Relating to others

We project altruism and we think about possibilities and opportunities, and sometimes we pour our altruism into great causes. Which brings us to Animal Rights. When we’re aware of our own altruism, (like parents can be with their kids) we go on to apply it beyond the home and beyond the personal, and do it for other people, other species and even promote ideas which might be of interest to others. Altruism is like an outer- field-experience for developing empathy. Animal Rights is just one of the great empathy causes. Another is planet care, another is social justice - many people divide up their stocks of altruism between them, whether they pertain to personal interest or world matters. It’s valuable empathy business we like to be engaged in. Who doesn’t want to be seen as empathetic, altruistic and enthusiastic?
For us, as humans, empathy is our forté. We can feel almost as much for another’s loss of life as for the loss of our own. Humans are often drawn to compassion. Like when we see death amongst starving children, or any sort of suffering in children. It’s just as heartbreaking to see exploited animals but more than heartbreaking is the deliberate ending of their young lives, by execution.
Any damage to a young one, be it human or animal, is hard to handle: it could be starving kids, it could be lambs at slaughter. It’s not simply an empathy for the dying but for the suffering that goes before it.
The ability we have (we ‘responsible’ adults) to inflict suffering, purposely and carelessly, whether it’s by denying kids food or in the caging and killing of animals, is opposite to empathy. It’s the ‘separation process’, moving away from ‘the other’.- preliminary to exploiting and killing. As we have to feel alienated to the enemy we’re about to kill so too with animals, before we submit them to an unnatural death.
In human dealings when we turn against each other, there’s separation. It can be as bad as war. If war is the manifestation of first-stage violence, then second stage requires alienation plus disrespect for ‘the other’, as an individual – these don’t need to be engaged or straight away killed, simply enslaved. In this stage of violence, humans take away an animal’s dignity (plus freedom, ability to socially relate, have sex, forage for food or live in harmony with Nature) but we have an execution in store for them, and whilst they’re still young. This requires a very malignant spirit in the human being. And yet a creepier trait is the compliance of almost everybody using animals. It’s mindboggling to think that any adult human can live with this much on their conscience. But of course they don’t bear the weight of it much at all, because they’ve learnt to manipulate their own conscience, or worse, allowed themselves to BE manipulated … either way, it’s worrying. Most of today’s men and women are still willingly following like sheep (“If you do it, so will I too”) with nary a hint of a question about what we do being immoral or even unconscionable .
To do what humans do to animals is bad enough, but it’s the consumer who has the last say and upon whom we animal activists ought to gang up on. It’s they who consume and yet allow others to do the dirty work for them. (Although in truth, there is no practical way the consumer could raise and slaughter the animals they want to eat, or milk them).
If you’re a meat eater and an animal product user you have to sleepwalk through this bit. No adult, especially here in the Western world, can possibly argue ignorance any more. In recent years there’s been enough information about cruelty to animals and factory farming to sink a battleship. So, it seems we just can’t be honest about our attitude to these animals. We can’t grow up. We can’t wake up. We don’t want to wake up - the bell rings, the body is shaken but the eyes remain closed. And, we believe if we can keep our eyes closed long enough we can fall back to sleep again, when ‘the awakeners’ have gone away.
Maintaining relationships, whether with spouses, lovers, offspring, parents, friends or anyone we know well, is the big lesson today. But we’re so busy on our human relationships we neglect the others, particularly when those living beings are useful to us. Animals especially. The sort of relationship we have with farm animals or laboratory animals couldn’t be worse - we exercise power over them unashamedly, we grant them no rights, allow them no freedom or fun. And only grant them the ‘privilege’ of staying alive until we want to kill them. That’s about the most cynical foundation for a relationship one could imagine.