STOP! – "I Don’t Want To Know"

1217:

Edited by CJ Tointon

Take any man or woman on the street.  Ask them what 'factory farming' is.  They’ll probably squirm and struggle and pretend not to know.  They don't want to admit their own complicity in it, so they try to fake it.  Whatever they say won't be convincing, either to them or anyone else, so fake it they must, just to get out of an awkward situation.  That’s why I never actually go up to people on the street and ask this sort of question.  I don’t need to see anyone squirm or embarrass themselves.

However, for the omnivore, there must be something 'filtering out' what’s really happening to animals (hens for example) in order to get the breakfast egg into the mouth to be enjoyed, otherwise the egg would have a tendency to stick in the throat.  Say the first food we see in the morning is an egg.  We all know it’s been (biologically) forced from a hen and that the hen has probably been confined in a cage.   Psychologically, how do we deal with knowing that?

Another example might be a beef steak, knowing that it comes from a castrated bullock whose had a knife taken to his private parts when young and another knife taken to cut his throat when he's older and fatter.   How can we get our heads around that fact?

Our 'animal' foods involve cruel conditions and processes.  We all know it, yet we somehow choose not to think about it.  And that’s not so difficult because all the really ugly stuff is done by others, behind closed doors.  They get paid to do it so that the consumer doesn’t have to feel part of it, or feel concern about it.  You could say that it’s not the slaughterer’s knife that most threatens the hen, cow, pig or sheep, but our own dinner knives.  You might say you care, but it’s an empty sentiment when you're still eating animals' body parts.

We eat their by-products and we consume their carcasses.  We are encouraged to do this by those  involved in the thriving business of enslaving and slaughtering animals.  So the consumer is in cahoots with the farmer and the abattoir.  And this means that every consumer is caught up in routine violence and is trapped by their own food habits.

In a better world, animals would be seen as precious individuals.  They’d be objects of care for us. They’d never be abused by us.  But these same animals, because they have no means of expressing their feelings, seem conveniently to HAVE no feelings, and if they don’t feel (who can prove that they do?) then they don’t mind what we do to them!  Guessing how they might possibly feel is not scientific, so it doesn’t count.  Anthropomorphising is considered invalid.

This is why we not only need to empathise, we need to use our imagination to look at things from an individual animal’s point of view.  Take an egg-laying hen’s life.  There’s nothing natural left in it!   She only ever knows loneliness and pain.  She’s mutilated, roughly handled, imprisoned in a small prison cell with no sunlight, no fresh air, no soil, no plant life, no natural sounds and no mother.  All she's given is enough food to make her productive.  For the whole of her assigned life (a period of some twenty or so months, which is the time it takes to bring her to menstruation and begin laying eggs) there’s pain.  Pain from being caged in a tiny no-room-to-move space, with two or three other hens.  Her whole existence is spent standing on mesh-wire flooring, breathing ammonia from the excreta of thousands of other birds who also live in the shed.  There’s synthetic lighting, the din of screeching, demented hens, the inability to move, and of course - no chance of escape!

This tormented, imprisoned state is what consumers support every time they eat an egg or buy  products which contain eggs.  Is it any wonder vegans are so outraged, not only by the cruelty but by the indifference of their fellow humans, who have the gall to say, “I Don’t Want To Know”??