How can some people do what most of us could never do?

978: 

I can imagine how some smart bloke dreamed up an idea for making more money out of the animals he owned.  He looked at his chickens pecking about the yard and wondered if he could reduce his feed bill and the untidiness of his farm yard by caging these animals, keeping them immobilised and automating their feeding and the collection of their eggs.  It would increase his profits no end.  By intensifying his operation, the farm would become like a factory, his animals automated like machinery; it would be done at the expense of his animals, whose feelings don’t count.

So brazen was this crossing of the boundary, between animal care and animal contempt, that it gave rise to what we now know as ‘Animal Rights’ - their right to a life. This is a movement that has been growing for the past forty years, aiming to have the rights of all animals, including farm animals, written into law, to prevent the worst atrocities and eventually to make it illegal to abuse any animal. Only today I heard that, here in Australia’s Capital Territory, they have passed a law to prohibit the use of cages for commercial egg production, the de-beaking of chickens and the use of sow stalls and farrowing crates for pigs.

But the full protection of animals will probably be a long time coming.  If human exploitation of animals has taken millennia to arrive at today’s worst excesses, then it’s likely to take quite a while for the less outrageous abuse to end, mainly because of the lack of public support, stemming from the widespread addiction to animal products by almost the entire human population of the planet.

The consumer wants the food (and other commodities) made from imprisoned or dead animals, and at the lowest price possible.  The producers have to treat their animals badly to make a profit, to stay in business.  They have to run intensive operations involving huge numbers of animals. And since intensive and closely confined animal populations are prone to epidemics, more and more drugs have to be pumped into their animals to prevent mass outbreaks of disease in these huge flocks and herds.  And these drugs and chemicals, being ingested by animal-eating humans, bring about more and more illness.  Then of course, there’s pollution from animal waste adding to the problem.  The stranglehold of the market determines how permanent these situations are becoming and how inevitably worse they must become. I guess it will go on until we reach a critical point, where consumers come to their senses and follow the advice of vegans - to boycott the lot of it, meat, animal products and all animal-derived commodities.

We have to believe that the human, who is the destroyer, must also be the creator - the same brain that creates the cage, and all the problems ensuing from it, can also create the solution.  When humans eventually realise how lucky we are to have brains to get us out of our scrapes, only then will we move towards a true transformation of our species.