Friday, April 3, 2015

What the eye doesn’t see …


1324: 
  
In our society, we are encouraged not to know about animal issues.  Factory farms, abattoirs and animal laboratories are closed to the public.  But it’s unlikely the public are keen to visit them anyway because they’re such ugly places - we can’t object to what we haven’t seen with our own eyes.  We also reckon that if teachers at school thought we ought to know about this, they’d have taught it.  If we aren’t taught something then we reckon it’s probably not worth knowing about anyway.

One thing leads to another - if we discover that dairy products are cruelly produced then everything made with milk is ethically questionable ... and then our conscience will force us to inconvenience ourselves big time.


Imagine then, what happens when the same arguments are applied to our wardrobes.  Health arguments obviously don’t apply here.  Leather shoes, for instance, aren’t ‘bad’ for you, but they do come from slaughterhouses just as meat does.  (Leather is not so much a by-product as a co-product, since its production is often as economically important as meat production).  Vegetarians who still wear leather can’t hold, let alone promote, Animal Rights.  

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