1454:
If we don’t drop animal
products we can’t be peacemakers. When
we go shopping for animals or sit down to eat them, we encourage the assault on
them. We waste our own happiness, and
waste it for animals too. To them we are
their only hope. If some of us aren’t
willing to defend them, they’re lost. By
taking part in the violence implicit in buying slaughterhouse products, we play
a role in the slaughterhouse process.
But we are easily fooled. The meat dripping with blood brings the animal
connection that much closer. But what
about the clean-looking foods we also buy. Not a drop of blood in sight. No evidence from the product that the animal
has been subjected to cruelty or indeed slaughter. Milk, cheese, wool, leather, eggs. But each
farm animal is abused and cruelly slaughtered when the animal is used up or the
human no longer has any use for them.
The seemingly benign egg has
come to represent perhaps the worst violence, as well as the most mindless
compliance of the consumer. Here’s what
happens: I buy a packet of biscuits the ingredients of which include egg, and
that egg comes from caged hens. As a
biscuit eater I don’t want to know about egg-laying hens and their
circumstances. I just want my biscuits. But whether I know the ingredients’ background
or not, the fact is my biscuit contains something that can’t be justified,
eggs, which come from the battery system. I’m sure biscuit makers don’t go around
looking for ethical raw materials.
Who approves of this system? Probably none of us would, up-front, but we
nevertheless still buy egg-containing-products. Just by doing that one little thing, we
compromise what, otherwise, makes us caring people. It seems pathetic to be seduced by a biscuit.
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