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’ their animals and what they produce. They advertise animal products as if they had nothing to do with living animals. So, what we have to say about the way they treat their animals is unimportant to them, simply because it’s unimportant to their customers. But, to be on the safe side, they don’t denigrate us or dispute what we say - they simply ignore us altogether. They reckon if issues are not discussed in public they’ll seem not to exist, and that will mean fewer people rocking the boat.

The Industry spends a lot of money on advertising and therefore has the power to discourage the mass media from looking too closely at the idea that animals deserve rights. The power of the advertisers determines that this subject becomes a non-subject. It should never be considered news-worthy. They’d reckon that farm-animal-abuse isn’t a ‘turn on’ for the customer. It’s taboo for a newspaper’s food columnist; they would probably lose their food-industry sponsorship if they dared to suggest that ‘vegan is worth considering’. And anyway, omnivore journalists are hardly likely to sympathise with our case, by arguing against their own personal lifestyles.

As yet, we don’t have any vegan journalists (at least, not ones who have ‘come out’, and are powerful or brave enough) to communicate the essence of this subject to readers; I guess they simply don’t exist, yet. A jobbing journalist certainly wouldn’t risk their reputation writing about it, or risk exposing any double standards. Whilst they might pride themselves on their work on social justice or in general exposing wrongs, this subject is different. It’s a journalist’s dilemma: dare to deal with it once and for all or ignore it altogether and be seen as a toady.

A journalist’s job might be to get to the truth of a story, ‘by sincere exertion’. But to deal with intensive farming or the mass slaughtering of animals would put them off-side with their readership. Worse still, they’d be treating the issues in a serious way and therefore lending a voice of authority to kids, who could use what read to confront their elders over animal-enslavement. There’d probably be complaints, leading to sackings, at Fairfax and Murdoch Press.

To stay safe, writers and readers, parents and teachers, priests and elders MUST conspire to silence, “Don’t mention it in front of the kids”. If students at school got to know (about abattoirs and farms) and felt an empathy with the animals, they’d go vegan in a flash, kids being idealist. Then the trouble starts - they try to persuade their parents to accommodate them over this.

Pre-empting that, parents would have a highly inconvenient junior revolution on their hands. They’d be desperately seeking support. They’d be speaking to other parents, “... And whatever you do, don’t introduce your kids to any vegans”.