Soft we are, and not judging

817: 

The truly hard-bastard is not a typical human; we are mostly softies. None of us, vegan or omnivore, would deliberately hurt anything. People are NOT violent by nature, and don’t deliberately set out to hurt for the fun of it unless we’re psychopathically disturbed. It’s impossible for a sane person to inflict suffering on a sentient life form (animal or human). What ever could make us do such a thing?

            But this is where the meat-eater is torn. We don’t actually do the deed ourselves, we get others to do it for us - out of sight, out of mind. Most people will say it’s not nice but we are pragmatic about it. We think we have to inflict hurt in order to eat (obviously we have to kill an animal if we intend eating it). We ameliorate our feelings of guilt by allowing a proxy to do the killing for us.

            The ability to avoid our own responsibility here leads me to wonder what it was that set human nature on this course. It must have started maybe a couple of million years ago, when we started to hunt animals, but the taking of unfair advantage of animals, the corralling of them, the enslaving and eventual cold-blooded slaughtering of them, that came more recently. At some stage we manipulated our nature so that we could do any number of soul-crushing things to the animals we eat. And it was only made worse by our letting others do the dirty work (of rearing and killing) for us. We now have the best of both worlds - we have the body parts of the animal for our use, and we don’t have to look at an animal’s frightened eyes as it heads towards its execution. So deep is our addiction to eating the flesh and by-products of animals that we allow our soft-hearted natures to be squashed.

            Most people are softies at heart. And just as we can’t hurt creatures neither would we hurt people (unless in self-defence). Hunters do it and find pleasure in it, but these days, where it’s not done to avoid hunger it’s done for the rush the hunter gets from the kill. You and I wouldn’t be able to find any pleasure in this.

Most of us have some level of violence in us but at heart we’re soft, we’re wired up that way. Violence is appropriate to thunderstorms and earthquakes, but not to human behaviour.