Cow prisons

1169: 

Why should we care about cows living on prison farms?  Surely cows are the living example of how we’ve made a machine out of Mother Nature.  We’ve harnessed Nature to supply our needs, and insured our survival by having so many animals ‘on tap’.  Consequently we can guarantee our major food supplies.  We’ve achieved this by using our brains.

         

Again, it’s illustrated best by the use of the cow.  With our useful knowledge of the biology of this animal, we’ve taken control of her, body and soul.  Keeping a cow as a milk-producing machine involves forcibly impregnating her, letting her carry a calf to term, and letting that biological process stimulate her mammary glands to produce maximum milk.  And this milk is for us only. So it makes sense to dispose of the newly birthed calf, in order not to have to share this valuable milk.  This is the perfect example of slavery.

Certainly in Nature terrible things are known to happen between creatures, but everything done by the predator to the predated is part of the natural world.  But there’s nothing ‘natural-world’ about farming cows or any other animal.  They are enslaved, shut up in cages, enclosed by concrete walls, in constant contact with hard steel, and attended by cold hearted humans.  There’s nothing natural about them being made captive, being used up and then being coldly executed, when the human is finished with them.

         

Something in our finely developed human instinct should tell us this is profoundly wrong.  But for most of us, our empathy-instinct is cauterised, and what we find acceptable has been manipulated, so we see no wrong in the way animals are used by us.