Farms

1482:

We’ve been brought up to see animal farms as romantic or at least useful places.  And we even regard animal research laboratories as essential.  As a community we value the work of farmers and scientists who ‘work with animals’.  Consumers, along with factory farmers and vivisectors, are becoming increasingly desensitised to the suffering of animals.  For instance, consumers let themselves be persuaded that an animal laboratory is a benign place, where the safety of pharmaceuticals is tested, and animals co-operate with the scientists, each valuing what the lab is doing!!  As if they'd ever had any choice.

The animals know what's happening, whereas most humans prefer not to know, since we play a 'part' in it.  

Ignorance is the best friend of any consumer.  The last thing we want to know is 'animal connection'.  Most of us have seen the pictures, and know more or less what goes on in labs or on animal farms.  Which is why farms and labs are surrounded by secrecy which they say is essential for bio-security.  That means the general public can't see what's going on, making it difficult to find fault with what you haven't seen, in these places. 

We have double standards running through our decisions - I hate hens in cages: I love fried eggs for breakfast.  It's inconvenient to be thinking about the daily things we do, which require so little thought.  That's the luxury of being human!!  So, the public prefers to ignore animal treatment and focus on price or usefulness of a product.  The public doesn't want to be considering enslaved animals when out shopping.

Every being, human or non-human, wants a life of their own.  But we deny 'domesticated animals' just that, along with affection and/or pain relief when subjected to mutilation.  They certainly aren't given anything to ease the pain of their terrible deaths.  (A sheep that is stunned before slaughter does not constitute a humane killing).

If we humans can’t see the wrongness in any of this, it’s likely we’ve bypassed not so much the guilt in it as the intelligence in it, knowing that using animals is wrong in whatever way we do it, because it doesn't involve cooperation and is always underlined by the threat of punishment.  Foodwise, we should be more circumspect about what we put in our mouths.  Who knows what they put in things these days, especially in processed foods, and in animal-based foods.  And when this circumspection has an ethical component, we see how unethical animal-based foods are but also the ethics of the clothing we wear.  Your feet won't be poisoned by leather shodding, but the conscience will be, from leather shoe-wearing.

As members of our society we conform.  We follow the crowd. "I will not feel guilty".  And if we do feel conscience niggling, it's minimised because our guilt-by-association is dramatically lessened by the lawmakers making animal abuse legal.