How to hurt animals

An animal is a free creature whether a predator or predated. He or she is self-feeding, is a social being and has no interest in concrete structures or helping humans have a more comfortable life. But to many humans, a free animal is an animal wasted, a waste of good money. And it means nothing to them to capture and incarcerate them - they’re just money, a resource, and of course they are supported in what they do by their customers and the law that makes what they do legal.
Humans hurt animals. We not only use physical force to make them pull a plough or race around a track but we take away their freedom of movement by putting them in pens, cages, behind barbed wire … and we do it to make them manageable, to make profits and to guarantee food supply. It isn’t questioned. Unless in economic terms. As competition bites, people in the animal business cut corners to stay ahead of the opposition (who could be an overseas producer). And again, the animals bear the brunt.
In a way, what we do to animals we do to ourselves. We act like Barbarians because we’ll stop at nothing. We’ll cut off tails, horns, beaks and testicles, even their very sentience when necessary. We’ll do anything. We put them behind bars, behind glass as exhibits at zoos, we treat them as things. Nothing more. The evidence is everywhere in the countryside, mostly on farms where you see equipment for mutilating (‘marking’), tools for cutting bits out of animals’ bodies and the ominous, ubiquitous truck, parked, ready to carry them off to the slaughter house. The psychological cruelty alone would be bad enough but the slum conditions of all farms adds up to monumental cruelty. The more one discovers what happens on farms, the more one’s breath is taken away. But people in general know almost nothing about this – they are ignorant or pretend to be. We most of us live in towns and cities. We never go to the country and when we do we just see scenery. We see the cosy farm nestling into the hills with trees and paddocks. But we never see behind the scenes, nor want to. If we get to know, from pictures or TV footage, that animals are kept like this and we know our food comes from these places, why don’t we act? We must be aroused to the possibility that there’s something profoundly wrong. And isn’t it suspicious that we aren’t allowed to check out conditions on farms? If we did it would be a case of once seen never forgotten.