Hurting animals

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By representing Animal Rights I try to steer clear of sounding ‘right’ about animal cruelty and animal food (despite having no doubts about that myself), since there’s something else important to establish ... the need for empathy between each other. It’s this idea of doing unto others what you’d have done to yourself, which in turn ignites people’s empathy for animals. If we can apply that principle to each other then why not to animals too?
By taking the emphasis away from myself (my own interests and self development) what I have left is empathy. By comparing and contrasting the empathy shown to our dog with our lack of empathy for other animals we can see big contradiction. The last thing we’d want to do to our companions at home is hurt them, because we know them as individuals. It’s the same with other people’s dogs - we don’t have to know them, because each dog has its own personality and we can feel that, and empathise with it. We’re all of us proud of ourselves for being able to do that.
Animal Rights emphasises these strong empathetic bonds we have between ourselves and ‘the creatures’ and it’s likely none of us could purposely de-individualise any animal in order to put it in a special category, thence to inflict cruelty on it. For most of us it would be absurd to try. We certainly couldn’t help to end its life. But that’s exactly what animal farmers force themselves to do. That, after all, is how they make their living, just as many others do in the ‘Animal Industries’.
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. I always hoped that, at the moment when I had to end its life, that it understood why I did it. But for an animal to face the knife without that sort of reason, that’s quite a thought! And yet billions of animals face unreasonable murder each day, with no kindness and no anaesthetic to ease the pain and terror. When they are about to be executed there’s the smell of death all around them, and the machinery of death along with the all too familiar ‘ubiquitous human’, forcing them forward. To think of just one animal suffering like this, let alone billions of them, is unimaginable.
Humans, who love animals (as they do children) have a strong sense of empathy. But even a felled tree is empathised with more than a farm animal. Humans are good at pretending. They pretend they can feel empathy because they love their dogs and cats. They’re able to empathise and they feel rightly proud of that ... but then, having won a few points in their favour, afford themselves ‘special circumstances’ to be applied to farm animals ... for the sake of ‘essential food’. So, by providing a market for animals they connive in their terrible treatment and their even more terrible death.