Rage and abandonment

583:

We say, “Look, will you, at what they’re doing to the animals. It’s absolutely disgusting”. We say, “Stop buying their stuff. Stop grabbing what they’re offering you”. But how often do we ever get a chance to say any of this? And even if we did say it, surely it’s the way we say it, to show we are concerned both for the animals as victims and for the humans as perpetrators.

            For those of us who are concerned, we find it hard to suppress our feelings. And I’m arguing that most times we should try hard to suppress, for the sake of a better outcome. This ‘concern’ we have is a double worry. We’re as much worried by what’s happening as we are about our own inability to stop it happening.

            I often think it’s like passing a house, looking through a window and seeing a kid being threatened by an adult and being entirely unable to help. It’s possible that it isn’t as it seems. We have to say to our self “Oh, they’re just having a scrap, none of my business”, and then walk on.

            It’s very difficult for the animal activist to imagine how any of this killing will be stopped. Lying awake at night I, like others, picture small animals, alone, frightened, and in a state of god-knows-what-unimaginable-hell. Lying awake, I think, “this is happening tonight, now, at this moment”. I might be deeply concerned but it doesn’t help any of them. And yet my imagination is showing me this suffering and I know that it’s happening just down the road, not so far from where I live.

            In these sleepless moments I might think we’re all doomed. I envisage the torment behind the production of each breakfast egg. That torment continues unheard, behind closed-doors. As I imagine it, it gets into my head. I can hear the animals scream and my heart goes out to them both for the physical suffering and the anguish they must feel, that nobody cares for them. And that they’re abandoned. But if I said any of this to you as you ate your breakfast egg you’d simply make me feel over-emotional, in order to shut me up.

            It’s as if some of us live on different planets to the rest of the population, or that we speak a foreign language, or that we are a voice that can be switched off like we switch off a radio. The greatest challenge we have is to find a way to make some small impression on those who are all too ready to switch us off.