The Animal Issue

1862:

There’s a great gulf between people’s attitudes to animals. The difference lies between the cute, cuddly ones and the ‘edible’ ones. Until a few decades ago, no one thought much about it - farm animals were just different types of animals, which we needed to eat to stay alive. Then the myth was exploded – it was discovered that animal protein was NOT essential to good nutrition. Then the rest of the story came tumbling out, about how animals were being treated on farms and in abattoirs.

         

In the 1940s and 50s the idea of a vegan diet was being tested and found to be not only safe but healthy - plant-based nutrition was coming of age. By the early eighties, The Animals Film and the book Animal Liberation were released, and together they had a shocking effect. They certainly shocked me. I realised for the first time how much our food relied on animals, and what actually happened to the animals reared for food. Some of us were galvanised into action at the time. The information seeped into public consciousness and suddenly everyone seemed to be talking about it. And then, surprisingly, it all came to a standstill. At least it did in Australia.

There was a lot of discussion of the situation in Animal Rights publications, but nowhere much else. In the general community, there has been a reluctance to face up to animal issues - probably because people who eat animals feel too uncomfortable to think about it too deeply. In private, if there’s any talk of it at all, it centres on health issues rather than the ethics of imprisoning and killing animals. People like their animal foods too much to discuss the rights and wrongs with any sort of intellectual rigour. In any supermarket, there are probably thousands of choices of animal-based edibles. In any one day, the meals and snacks we’re likely to be eating probably all contain some animal ingredient, because it adds richness, flavour and bulk to foods. The food industry has worked hard to make us fall in love with their products and thus to crave the animal content. And since we now want it so badly, we’re reluctant to discuss the subject seriously.

Those who are against the ‘eating of animals’ are usually the butt of jokes. Those who are likely to want to talk about animal issues are usually avoided or discouraged from even bringing up the subject in conversation. The subject is generally tabooed or joked about as being unrealistic.