Conversations with Friends

1896:  

Judging and condemning don’t work. Not in the case of Animal Rights anyway, since any amount of outrage from a small group of people, is ineffective. It’s just too easy for the big group of people to ignore the whole thing and remain blissfully unscathed by their minority judges. We’re talking food habits here, where ninety per cent of people don’t regard animals, like pigs and cows, to have any other purpose than to be there for human use. The way we treat them is not that important, because it’s hidden so that we don’t have to see it, even if we wanted to. The feelings of farmed animals either don’t exist or they’re not important because they can’t be expressed in any language we can understand. No language - no feelings, so why worry since they’re going to be put to death soon anyway. That we eat them is not important, since we’ve been doing it for two million years. And we seem to thrive on our ‘natural diet’ of meat and two veg.

People who don’t think they’re in the wrong will see their critics as ignorable. There are just too many meat eaters and milk drinkers, for them to be worried about what a few rabid vegans have to say. Cruelty on the farm is just part of making a living, sometimes a very poor living, out of the land. Not all land is good for cropping, and only suitable for grazing. Then there’s the competition of other less scrupulous farmers who take short cuts, not with the quality of their product so much as with the quality of their board and lodging facilities, for their animals. They can make food that is cheaper. If a cage can double production and cut costs in half, eggs will be cheaper. If stabling dairy cows or sows or turkeys burns less energy, that means greater production and lower fodder bills, but lower retail prices. If they didn’t confine animals, farmers would go out of business.

The arguments of the people who don’t think they’re wrong, are common to people everywhere on the planet. They’d barely give the matter of animal rights a second thought. And yet there are others of us who think of very little else. We can’t get the daily holocaust out of our minds.

So, we condemn the unethical use of animals. But we know that, without the support of the law or the majority of ordinary people, our protests and judgements will go unheeded. Regarded as merely ravings of weirdos, who are therefore ignorable. But useful in so much as their antics can be the subject of amusing dinner-table conversations. The casual nature and incidental, even subliminal ‘product placement’ on TV shows further emboldens the carnivores to carry on being carnivores.

We observe them wheeling their shopping trolleys down the aisles, laden with their ‘little comforts’. We see them doing what they do and buying what they buy. And find it sad to see them eating their way to an early and ugly death. But ours is still a concern for them as fellow humans, for their conditioning and desensitisation, while our main concern must always be the liberation of human-exploited animals.

Perhaps we should only encourage people to think for themselves and not let them be frightened to discuss matters with people like us. For that to come about, they must be sure that vegans are gentle in all ways, knowing that we would never insist that anyone agrees with us, nor that we ourselves would ever become defensive about our own views.