Care

We might say we care, but it has limited meaning because we continue eating the stuff of animals, who themselves could be our most precious objects of care. We eat their by-products, we consume the whole of their bodies, and we know this activity is only possible because we enslave them. Slavery is the only way a farmer can survive, by aiming at the lowest costs, in rearing their animals. The consumer goes hand in hand with the farmer in this, each dependant on maintaining the violence to stay afloat. And for this, at some level, both farmer and consumer will lose self respect. How can anyone approve or enjoy being caught up in routine violence towards animals?
Look at this from the individual animal’s point of view. Take a hen. There’s nothing natural left in her life. She only ever knows loneliness and pain - she’s mutilated, roughly handled, imprisoned, and when very young her pen is a smallish prison cell, into which there comes no sunlight, no fresh air, no soil, no plant life, no natural sounds and no mother, but what comes aplenty is food. Afterwards, for the rest of her assigned life, there is a period of some eighteen months (whilst her body menstruates and she lays) which now becomes that much more painful. There’s an even greater space restriction – she’s caged into a tiny no-room-to-move space, with two or three other hens. Her whole existence is spent standing on a large-mesh wire flooring, breathing ammonia from the excreta of thousands of other birds who also live in the shed. Synthetic lighting, screeching of demented hens, the inability to move within her cage let alone escape from it - this tormented imprisonment is what consumers support every time they eat an egg, or buy a product made with eggs in it. Is it any wonder vegans are so outraged. Not only by the cruelty but by the indifference of their fellows, who have the gall to say, “No thanks - I don’t want to know”.