Enter the monster

1017: 

In a responsible society, you would think that bad behaviour, obviously harmful behaviour, would be punishable.  But in our society it can be authorised, legalised and considered morally okay.  This puts the very stability of a society on shifting sands - it makes us lose our confidence in the authority of our society’s standards of morality.  Here’s an example of what I mean: Watching chickens hanging upside down shackled to a conveyer, having their heads dipped into electrified vats of water to stun them, before exposing their necks to revolving blades, which decapitate them ... this is the legal and routine horror behind the production of chicken meat.  And in our society and almost EVERY society, this is considered okay.  If our human societies can sanction this then they can sanction anything.  Is it any wonder that people lose faith in their society’s moral codes.

           

What seems unethical to you and I can be washed clean by decree, and once something has been morally ‘okayed’, that gives the unthinking consumer the green light to eat chicken.  Similarly when a society says that polluting the atmosphere or spoiling the environment is necessary for the progress of modern society, the gullible public accepts it, and soon enough it becomes the norm.  Eventually it is no longer questioned.

In the beginning we may have hunted animals on foot, using sharpened spears, and it wasn’t very efficient but it worked to some extent on the predator principle.  Many animals live off other animals – predation is how most animals survive.  As the human brain grew bigger it became more devious, and as time passed, we humans overstepped the mark.  We became monsters, never giving the animals a chance to defend themselves or escape.  We shot them with bullets and corralled them, bred them in captivity and enslaved them to our convenience.  We convinced ourselves that we needed to eat animals to survive and be strong.  It wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that that was proved to be untrue.  And that’s when vegans refused to be part of the war on animals.