A simple biscuit

If we don’t give up animal products we condone the violence done to them and therefore disqualify ourselves as true peacemakers. By the one daily action of shopping for and eating of animals we encourage the daily assault on them. That action wastes our best chance for future happiness, for us-personally or us-collectively … and of course for the animals too.
Humans are their jailers but we are also, potentially, their only hope. If we aren’t willing to defend them, their only chance for a natural life is lost. By taking part in the violence against them, by buying slaughterhouse products, we become part of that process. Take for instance the buying of eggs. The seemingly benign egg comes to symbolise the very worst violence imaginable towards a living animal. And that egg hides itself in the ingredients of familiar products that we’re used to buying.
I buy a packet of biscuits, the ingredients of which include egg from caged hens. As a biscuit eater I might not want to know all about the egg-laying hen. I just want to be left in peace to eat and enjoy my biscuit. But whether I know it or not, the fact is my biscuit contains something that can’t be justified I it is to know that biscuit makers don’t go around looking for ethical raw materials. If they make their product with eggs, it’s certain that they come from caged hens.
None of us actually approves of this system but we still buy egg-containing products. In doing this we compromise what we say we believe, namely non-cruelty. Beliefs like this could go to make us good people. To go against this goodness in ourselves, to be seduced by a biscuit, seems pathetic.
To feel okay about global warming we probably need an emissions trading scheme: but if we want to feel good about ourselves in regard to animal cruelty, there’s no system of guilt-trading to make us feel okay. All we can do is stop condoning it by not consuming ‘it’.