How can some people do what most of us could never do?

1804: 

I can imagine how some smart bloke dreamed up an idea for making more money out of the animals he owned. He looked at his chickens pecking about the yard and wondered if he could reduce his feed bill and the untidiness of his farm yard by caging these animals, keeping them immobilised and automating their feeding and the collection of their eggs. It would increase his profits no end. By intensifying his operation, the farm would become like a factory, his animals automated like machinery; it would be done at the expense of his animals, whose feelings, according to him, don’t count.

So brazen was this crossing of the boundary between animal care and animal contempt, that it gave rise to outrage. This solidified into a call for, what we now know as, ‘Animal Rights’ - their right to a life. This is a movement that has been growing for the past forty years, aiming to have the rights of all animals, including farm animals, written into law, to prevent the worst atrocities and eventually to make it illegal to abuse any animal. Here, in Australia’s Capital Territory, they've passed a law prohibiting the use of cages for commercial egg production, the de-beaking of chickens and the use of sow stalls and farrowing crates for pigs.

But the full protection of animals will probably be a long time coming. If human exploitation of animals has taken millennia to develop into today’s worst excesses, then it’s likely to take quite a while for less-outrageous abuse to end, mainly because of food interests. There is strong public support for animal-use (let's define that as 'abuse') stemming from the widespread addiction to animal products amongst almost the entire human population of the planet.

The consumer wants the food (and other commodities) made either from the bodies of live animals or the bodies of dead animals. And it has to come at the lowest price possible. The producers have to 'economise on the welfare' of their animals if they want to make a profit, to stay in business. They have to run intensive operations involving huge numbers of animals to stay ahead of the competition. And since closely confined animal populations are prone to epidemics, there are more and more drugs being pumped into their animals to prevent mass outbreaks of disease. And these drugs and chemicals, being ingested by animal-eating humans, bring about more and more illness. Then of course there’s pollution from animal waste adding to our existing environmental problems. The stranglehold of the market determines how much worse they must become until we reach a critical point, where consumers come to their senses and follow the advice of vegans - to boycott the lot of it, meat, animal products and all animal-derived commodities.

We have to believe that the human, who is the destroyer, must also be the creator - the same brain that creates the cage, and all the problems ensuing from it, can also create the solution.  When we humans start to appreciate what we have, and eventually realise how lucky we are to have brains to get us out of our scrapes, then we can move towards a true transformation of our species.