Dodging ethics

1054: 

Those who came up with the idea of imprisoning hens in cages, in fetid, sunless sheds, set a trend.  To come were other prisons, for other animals, perhaps inspired by the cruelties of wartime treatment of human prisoners.  The war had shown how willing whole populations of people could be, to ‘not-see’ what they had seen and to accept a ‘death-camp’ mentality, which included the turning of a blind eye for the sake of convenience.  Out of an existence which had been threatened, people were now dodging ethics as it suited them, accepting cruelty, ignoring empathy, and all for the sake of pragmatism and the importance of providing cheap and plentiful food.

If the cage was used as an emergency means of feeding hungry people there was no twilight clause written in, so it was never abolished.  The cage has continued up to the present day.  Eggs have been mass produced.  They’re cheap, people are hooked on them and like so many other animal products, they’ve become staples because we like the taste of them – nobody cares that the hens laying them are suffering.

In our war on Nature, humans thought they were going to get away with this sort of brutal enslavement of animals.  But perhaps Nature has hidden ways of getting her own back, by ‘dis-easing’ the physical and spiritual health of those humans with a couldn’t-care-less attitude.