Child-friendly propaganda

35.

Family-friendly farms got me thinking just how we indoctrinate children about animals. These farms look like fun places, for animals and children alike. Kids will believe anything if enough adults are telling them the same thing. After all, they’ve spent their entire lives being taught by adults how to do things, how to survive, how to enter the world of the grown-up.

It’s important that Mum and Dad, who provide the food for their children, get them to eat what they believe will make them healthy and strong. And these same adults have grown up believing that their parents fed them the sorts of foods which made them what they are today and which will be good for their own children. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, teaching the rights and wrongs of life to kids, so that they can pass the same thing on themselves.

However, we are not only born with parents and teachers to advise us, but instincts too. And for many of us those instincts are strong enough to make us question our educators. We might see the cruelty shown to animals and decide to take up a vegetarian diet, to avoid the worst of the animal cruelty. Others become vegans to boycott every aspect of that same cruelty, and at the same time re-examine the value of certain foods in order to avoid illness and the eventual poisoning of the body.

But desensitisation of instinct takes place on other levels too. Children are led to believe that instincts are unreliable or misguided. So if we see fear or madness on the face of an animal (or a human) it might not warrant pity but instead give rise to contempt. The child is taken to the circus and sees bears dressed in frilly skirts or lions leaping through rings of fire. The animals are seen as subservient or ridiculous, without any semblance of sovereignty or dignity. It’s as if they are too stupid to protest or refuse to cooperate with the friendly-looking humans who appear to love them. Such is the deception played out on gullible innocent children. The child is taken to the zoo, for much the same reasons, to desensitize them and make them question their instinctive sense of compassion. They are told that these animals are happy, when patently they are not. How could a child question the adult about such things when they have no basis for questioning except for their innate instinct. It would be a brave child who stood against such a barrage of persuasion put up by teachers, parents, uncles, aunts and seemingly the whole of their society. As children grow up, if they have come to accept the rightness of zoos or the rightness of eating meat, they will have taken part in so many questionable activities for so long that any tendency for protest will have been long drummed out of them.