Heavy attitudes

271:

The two different attitudes surrounding the animal debate - on the one side the anger felt by vegans, towards people who brag about their meat eating and don’t give a damn about animals, on the other side are people who resent being forced to consider animals when they don’t want to. There’s a gulf between people over the subject of animals.
Animals are eaten by the million, the billion, not the cute, cuddly ones of course but the so called ‘edible’ ones. Until a couple of decades ago no one gave much thought to how animals were being treated on farms and abattoirs or that it might be possible to survive without using animals or that it was wrong to kill them for food. Then, in the early eighties, The Animals Film and the book Animal Liberation hit the scene. They shocked a lot of people.
I, for one, realised for the first time how much of our food relied on animals and was horrified by what I saw actually happening to them (and became vegan as a consequence). Slowly these home truths seeped into public consciousness and a momentum started to build ... then, surprisingly, it came to a standstill. At least it did in Australia. The general public were no longer as outraged, the media didn’t take up the stories (of routine animal abuse), and the meat trade continued to flourish. In the general community there was a reluctance to face up to animal issues - probably because people were feeling too guilty to think about it ... and they liked their animal foods too much to want to examine the subject too closely ... and were addicted to them (to thousands of food products on the market) ... and to discuss animal issues might endanger supply or increase their cost.
Public attitude is now set in concrete. Discussion is subdued and the situation for farm animals is even more dire than it was thirty years ago. Taking a heavy hammer to that concrete isn’t the answer, I’m sure of that, but I’m not so sure there is another obvious way to even bring the subject up let alone get people discussing it constructively.