Shopping

Blog 123a

Humans are by nature kind people. Most of us would be completely incapable of deliberately making an animal suffer. But we’re duplicitous enough to let a proxy do what we can’t do - imprison them and kill them. In our minds we reconcile opposites, and with 99.9% general support we (the consumer) come out smelling like roses.
This is the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ syndrome. It’s ‘what our eyes don’t see our heart won’t grieve over’. We don’t make ethical decisions when shopping, so there’s no ‘heart or mind’ factor. We find food, we buy it, no contention. We see familiar packaging on the shelf, we reach for it (as we’ve done a thousand times before), drop it in the basket and take ownership of it at the check-out. Then it’s as good as eaten (since none of us have ever shelled out for some delicious food item and then not used it). And no worries when we do use it because we know there’s a never ending supply of more of it.
If we buy a battery egg or a leg from a lamb, we buy it because we want it. We have the support of our fellow humans when we refuse to concern our self about the way it was produced ... we buy it because it’s irresistible. No one is in favour of cruelty to animals but what shows up is a nasty fact of life - whenever animal welfare reforms are made, prices go up ... which is why they aren’t made ! Economics supersedes ethics. When we want something, we’ll buy it despite ethical reasons not to.
It’s interesting to note: bringing that thought out into the open is enough to stir a revolution.