The wicked

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The way the entrepreneurs have made money out of animal farming and the terrible suffering they put upon animals must be said to be truly wicked but the way they’ve manipulated their human customers, embroiling them in their crimes, is possibly worse.
Not too many people will admit playing a part in the tragedy of animal abuse, but they’re involved nonetheless - the customers are buying the stuff and the producers are reaping the profits. No one has clean hands.
The producers have built empires on the backs of animals. With the support of generations of customers they’ve provisioned us both at the survival level and the luxury level. The Animal Industries have taken control of our spending habits. Their influence is everywhere - in clothing industries, in food industries and in shoe companies, providing what seem to be reliable, safe, economic and fashionable products. They give the customers what they want and never let on how the products come to them. They’re allowed to tell lies, especially regarding the nutritional value of the foods they sell, and we suckers can’t believe so much untruth or greed can exist ... so, we believe what we really want to believe, however shonky their assurances seem. The customer doesn’t really know how corrupt the producers are. They can’t believe that they’ll stop at nothing to make profits.
I’d be very surprised if even 1% of humans are truly wicked or so mentally ill or desperate that they’d sell their soul for wealth. But many wealthy people will, because of their desperate fear of being impecunious. It seems they’re willing to abandon all moral constraint to guarantee their own material security. They inhabit the board rooms of agribusiness and allied industries, they force small farmers out of business and establish the intensive farms and processing operations.
For the remaining 99% of us we’re different in as much as we never have the chance to be tempted this way. But if we did have the chance, would we be like them? All of us probably have a few really deep fears – fear of failure, fear of poverty, fear of abandonment, fear of death etc., but most of us don’t have that monster-gene that allows us to destroy things for others, in order to make things safer for ourselves. We might flirt with the devil sometimes, we might be less than fully conscious of what we do, we might deliberately not-know … but most of us are still in touch with our own feelings. We wouldn’t exploit our fellow humans as they do ... but animals? With what we know about animal husbandry today, we have to have a very low empathy threshold to carry on eating the poor creatures and yet feel nothing.
Perhaps most people don’t realise the significance of what is happening behind the scenes. They have no idea how badly farm animals suffer and on what scale they suffer. The customer, wanting to eat what they want to eat, turns a deaf ear to information, they act blindly as if they didn’t know, but in these well informed times that can be a pretty lame excuse.