682:
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 every person living on the planet 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 develop an ‘atrocity-buffer’ which allows
them to spot any other atrocity except the one they themselves are
connected with.
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