Article 26. What are Ethics all about?

Ethics are fresh air. They are our instinctive ‘knowing’. They let us decide which direction to take, which routes and they also warn us of dangers. Instincts, linked to our senses, let us detect ugly, noisy or foul smelling things, telling us when they are to be avoided. This is why animal farms these days are closed to the public (as are vivisection laboratories). They are not attractive to look at, nor peaceful, nor sweet smelling. They have all the charm of concentration camps. These are places people avoid. Today’s farms are so obviously hotbeds of unethical animal treatment that only those people who work on them (or the very few animal activists or environmentalists who’ve made it their business to see what goes on there) would visit them out of interest. In fact, the general public is decidedly uninterested in ‘that sort of farm’. Enthusiastic consumers of meat and milk products almost certainly still hold in their heads a picture of a happy farmyard. They prefer to know very little about modern husbandry methods, preferring to travel, cocooned on the morality train, happy not to be able to see through where the windows should be, at the industrial processes being applied to rearing and killing animals. It would spoil their journey towards becoming a better person. And spoil their dinner too!
By seeing farms as animal prisons solely geared up for death, we must discover if indeed our interests are ours or not.
Not knowing, not making it our business to know, not wanting to know: all these states of mind are dangerous and when it comes to animal farming, the powers that be are obviously trying to conceal something. It seems as though some real denial of truth is going on (by the way, those are revolving blades that meet the birds on the conveyer!). By knowing even a little of this unprintable horror, puts animal-eaters in a terrible ethical bind. Although not socially embarrassing (because everybody else is, more or less, locked into it too) it is troubling to us on a personal esteem level. We like to think of ourselves as ethical people. But as soon as animal rights is brought up, we wonder if we can redeem ourselves. We know that animals are in death camps and that our dollars, spent on animal products, keep them there.