Hurting animals

1542: 

When representing Animal Rights, it's good to steer clear of sounding ‘right’.  Despite having no doubts about that, we might avoid being too dogmatic about animal cruelty and animal food, if only because there’s something else important to establish - the need for empathy between each other.  It’s this idea of doing unto others what you would have done to yourself. With that in mind, we have a chance to ignite empathy for animals.  If we can apply that principle to each other then why not to animals too?

By taking the emphasis off ourselves (the 'follow me, and aren't I wonderful' line) we can introduce the importance of empathy. The most obvious and widespread practice of empathising is seen with our dog at home.   By comparing and contrasting the empathy shown to our dog with our lack of empathy for other animals, we can illustrate the obvious contradiction in values.  The last thing we’d want to do to our companions at home is hurt them, because we know them as individuals.  Just because we don't know the pig or the lamb as an individual animal, doesn't mean that we don't need to show empathy.  It’s the same with other people’s dogs - we don’t have to know them, because each dog has its own personality and we can feel that, and empathise with them, and we can be duly proud of ourselves for being able to do that.

Animal Rights emphasises these strong empathetic bonds that we have between ourselves and ‘creatures’, and it’s likely none of us could purposely de-individualise any animal in order to put it into a special category whereby we feel free to inflict pain on it.  For most of us it would be absurd to try.  Nor could we help to end its life when not for compassionate reasons.  But that’s exactly what animal farmers force themselves to do and we, as customers, condone.  This, after all, is how they make their living.  This is what we expect of them, as we do of many others connected to the ‘Animal Industries’, so that we can benefit from their actions.

When I was young, I was hiking in the country overnight.  In the evening I found a pigeon which had eaten poisoned bait.  I looked after it overnight but it was in such obvious pain the next day I took a knife to its throat.  I often think of that bird.  I always hoped that, at the moment when I had to end its life, that it understood the reason I did it.  But for an animal to face the knife without that sort of reason, that’s quite a thought!  And yet billions of animals face just that.  They experience no kindness and no sedative to ease the terror, nor any anaesthetic to ease the pain.  When they are about to be executed there’s the smell of death all around them.  There's the machinery of death along with the all too familiar ‘ubiquitous human’ who is forcing them towards it.  To think of just one animal suffering like this is haunting, let alone billions of them.

Humans, who love animals (as they do their own children) have a strong sense of empathy.  But even a felled tree is empathised with more than a farm animal.  Humans are good at pretending.  They pretend they can feel empathy because they love their dogs and cats (and children).  They’re able to empathise, and they feel rightly proud of that.  But then, having won a few points in their favour, they then go on to afford themselves ‘special circumstances’ applied to farm animals, for the sake of ‘essential food’.  So, by providing a market for animals, they connive in the terrible treatment of them, and their even more terrible deaths.