Comforts for the carnivores

1452: 

   

Unless we leap forward into herbivorous-ness we’ll continue to assault animals.  We’ll risk everything for the sake of comfort food, none of which is nutritionally necessary, none un-replaceable by plant-based alternatives or, if clothing, with plant or synthetic fibres.  And yet people still go for animal-based products.  Perhaps that’s because there’s immense variety to choose from.   But, for that little luxury we pay dearly.  Mainly over food.  We can’t knock off those pop-foods which the ‘Evil Empire’ churns out.

         

We know that animals can’t hit back so it's quite safe to continue abusing them.  We do it because we know we can ‘get away with it’.  And it’s true, they can’t hit back, but there’s always a sting in the tail.  Their edible body parts are full of slow toxins.  By way of all that saturated fat and high protein, plus the adrenaline infusing into muscle tissue when terrified animals get to the abattoir, animals do ‘hit back’.  It’s like Montezuma’s revenge.  If we eat animals to feel good we end up NOT feeling so good –  these are our just returns for what we’ve put them through.  This is our penalty for pretending NOT to know about it or care about it.

         

Until recently, the mass of our population has not been made aware that there was any danger in eating animal foods (both from an ethical or health perspective).  We’ve just mindlessly eaten what our parents ate, clothed ourselves in the clothes everyone else buys.  Thus, we've exploited animals, using them merely as an available resource.  If we’ve been doing it for aeons it’s because there’s been no evidence that people have ever related to animals in any different way.  There's no history of treating animals in a non-violent way or symbiotic way.

         

We’re a very utilitarian species.  We’ve learned how to take advantage of anything that can’t fight back.  Animals have always been easy pickings - we’ve caught them, kept them captive (and now today imprison them in some sort of cage to restrict their movement), efficiently bred them, extracted whatever we could from them and finally executed them.  We’re pragmatic enough to design execution chambers for them, so they can be ‘killed humanely’!  And then, for chrissakes, we EAT them.  What sort of relationship is that, between fellow sentient beings?

         

The way animals are treated is so sad that I can hardly think about it.  And thinking is the key here, the lack of which leads most poor suckers to the doors of the abattoir to buy their daily three-meals-a-day-drug.  And they’re willing to have large amounts of their money extracted from them to pay for it, for what is definitely replaceable by a more humane and healthy alternative.  For clever humans to not think things through seems strange, so perhaps even stranger, even those with animal sympathies, is that almost every person is unaware of the cruelty behind the shoes they wear or the wool by which they keep warm.  It's only our self deluding convenience-thinking that allows us to believe that such things as milk and eggs and wool and leather do NOT involve the suffering or killing of animals - this is usually the 'thinking' behind the so called 'vegetarian', not using meat but the use of everything else from animals.