Covering-up Animal Rights

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Unfortunately, as important as Animal Rights issues are to us, they’re irrelevant to those who determine the way farm animals are treated. They pay the piper and they call the tune. They own the animals and they advertise their animals’ products. What we might have to say about the way they treat their animals is unimportant to them. But, to be on the safe side, they don’t denigrate us or dispute what we say. They simply ignore us altogether, reckoning that if animal issues are not discussed in public then there will be fewer people rocking the boat.

The Industry spends a lot of money on advertising and therefore has the power to discourage the media from looking too closely at the idea that animals might deserve rights. The power of the advertisers determines that the subject becomes a non-subject and is never considered news-worthy. Farm animal abuse is not a ‘turn on’ for the customer, and professional food columnists would probably lose their food industry sponsorship if they dared to suggest that ‘vegan is good’. And anyway, an omnivore journalist is hardly likely to sympathise with our case by arguing against their own lifestyle.

As yet, we don’t have vegan journalists (powerful or brave enough) to communicate the essence of this subject to their readership. A jobbing journalist certainly wouldn’t risk their reputation writing about it or risk exposing their own double standards. While they might pride themselves on exposing many other wrongs, this subject is different; it’s a journalist’s dilemma – to get to the truth ‘by sincere exertion’. But to deal with intensive farming and the mass slaughtering of animals would put them off-side with most of their readers. Worse still, they’d be lending useful authority to kids who could use what they read to confront their elders with the matter of animal-enslavement.

To stay safe, writers and readers, parents and teachers and elders all must conspire to silence; “Don’t mention it in front of the kids - if they knew (about abattoirs and farms) we’d have junior revolution on our hands”. And “whatever you do, don’t introduce your kids to any vegans”.