Hurting Animals

1132:

Edited by CJ Tointon

When representing Animal Rights, I try to steer clear of sounding 'too right' about animal cruelty and animal food (despite having no doubts about it myself).  There’s something else important to establish - the need for empathy between each other and of doing unto others what you’d want to have done to yourself.  I think this is the key to igniting people’s empathy for animals.  If we can apply the principle to each other, then why not to animals?

The popular quest for enlightenment, being somewhat spiritually self-indulgent, diverts many good-hearted people away from one big, dark blot on their personal landscape - rampant animal cruelty.  But by taking the emphasis away from oneself (my own interests and self development) I’m left with empathy.  This comes from a greater need to 'share' than to 'keep-for-oneself'.  Animal Rights takes that empathetic characteristic in humans and places it squarely at the feet of the beings who suffer most.  The ones we enslave -  domesticated animals!

By comparing and contrasting the empathy shown to our dog at home with our lack of empathy for other animals, we can see a big contradiction.  The last thing we’d want to do to our companions at home is hurt them, because we know them as individuals.  It’s the same with other peoples' dogs.   Each dog has his/her own personality.  We can feel that and empathise with it.  In fact, we're rather proud of ourselves for being able to do so.  

Animal Rights emphasises the strong bonds we have between ourselves and 'the creatures'.  It’s likely none of us could purposely 'de-individualise' any animal in order to put it into a 'special category' so that cruelty could be inflicted upon it.  For most of us it would be absurd to try.  We certainly couldn’t be complicit in ending its life for personal gain.  But that’s exactly what animal farmers force themselves to do (that is, after all, how they make their living, just as many others do in the 'Animal Industries') and in turn 'force' their customers to be complicit in that same hurting and killing.

When I was young, I often went hiking in the country overnight.  One evening I found a pigeon that had eaten poisoned bait. I looked after it overnight but it was in such obvious pain that the next day I took a knife to its throat.  I often think of that bird.  I always hoped that, at the moment when I had to end its life,  it understood why I did it.  But for an animal to face the knife without that sort of reason, is quite a terrible thought!   Yet billions of animals face that very act of murder each day, with no kindness and no anaesthetic to ease their pain and terror.  When they are about to be executed, there’s the smell of death all around them and the machinery of death, along with the all too familiar 'ubiquitous' human, forcing them forward to their untimely death.  To think of just one animal suffering like this is unimaginable, let alone billions of them!

Humans, who love animals have a strong sense of empathy.  But for many people, even a felled tree is empathised with more than a farm animal.  Humans are good at pretending.  They pretend they can feel empathy because they love their dogs and cats (and trees).  They feel rightly proud of that.  But after having won a few points in their favour, they will afford themselves 'special circumstances' to be applied to farm animals.  All for the sake of 'essential' food!  By providing a market for animal-killing, they connive in the terrible treatment (and even more terrible deaths) of these animals!