New levels of barbarity

1365: 

Seventy years ago, three near-simultaneous events took place.  First, there was a war grinding to a halt, millions dead, millions dying of starvation.  The ring master, Hitler, had badly scared people, and when he died, when this was all over, there was a new confidence to enlarge or start families.  Second, around the same time, an atom-splitting device was exploded (over two Japanese cities) showing how we could wreck the whole planet by just pressing a button.  These two events marked the end of an era and the beginning of another, a 'cold' war.  No sign of violence abating.  The third event, happening around the same time, was the problem of feeding people, where the war had brought hunger and much need for a reliable food supply.  Brains went to work, ethics were laid aside, and in came the cage.  Caged animals were now to become production units of human food, and animals were to be no longer regarded as sentient or to be considered as individuals.  A new and very nasty piece of violence!

The idea of confining a whole sentient species, holding their bodies in straight jackets for the span of their foreshortened lives, was the order of the day.  As we started to exploit the biology of the animal’s body, so we introduced an almost gratuitous cruelty into animal farming.  New husbandry methods brought new levels of barbarity, most especially by entombing and completely enslaving any animal deemed useful for feeding humans.

As the war was ending so the intensification of farming was being introduced, and it has increased exponentially, becoming more and more demonic in character, up to the present day.  Perhaps the most interesting and frightening phenomenon was that the more people knew of the cruelty involved, the more they turned away from knowing.  This was nothing short of a cauterising of consciousness, a backward step in human evolution.  As a response to both the cruelty and this convenient ignorance came the Animal Rights Movement.