Heavy attitudes

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The two different attitudes surrounding the animal debate. On the one side, there is the anger felt by vegans towards people who brag about their meat eating and don’t give a damn about animals. On the other side are people who resent being forced to consider animals when they don’t want to. There’s a huge gulf between people over the subject of animals.

Animals are eaten by the million and the billion, not the cute, cuddly ones of course but the so called ‘edible’ ones. Until a couple of decades ago no one gave much thought to how animals were being treated on farms and abattoirs, or that it might be possible to survive without using animals, or that it was wrong to kill them for food. Then, in the early eighties, The Animals Film and the book Animal Liberation hit the scene. They shocked a lot of people.

People began to realise for the first time how much of our food relied on animals and were horrified by what was actually happening to them. Slowly these home truths seeped into public consciousness and a momentum started to build. Then, surprisingly, it came to a standstill. At least it did in Australia. The general public were no longer as outraged, the media didn’t take up the stories (of routine animal abuse), and the meat trade injected lots of cash to make sure meat and dairy continued to flourish. In the general community there was a reluctance to face up to animal issues - probably because people were feeling too guilty to think about it. But the main reason animal issues slipped from public consciousness was that they were so unpalatable. People like their animal foods too much to want to examine the subject too closely. People are addicted to the thousands of animal-based food products on the market. People are afraid that even by discussing animal issues, it might endanger supply or lead to an increase in prices.

Public attitude is now set in concrete. Discussion is subdued and the situation for farm animals is even more dire than it was thirty years ago. Taking a heavy hammer to that concrete isn’t the answer, I’m sure of that, but I’m not so sure there is another obvious way to even bring the subject up, let alone get people discussing it constructively.