me and my shadow

Ethics are our instinctive ‘knowing’. They let us decide which direction to take, and they also warn us of dangers. Instincts, linked to our senses, let us detect ugly, noisy or foul smelling things, telling us when they are to be avoided. This is why animal farms these days are closed to the public (as are vivisection laboratories). They are not attractive to look at, nor peaceful, nor sweet smelling. They have all the charm of concentration camps. These are places people avoid. Today’s farms are so obviously hotbeds of unethical animal treatment that only those people who work on them (or the very few animal activists or environmentalists who’ve made it their business to see what goes on there) would visit them out of interest. The general public is uninterested in ‘that sort of farm’. Enthusiastic consumers of meat and milk products have a picture in their heads of a happy farmyard (circa 1930). They prefer to know very little about modern husbandry methods, the industrial processes being applied to rearing and killing animals. It would spoil their journey towards becoming a better person. And spoil their dinner too!
Not knowing, not making it our business to know, not wanting to know: all these states of mind are dangerous and when it comes to animal farming, the powers that be are obviously trying to conceal something ugly, namely that their farms are really animal prisons solely geared up for death. By knowing even a little about all this horror, puts animal-eaters in a terrible ethical bind. Although not socially embarrassing (because everybody else is, more or less, locked into it too) it is troubling to us on a personal esteem level. We like to think of ourselves as ethical people. But as soon as animal rights is brought up, we wonder if we can redeem ourselves. We know that animals are in death camps and that our dollars, spent on animal products, keep them there.