Animals that are used for food

673:

I’d like to go back to basics for the next series of blogs, to recap on some of the reasons why we shouldn’t be using animals for food. This is at the heart of veganism, of boycotting any industry that uses animals for any purpose whatever. Humans have realized that animals can be profited from and that there are no constraints on exploiting them - the general public will not complain as long as the producers give them what they want and no one informs the customer too often about what really happens on farms and abattoirs. The animals themselves can’t fight back so there’s no danger from them.

In the animal industries, worldwide, there is fierce competition for market share, and this has led the Industry to lay aside welfare considerations in order to produce food and clothing at the lowest price possible. Animal suffering is no longer a consideration. I’m mainly concentrating here on the food industry, where animals are used for food.

My reaction to animals being used as production machines is simply to say that it’s inhumane to confine animals, kill them, butcher their bodies and eat them! The very idea of denying animals their freedom or any semblance of natural social life, keeping them in slum conditions, and then, on their execution day, hanging them upside down to bleed to death, is obscene. However badly we may want to eat their bodies and secretions there is nothing which can justify this sort of barbarity.

We might have arrived at this point in human history for a reason: to review our own barbarous nature in relation to the way we treat these animals. But it gets worse, for if cruel and callous things can be done to entirely innocent animals like cows, steers, pigs and sheep, how much worse is it for the very young of those species? Imagine how it is for the ‘children’ of the animal world, the six week old pullets, piglets, calves and lambs.

            The sheer horror of what is happening to animals, on a mass scale, all around the world, makes me (and many others like me) want to do anything we can to change peoples’ attitudes, to stop them buying into the trade in animals. Perhaps the most powerful argument we can offer is to point out some of the terrible things being done both at farms and abattoirs. But many of us have tried doing that and found the ‘shock-horror’ approach ineffective; it seems that when most people do what most others do then it allows them to follow suit without the need to think about what they do. The feel covered by common practice. Most people are reluctant to think too deeply about using-animals. “Ho hum” they say, and “All very sad, but that’s just the way things are. We humans have been eating animals for a million years. We aren’t likely to change now!!”.

But we are changing, especially here in the Western world where we are more fully informed about animal exploitation. We are changing because the shame is too great. But change is still slow.