Children recruited into animal cruelty

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Those of us who don’t subscribe to the supremacy of the economic argument, and who think using animals is wrong, also realise that animal protein is unnecessary and often harmful to health, especially in the overindulgent way it is consumed in the West. We also see it as a tragedy for both animals and young people. Both are powerless victims of the habit of consuming animal-based foods.

            Kids can’t fend for themselves. They must do as they’re told and eat what they’re given. Almost every child is misinformed or kept uninformed about animal-based foods and how they are ‘produced’.  Consequently, they come to believe what they are told, by adults, that it is necessary to farm animals for food. They grow up being told little about how their food comes to them, and especially little about what life is like for farm animals. In fact most people know very little since everything is kept secret. These days no one, adults and children alike, is encouraged to study animal farms let alone intensive farms or abattoirs.

            If we, as a society, weren’t ashamed of our treatment of farm animals, we’d allow and encourage students to see it all for themselves, at every stage of the processing of animals for food. Children would be taken to factory farms and processing plants and shown how meat, milk and eggs are produced. Then, whne they are due to leave school they’d be in a better position to decide for themselves whether they should use food produced from these animals. But since that would be likely to seriously affect the fortunes of the animal-food market, it doesn’t happen!