The atrocity buffer

5

If hunting with barbed fishing hooks or with guns is a ruthless sport, then animal farming is a cold, calculated and prolonged torture process. Using animals as a main source of food supply has long been shown to be unnecessary, since a plant-based diet is safe, satisfying and very healthy. When that penny eventually drops, one hopes that all intelligent people will say “no more” and start to look more carefully at the Animal Rights arguments and go on to discover a food regime which poses no danger to either health or conscience.

But at the moment, most people haven’t paid too much attention to our arguments. They prefer to eat as others eat, fish as others fish, shop as others shop. Of course, impressionable youngsters think everything is quite normal and acceptable; and we can’t blame them for that.

Over this last half century, since the end of the Second World War, consumption of meat has increased dramatically. It’s cheap, plentiful and animal by-products are widely used in a huge variety of snacks and confections. We’ve become dependent and even addicted to animal-based foods. Greater demand and competition has brought about a creeping deterioration in conditions on animal farms, to the point where intensive farming is now nothing short of an atrocity. When we think of atrocities, we imagine the torture and massacring of people. These horrors, not usually involving us personally, we duly condemn. But this atrocity (the enslaving and executing of food-animals) only differs in so much as almost everyone is involved in it. For example, the life-long caging and brutal killing of chickens is actively supported by anyone who is buying caged hens’ eggs or eating chicken-meat … which is something that most people do. Since no one wants to associate themselves with ‘atrocity’, they try to deny it. They’ll develop an ‘atrocity-buffer’ which allows them to spot any other atrocity except the one they’re connected with.