Thanks, but I don’t want to know

1523: 

You take any man or woman on the street and ask them if they know what factory farming is.  They’ll squirm and struggle and pretend not to know, even though they probably know all too well.  But this is not likely to happen, since we aren’t likely to bail up strangers on the street, to ask this sort of question - in reality, there won't be much ‘squirming’ going on.

Most people have an ‘awareness filter’ in them, that keeps them comfortably in the dark about the ugly things that have to happen in order to get their 'animal' food to them.  For example, take the egg sitting on the breakfast plate - it might be the first thing they see in the morning - they might be reminded as to how this item has been biologically forced from a hen (most often confined to a cage).  At lunch we may get another reminder, as we cut into a steak, that it comes to us from a castrated bullock, whose private parts have been subjected to the knife at an early age.  Whatever animal is used for food or clothing, has its throat cut, when no longer needed alive.  And fish are no better off, being suffocated and crushed to death on the decks of fishing boats.

Farmed animals are never allowed to die a natural death, each having to be put through a terrifying process of execution.  But because it’s done by others, the consumer never has to feel part of that process.  We can’t grieve over what the eye never sees.  And if we don’t have to grieve, we don’t have to care about what happens.  And yet the responsibility of this process lies with the consumer - it’s not the slaughterer’s knife but our dinner knife that is responsible for the killing of the hen, cow, pig or sheep.

         

We might say that we care, but it’s meaningless all the time we eat what we eat.  If we use their by-products, the animals must eventually be put to death, no differently than those whose carcasses we consume.  We, the consumer, are in cahoots with the farmer in this, caught up in the whole cycle of routine violence, and unable to detach from it because we are trapped by our own food habits.  In a kinder world, these same animals could be precious objects of care, never abused, and allowed to live out their natural span of life (which is many times longer than they are allowed to live under present ‘farmed’ conditions).

         

Look at this from the 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 does have is plenty of food, enough to make her more productive.

         

For her whole assigned life (a period of some eighteen months whilst her body menstruates and she can lay her daily egg) there’s pain.  Her life experience is one of being caged in a tiny no-room-to-move space, with two or three other hens.  Her whole existence is spent standing on a mesh-wire floor, breathing ammonia from the excreta of thousands of other birds who also live in the shed.  She only ever experiences synthetic lighting, the din of screeching, demented fellow hens, she has an 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 a product made with eggs in it.  Is it any wonder vegans are so outraged, not only by the cruelty of it all but by the indifference of our fellows, who have the gall to say, “I don’t want to know”.