The human who couldn’t change personal habits

975:       

Anyone who instinctively sees an urgent need to do something about the way we treat food-animals is up against it; we have to ignore what’s previously been taught about food, go against tastebud-advice, against the advice of corporations, governments and educators, and turn to themself for advice.

The issue of using animals in the food and clothing industries sits like a lead weight on our collective conscience - what we do to animals makes monsters of us.  I’m ashamed of being a human, for what I did for so many years. I didn’t care about animals being slaughtered.  I didn’t care about hens being imprisoned in tiny cages.  But the more I learned the more critical became the situation inside my head.  I discovered that newborn calves are snatched away from their mothers (and shot soon after they’re born).  I found out that sows are kept restrained in stalls, and cattle are mutilated without pain killers, always for very practical reasons, of course.  The list of horrors goes on and on.  Each one reflects on the farmers, the producers and the consumers who support all this.  We consumers especially, who buy the animal produce.

           

Now all this might be true enough, but nearly every one of us is involved.  We can switch off.  No one will notice.  We don’t have to talk about it.  Or think about it if we don’t want to.  This is where we’re stuck.  This is why we’re stuck, and can’t move forward.

           

We’re stuck because we’re all the same in so many ways.  My taste buds are like everyone else’s.  I respond to my favourite foods as you do.  If I’m more sensitive then, these same foods weigh heavily on my conscience.  It hurts me only because a sort of numbness comes over me when I try to think about it.  How sentient animals are suffering.

The fact is that animals are born and kept alive only to be eaten.  They’re held in prisons and live in terror, and die the most ugly death you could imagine.  And we sensitive ones comment on all this.  We say, “it’s outrageous”, but then carry on eating them all the same.  We object, but we still allow it to happen.  By way of some nifty mental gymnastics we can relax at the dinner table and eat what we’re given.  Minds closed, mouths open.