Cold hearted horror

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When you see pictures of the Nazi prison camps and the Jews being marched to the gas chambers, you realise how much damage the human brain can cause, especially when its used to normalise cruelty. And especially when that normalisation becomes so routine, that it’s no longer noticed or remarked upon.

If you’ve ever seen films like, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, you see how damage can be maximised when directed at innocence itself. When a child is traumatised, when a child’s innocence is broken, when a child is sent into the gas chamber, at that point innocence is totally violated. By realising that this could happen, that one human could do this to children, is salutary. The exquisite terror these children must have experienced, as they saw the cold-blooded killing ‘machine’ go into operation, must have been more than anything a surprise.

A child’s innocence, just like an animal’s, by being destroyed, emphasises the pitilessness of the deed. It’s so surprising to think any human could be capable of this. Therefore, to me anyway, what happened there tells me a lot. For the two boys in ‘the striped pyjamas’, this was an attack on their consciousness, the most precious survival equipment humans have, for becoming aware of their thinking-environment.

By their sharing so much of the same sentience, I can only think it’s much the same for animals, when facing the same lack of pity from their executioners. This is why farmers don’t give their animals names or let their kids get to know them. If young people, living on animal farms, were allowed to develop any sort of emotional attachment to them, they would have too much difficulty later on, when they become their betrayers. Without this betrayal, the animals could never be sent to the equivalent of the gas chamber, sent to an equally  terrible death by having their throats slit open.

There’s not much difference between the death camps set up for humans and the abattoir set-up for animals - each shows how unfeeling, how ruthless and how pragmatic humans can be. And it’s that trait, in some humans, that lets them do what they do, without a second thought. Which is why people like us have to distance ourselves from this particular barbarity. Once we end our association with the Animal Industry, we can wash our hands of the abattoir, and that of course means that we give up eating (and enjoying) the meat and produce from those abattoir clientele.

These images of abattoirs and gas chambers are haunting enough, if only because they fatally attack the defenceless - they are a constant reminder of what the human is capable of.

But if the act itself is straight forward, far from simple is the psychology running behind it, since it reflects the human capacity to make what’s wrong right. This is what Orwell might describe as “double-think”; in the nature of this particular crime, it is not seen as a crime at all.

Most present day humans (including almost everyone that is an animal ‘consumer’) don’t necessarily see the crime, any more than do the hands-on animal farmers, transporters or executioners. They hold a view that says, “Animals - why make a fuss about them? They are ‘mere’ animals. They don’t have brains like ours. They are incapable of feeling. They don’t have the same ‘sentience’ as us. They aren’t as conscious of things as we might be. They can’t be traumatised because they can’t reflect on their own situation. They can’t premeditate their own destiny, so they don’t suffer from anxiety. In short, animals are unaware of what’s happening to them until it happens and, because of that, they never experience agitation. We mustn’t anthropomorphise about animals”.

These explanations have comforted many generations of meat-eating humans. They help to convince whole populations of people, that what happens to animals is basically okay, because our ‘using’ them is essential to the preservation of our life.