The Inanimate

1917:

If I think the animal thing is sad and you don’t, it says a lot about perception. I might know a few more details which makes me closer to the animals’ plight, but today almost every adult knows essentially how bad things are in those gulags they call animal farms, and in slaughterhouses. And yet it seems that I see things one way and you another.

         

This is how I see it: animals are not so very different to us, they’re sentient, they feel pain and suffer as we do when their well-being and life are threatened. But as ‘non-sovereign beings’ their treatment, by their owners is, by the word of Law, no one else’s business - property is sacrosanct.

However, according to moral law, the way we treat them shows us how careless we’ve become. It’s no longer a secret. So, finding out what’s actually happening to them is a huge wake up call. Or so you’d think. But most of you animal-eaters are still swayed by the rights of the owners.      

         

One of the most useful things I possess is a table, my desk, a place where I sit and eat and write. I love my table - I made it. I’m proud of ‘my’ table. I chose the wood, paid for it and did the carpentry. I didn’t grow the tree but I feel I have the right to call this table ‘my’ table. It’s my property. I can look after it, abuse it, even chop it up. I don’t have to wonder how the table is feeling, or what it thinks about my ‘owning’ it because, of course, objects can’t ‘feel’ or ‘think’. Does that mean I can treat my car, my bike, my table in any old way I please? Legally I can.

         

This must be how farmers think about their ‘right’ to treat what’s theirs, in any way they choose, not only their tractors but their ‘stock’. We’ve just had terrible bush fires, and on the news the sympathy is for the farmer who has suffered ‘stock-losses’, no sympathy expressed for the animals burned to death in their inescapable paddocks.

Essentially, it’s carte blanche – the humans can do whatever they like - because animals are considered property (like my table or my bike). They can be loved and nurtured or they can be exploited and even destroyed. We deal with property as we please, with impunity (and legal immunity). Farm animals are regarded, to all intents and purposes, as inanimate: not without life but without the right to life.