Hurting animals

By representing Animal Rights we have to step aside from being personally ‘right’ about animal cruelty and animal food in order to stress the importance of empathy itself, which leads to empathy for animals. At the centre of empathy is the principle of do unto others what you’d have done to yourself . If we can apply it to fellow humans why not to animals too? By taking the emphasis off ourselves and our own self development, we bring our arguments down to a very natural feeling. We all have it. It stems from a simple comparison, between the empathy we feel for our companion animals at home and our non feelings for edible animals. To hurt our own animals is unthinkable, because we know them as individuals. We know each one to have their own personality. Animal Rights is about empathetic bonds we have between ourselves and ‘the creatures’ we know. It’s likely none of us could purposely de-individualise any animal. How then can we de-individualise a farm animal? To the point where we help end its life.
When I was young I was hiking in the country overnight. In the evening I found a pigeon which had eaten poisoned bait. I looked after it overnight but it was in such obvious pain the next day I took a knife to its throat. I often think of that bird, at the moment when I had to end its life and I hope it understood why I did it. But for an animal to face the knife without their being any compassionate reason to kill it, must be like any victim facing their murderer. And yet billions of such animals face their murderers each day. There’s no one present like a kindly vet to ease the trauma, there are no anaesthetics, just the machinery (that makes the moving animal still enough so that its carotid artery … and there’s no need to continue that sentence, because the ending is obvious and the picture clear enough. The sort of death these animals meet is mind-bogglingly cruel. It’s the humans forcing the animal forward, to their execution. Think how even one animal could suffer this, let alone billions of them. Humans love animals as they do children. We have a strong sense of empathy for animals. Even trees being deforested are more empathised with than animals.
But humans pretend they can feel empathy because they know they love their dogs and cats. What feat of mental gymnastics has to happen to exclude farm animals from that same empathy? We know what happens when we effectively condemn the animal to be our slave living on death row. We know what happens when their dead bodies and their by products are called for by market demand. But how do we as individuals contribute to that demand?