1248:
Human convenience is a
powerful instinct. How many of us could
give up using paper to save the forests from being pulped? And that’s just paper. When it comes to food and clothing it would
seem to be a mighty strong principle one is espousing, that denies us so many
wonderful conveniences.
It all comes back to
lifestyle and what we’ve grown used to.
Moving towards liberating animals would be inconvenient, but freeing
children or freeing any slave from their master was once thought to be
unrealistic. Freeing humans from slavery is no different from liberating
animals from humans. It’s so typical of
human bias and prejudice, that we have a horror of humans being slaves but not
animals being slaves. It’s a bit like
our Western horror at eating dogs put up against our excitement at eating
sheep.
Having said that, about
freeing animals, I acknowledge the danger of our being overrun by them - we’ve
bred vast herds and flocks of creatures, and for our own safety we would have
to curtail their breeding until their numbers substantially diminished. But there’s a question of their safety. These are mutated creatures, warped by humans
interfering in genes and immune systems. Domesticated animals, freed from
farms, would have to be protected from Nature and predation - they couldn’t
survive in the wild.
But bearing that in mind, and
realising that when these changes are being made they’ll happen slowly, there’s
still going to be money involved. There will be a sanctuary-building bill to
pay. But that’s some way off, and it
comes when there’s been a substantial change of attitude towards animals in our
care. What is appropriate, for these early days, is that the concept of Animal
Rights needs to be promoted vigorously.
It’s the principle of the thing which people need to get their heads
around. If we trim it to make it more
acceptable there won’t be nearly enough momentum to achieve any sort of rights
for animals, and the whole horror story will only continue and get worse.
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