Conscience

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A numbed conscience lets us get away with things. A troubled conscience casts a dark light on what we do. Does conscience prick when we eat a steak? Does it sleep when we want it to NOT notice?
Either sub-consciously or consciously, we presumably suffer ‘conscience pain’ ... unless we can switch it off. But if it can be switched off then the habit might grow until we lose sensitivity altogether, and that means we can only ever be half awake.
It seems that a big part of human development relies on our seeing things very clearly, but another part requires that we should close our eyes, for fear of being blinded by what we’re looking at. When it comes to food we’ve learned how to desensitise. With animal-eating we say, “Everyone does it so why shouldn’t I?” ... and just to help us along we have ads on the TV to help us normalise animal-eating ... and cooking shows always use lots of meat ... and it’s always a big part of travel and holiday programmes.
Promoting animal foods is big business. Animals are always portrayed as being here for our benefit. The messy or cruel side of animal life is never shown, only the ‘end product’ - we never know them as live beings only as dead food products. Even educated people convince themselves that, because they haven’t personally been involved in torturing or murdering animals that they can’t be held accountable for what goes on behind the scenes. Conveniently, we dumb down over all this, pretending we know nothing even though we know enough ... we know, for instance, that we support the Industry with our dollars.
We try not to see ourselves as the cold-hard-bastard. We try to let our untroubled conscience sleep on. And in this climate of acceptance, where meat and animal secretions are ‘just normal’, the only time we might be disturbed is when we meet up with one of those ‘damned vegans’, who ask how we can possibly go on supporting the Animal Industry.