How we routinely hurt animals

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Whether predated or a predator, an animal is a free-spirited creature. It’s a self-feeding, social being. It isn’t interested in concrete and steel structures or in helping humans to lead a more comfortable life. But to many humans a free animal is an animal wasted, a waste of good money … and for those who make their money out of farming them it means nothing to have them incarcerated - they’re just a resource. Every customer of every animal product helps to support that way of seeing animals.
Some humans do love animals but most humans also connive at hurting them, by supporting those who take away their freedom of movement, by putting them in pens and cages.
In a way, what we do to animals we do to ourselves. We sell our souls to keep ourselves fed, or more particularly over-fed, and all the rich food we eat ends up killing us. Our addiction to it makes us demand that it should be cheap. In response to customer demand, if the farmer wants to stay in business, he cuts every corner he can - he lets his animals suffer. If it means cutting off animals’ tails, horns, beaks and testicles for easier management of them, then that’s what is done. They are enclosed behind fences, put behind bars, encased in glass boxes as exhibits at zoos, caged, tethered, immobilised and generally treated like machines, and yet it’s strange how we also romanticise them. The farm animal is part of the rural idyll, we see them contentedly grazing the pastures and never get to see indoors, at the darker side, where they are subjected to torture. We never see the equipment used for mutilating them, for cutting bits out of their bodies. We never hear the sizzle of skin under red-hot branding irons. Perhaps we see the double tiered trucks on the highway filled with animals being transported to the abattoir but we’re largely no more aware of their fate than the animals are themselves.
On the farms and especially the factory farms, the psychological torment suffered by the animals is unarguable. But people in general know almost nothing about this – they are ignorant or they pretend to be. We most of us live in towns and cities. We hardly ever go to the country and when we do, we see the pretty farm buildings nestling amongst trees surrounded by green paddocks. We never see the interiors … nor want to. If we get to know, from pictures or TV footage, that the animals are kept in slum conditions (and therefore realise that our food comes from these places) we still don’t react. We aren’t aroused by the possibility that there’s anything wrong going on, let alone anything diabolical. We aren’t encouraged or even allowed to check out conditions on farms.
If you go down to the farm today you’re in for a big surprise - if you ever get to see inside one it would be a case of ‘once seen never forgotten’.