What the eye doesn’t see …

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In our society, we are encouraged to turn a blind eye to animal issues.  There’s very little media coverage, and factory farms, abattoirs and animal laboratories are closed to the public.

But it’s unlikely the public is keen to visit them anyway because they’re such ugly places – and this works quite well since it’s much more difficult to object to something when we haven’t seen with our own eyes.  We are also encouraged to believe that if teachers at school thought we ought to know about this, they’d have taught it.  If we aren’t taught something then we reckon it’s probably not worth knowing about anyway.

This is a world where the thin end of the wedge is thought to be dangerous, where one thing leads to another and too many awkward questions are asked.  For instance, if we discover that dairy products are cruelly produced then everything made with milk is ethically questionable ... and then there’s a danger that our conscience might force us into great inconvenience.

It’s like opening a Pandora’s Box when you start to apply ‘Rights’ arguments to the wardrobe.  Health arguments obviously don’t apply here.  Leather shoes, for instance, aren’t ‘bad’ for you, but they do come from slaughterhouses just as meat does.  (Leather is not so much a by-product as a co-product, since its production is as economically important as meat production).  A delicate conscience puts two and two together and comes to some difficult conclusions.  For example, vegetarians who still wear leather shoes can’t hold, let alone promote, Animal Rights views.