Using Animal Bodies

1840:

I’m sure the damage humans do, especially when enslaving animals, contravenes the most primary of Nature’s laws. The audacity and evil of slavery is breathtaking. Each instant takes the very oxygen out of the air. Indeed, this very Saturday morning I waded through a fog of burning animals’ bodies to get to the vegie stand for my pesticide-free carrots.

Slavery, that “peculiar institution”, makes all the other damage we do seem relatively insignificant, because we do worry about the future, and most people think our big problem world-wide is over-population. But there’s enough vegan food on the planet to feed twice the number of humans. Switching over to plant-based foods isn’t the biggest problem we have. Once we’ve done that we’ll realise that we actually have an animal-population problem – what are we going to do with fifteen billion animals? Genocide them? Sterilize them? Although most people don’t realise it yet, still content to continue as carnivores, the biggest overall problem is waiting to confront us, alongside climate change and a general collapse in human ethics.