the early eighties The Animals Film and the book Animal Liberation shocked people. We realised for the first time how much of our food relies on animals and what actually happens to the animals themselves. Slowly this information seeped into public consciousness, then, surprisingly, it came to a standstill. At least it did in Australia. Why? It has been a matter for some discussion on vegan websites and magazines but nowhere else. In the general community there’s a reluctance to face up to animal issues - probably because we feel too guilty to think about it. In private, if there’s any talk of it at all, it’s argued without much intellectual rigour. We like our animal food too much to want to put it down. We’re addicted to it. The matter of eating animals is just usually the butt of jokes.
Recently I was visiting an elderly friend of mine and her youngest and eldest daughters were visiting at the same time. The younger one ‘needed’ to joke with me about her choice of food at her sister’s birthday dinner in a restaurant. She let everyone know(particularly me), that she had had “the lamb”. This was her way of saying “up yours” to me, a reminder of how much her views differ from mine.