Out of sight

Will Tuttle has written a book The World Peace Diet. http://worldpeacediet.org. In it, on page 222, he says:

“We tell ourselves that we are good, just, upright, kind and gentle people. We just happen to enjoy eating animals, which is okay because they were put here for us to use and we need the protein. Yet the extreme cruelty and violence underlying our meals is undeniable, and so our collective shadow looms larger and more menacing the more we deny its existence, sabotaging our efforts to grow spiritually and to collectively evolve a more awakened culture”.

This is a picture of humans with their hands tied. He says, on page 221, “We will always be violent toward each other as long as we are violent toward animals – how could we not be?”

Humans are by nature kind people. Most of us would be completely incapable of deliberately making an animal suffer. But we are by nature duplicitous too. We let a proxy do what we can’t do: kill our food animals. And somehow we think we can reconcile these two opposites and come out smelling like roses.
This ability to accept ‘out of sight out of mind’ says a lot about us. We say that what our eyes don’t see our heart won’t grieve over, so whenever we buy animal products we see nothing wrong happening - when we’re out shopping we visualise buying a familiar product. We remember how it tastes. We know the packaging. We know where to find it on the shelf. We reach for it and, as soon as we touch it, it’s as good as taken, and eaten. If we have the money to spend on it we know there’s a never ending supply of it. We make our purchase and a replacement immediately fills the empty space left on the shelf.
The routine buying of animal products is so familiar to us we do it without a second thought. If it’s a battery egg or a leg of a lamb, we buy it because we want it. We refuse to be concerned about how it was produced. We buy it because it is irresistible. It doesn’t mean we’re necessarily in favour of cruelty to animals but we know what is most important to us - we do notice that whenever animal welfare reforms are made, prices go up. That one factor makes us less enthusiastic for any further reform of farming practice. In the end money talks. Economics supersedes ethics. When choosing what to buy, it is nearly always for our own personal convenience and self-interest. This is what determines our decisions. When we want something, we will always decide to buy it despite having a strong ethical reason not to.