Sanctuary

1109: 

What most people refuse to see about the plight of food-animals becomes patently clear as soon as one stops eating them.  So, the next logical step, after becoming vegan, is to encourage others to do likewise, and then to lobby to provide these animals with sanctuary.  In most people’s eyes, this would be seem like a departure from reality.

The cost would be prohibitive, which is what slave-owners two hundred years ago said about freeing their slaves.  And yet it would be a short lived cost since there would be no need to breed more animals, if they were no longer going to be useful to the human.  The kindest result would be that those domesticated animals would die out.  But in the short term these animals would be retired into a safe environment. It’s the very least we owe them.

The idea of ‘farm sanctuaries’ is already being considered.  Some in USA have been in operation for two decades.

If we don’t consider this, we’ll be caught up in an endless cycle of barbaric, polluting and wasteful activities, resulting in the destruction of everything we hold dear.  By avoiding this issue in order to maintain the personal comfort animals afford us, we hand big problems on to future generations.

What would it mean to establish animal sanctuaries?  Initially, they’d be expensive to set up because there are still so many animals alive who need taking care of, but as vegetarianism increases, so the ‘domestic’ animal population decreases.  And by operating a deliberate non-breeding programme there will soon enough be a reduction in the numbers of animals.

Sanctuaries may be the only way to provide safety for animals, but it presupposes great altruistic intention from a lot of people.  And initially that will be shown by the numbers of people becoming vegan and choosing a more altruistic outlook on life; they’ll adopt a non-speciesist attitude, moving their support for animal farming to creating sanctuary for them; a switch from killing to caring.