Heavy attitudes

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There are two different attitudes surrounding the animal debate - on the one side the anger felt by vegans, towards people who brag about their meat eating and don’t give a damn about animals, on the other side are people who resent being forced to consider animals when they don’t want to or have to. There’s this huge gulf between people over the subject of animals.

Animals are eaten by the million, the billion. Not the cute, cuddly ones of course but the so-called ‘edible’ ones. Until a few decades ago very few people gave much thought to how animals were being treated on farms and abattoirs. Nor did they think it was even possible to survive without using animals. Still, today, most would disagree with vegans, that it was wrong to kill them for food.

In the early eighties, The Animals Film and the book Animal Liberation hit the scene. Some of us were profoundly disturbed by what we read and saw, realising for the first time how much of our food relied on enslaved animals. Slowly, with the help of organisations like Animal Liberation and the Vegan Societies, the newly revealed truths seeped into public consciousness and momentum started to build. Then, surprisingly, like Scotch mist, the shock faded and people started to forget. Compromises sprung up, welfare and partial vegetarianism became fashionable. But in general, the public were not to be put off their favourite foods and articles of clothing, even if they came from brutalised animals. The Animal Industries continued to flourish.

In the general community there was a reluctance to face up to animal issues because almost everyone was addicted to the thousands of food products on the market. With a cosy relationship between the media and The Industry, discussion of animal issues was never encouraged, for fear of endangering supply or increasing costs or losing advertising revenues.

Public attitude is now set in concrete, and the situation for farm animals is even more dire than it was thirty years ago. Taking a heavy hammer to that concrete isn’t the answer, I’m sure of that, but I’m not so sure there is another obvious way to even bring the subject up, let alone get people discussing it constructively.