The Wicked

1577:

The way big business has made money out of animal farming and the terrible suffering they inflict on animals must be said to be truly wicked, but the way they’ve manipulated their human customers is possibly worse. And there again, the customers aren't innocent; most know about farmed animals. 

Not too many people will admit to playing a part in the tragedy of animal abuse, but they’re involved nonetheless - the customers are buying the stuff and the producers are reaping the profits. No one has clean hands.

The producers have built empires on the backs of animals. With the support of generations of customers, they’ve provisioned us both at the survival level and the luxury level. The Animal Industries have taken control of so many of our spending habits. Their influence is everywhere - in clothing, in shoes, in food, and countless useful or fashionable products. They give the customers what they want and conceal from them how the products are produced. They’re allowed to tell lies, especially regarding the nutritional value of the foods they sell, and the customers, unable to imagine that so much untruth or greed can exist, believe what they really want to believe, however shonky the assurances given. It's obvious to anyone who looks closely, that the producers will stop at nothing to make profits.

         

I’d be very surprised if even 1% of humans are truly wicked or so mentally ill or desperate that they’d sell their soul in order to increase their wealth. But many wealthy people will, because of their desperate fear of being impecunious They'll abandon all moral constraint to guarantee their own material security. They inhabit the board rooms of agribusiness and allied industries. They force small farmers out of business and establish the intensive farms and processing operations, and get richer and richer.

For the remaining 99% of us, we’re different in as much as we never have the chance to be tempted this way. But if we did have the chance, would we be like them? All of us probably have a few really deep fears – fear of failure, fear of poverty, fear of abandonment, fear of death etc., but most of us don’t have that monster-gene that allows us to destroy things or make others suffer in order to make things better for ourselves. We might flirt with the devil sometimes, we might be less than fully conscious of what we do, we might deliberately refuse to know, but most of us are still in touch with our own feelings. We just wouldn’t exploit our fellow humans as they do. But how about animals? If we are consumers of any animal foods or wear any animal-derived clothing or footwear, we are complicit in the whole sorry business. With what we know about animal husbandry today, one has to have a very low empathy threshold to carry on eating (and wearing) the body parts of these poor creatures and not to feel anything for them.

Perhaps most people don’t realise the significance of what is happening behind the scenes. Perhaps they have no idea how badly farm animals suffer or on what scale they suffer. The customer, wanting to eat what they want to eat, turns a deaf ear to information. They act blindly, as if they didn’t know. But in these well informed times that can be a pretty lame excuse.