Shopping

1392: 

Humans are by nature kind people.  Most of us would be completely incapable of deliberately making an animal suffer.  But we’re duplicitous enough to let a proxy imprison them and kill them, for us, and we still come out smelling like roses.

This is the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ syndrome - ‘what our eyes don’t see our heart won’t grieve over’.  The mind of most people cooperates with their own interests, so ethical decisions are rarely made when shopping.  We shop without there being any ‘heart or mind’ factor involved.  We find food, we buy it, we eat it; we see familiar packaging on the shelf, we reach for it (as we’ve done a thousand times before), drop it in the basket, and take ownership of it at the check-out.  Then, it’s as good as eaten, and once used, once eaten, we needn’t worry that it’s gone, because there's plenty more where that came from.

If we buy a hen’s egg or a lamb’s leg, we buy it because we want it.  We don't need to know about how it was produced.  We buy it because the thought of eating it is irresistible.  No one is in favour of cruelty to animals but keeping things the way they are is to our advantage; whenever animal welfare reforms are made, prices go up.  Economics supersede ethics.  When we want something, we’ll buy it despite ethical reasons not to.