685: Self preservation

Most people are unwilling to step so boldly away from convention by taking up a vegan lifestyle, especially because it means giving up their favourite foods. At best, they are afraid of living for the rest of their lives on, and perhaps suffering from the ‘deficiency’ of, a plant-based diet. At worst, they are ignoring animal cruelty in the food industry and therefore in ‘atrocity-denial’, and playing dangerous mind games with themselves.

Maybe they do realize the truth of what we are saying but just try their best to ignore us. They may be afraid that if a break-through were made in the public’s acceptance of Animal Rights, that it would spell the end of animal farming. That would mean no more meat and none of the thousands of animal-based commodities widely available today. In foreseeing this, people are inclined to vigorously defend their lifestyle and do whatever is necessary to guarantee supplies of their favourite foods. More importantly, they’ll resist everything we are saying about ‘atrocity’, which is probably why people pre-emptively shy away from discussing anything to do with animals that are used for food.

In the meantime all we can do is present our case and wait.

684: 

It’s as important to be patient as it is to have a credible argument at our fingertips. When they are required by our freedom-loving, self-willed omnivore friends we must know that we have many good arguments to choose from. And for us to know the facts which can back them up.

We might expose the ugly horrors, appeal to people’s sense of compassion, explain in detail why animal by-products involve cruelty and how they damage the health of the human body. We can suggest attractive non-animal foods, recommend what sort of clothing and footwear to buy. We can emphasize the greenhouse implications of animal farming and tell our friends how inexpensive plant-based foods are and how they don’t rot so quickly or smell so badly when being cooked.

Ah, but that’s not quite true, for it comes down to perception. For me the smell of frying bacon is disgusting and I want to block it out, whereas for others, who eat bacon, it is the most seductive smell. And so these arguments, the warmth of wool, the look of leather, the smoke of the barbeque, they are very subjective. And ethics are too; I regard the animal as a sovereign, irreplaceable, individual, sentient, innocent creature, and you might think of them as dumb beasts without individual personalities, put on this earth for humans to use as they will, believing they don’t have brains like ours, don’t feel as we do, don’t have our sensitivity and can’t foresee their own destiny at the abattoir. How do I get over the subjective barriers?

Perhaps the strongest position I take, when advocating that animals deserve to be granted rights, is that our attachment to animal products is a weakness, and like any weakness we can find any amount of justification for it but this one will always clash with our instinct for non-violence. Because there is so much violence in our society it would seem obvious that this ‘little weakness’ is connected in some way with the way we treat those species we are closest to and which are most useful to us. Instead of protecting them, as we would children or the disabled, we exploit them. Knowing that they can’t fight back, should alert us to the need to be their guardians and not their jailers. The shame of that might be overwhelming but, in reality, not as overwhelming as our attraction to the yummy foods we will enjoy if only we can forget the social injustice of animal exploitation.

Denial

683: 

By their use of animal foods and by supporting the way animals are treated, most people are in denial. They protect themselves by only-doing-what-others-do. If they practise same-behaviour then they also turn a blind eye to the suffering of these ‘food animals’. The main obstacle facing the liberation of these animals is that there are so many people still supporting the trade; it’s not only ‘most’ people, it’s such a high percentage of the population that for them there is, ethically-speaking, a great feeling of safety in numbers. Everyone knows that everyone else is keen to preserve the status quo, knowing that if the flood gates of dissent were to open even a crack, that people would start to consider the part animals play in our Society, and experience a rather nasty shiver down their spine. So many goods and services would be put on the politically-incorrect list that life as we know it would be virtually unrecognizable in a short space of time; food would alter, confections would change, shoes would be different as would a lot of our warm clothing and bed coverings. And if such changes meant an entirely different lifestyle imagine how attitudes would have to change to keep pace. We’d then be much more open to what Animal Rightists are saying.

Those of us who are advocating rights for animals might try every known argument to persuade people to abandon animal-based foods and commodities, but we know that won’t happen till there’s a fashion change in attitude, a much greater recognition of what sentience means. I hate to use the word ‘spiritual’, with all its religious connotations, but that is more nearly what sort of revolution I am referring to.

The atrocity buffer

682: 

If hunting with barbed fishing hooks or with guns is a ruthless sport, then animal farming is a cold, calculated and prolonged torture process. Using animals as a main source of food supply has long been shown to be unnecessary, since a plant-based diet is safe, satisfying and very healthy. When that penny eventually drops, one hopes that all intelligent people will say “no more” and start to look more carefully at the Animal Rights arguments and go on to discover a food regime which poses no danger to either health or conscience.

            But at the moment, most people haven’t paid too much attention to our arguments. They prefer to eat as others eat, fish as others fish, shop as others shop. Of course, impressionable youngsters think everything is quite normal and acceptable; and we can’t blame them for that.

            Over this last half century, since the end of the Second World War, consumption of meat has increased dramatically. It’s cheap, plentiful and animal by-products are widely used in a huge variety of snacks and confections. We’ve become dependent and even addicted to animal-based foods. Greater demand and competition has brought about a creeping deterioration in conditions on animal farms, to the point where intensive farming is now nothing short of an atrocity. When we think of atrocities, we imagine the torture and massacring of people. These horrors, not usually involving us personally, we duly condemn. But this atrocity (the enslaving and executing of food-animals) only differs in so much as almost every person living on the planet is involved in it. For example, the life-long caging and brutal killing of chickens is actively supported by anyone who is buying caged hens’ eggs or eating chicken-meat … which is something that most people do. Since no one wants to associate themselves with ‘atrocity’, they try to deny it. They develop an ‘atrocity-buffer’ which allows them to spot any other atrocity except the one they themselves are connected with. 

The killing process we never get to see

680: 

Humans enjoy eating animals and animal by-products. We wear their skins and skin coverings. We experiment with them to test the safety of drugs and cosmetics. We downplay empathy for animals and emphasise the need for a more cold-hearted, macho and pragmatic attitude. Perhaps we regard animals as the spoils of a war. This is, after all, a war being waged against them, and they are our trophies. We eat and exploit animals as a celebration of our status as the ‘dominant’ species.

            Animals are eaten at almost every meal. We have a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude about these animals, and this won’t change until we see how ugly the whole system is and what we are buying into.

            We need to remind ourselves what actually happens to the animals we are about to eat. Lobsters and crabs are boiled alive, fish are slowly suffocated or crushed under the weight of other caught fish, chickens are hung upside down by their legs, and carried on conveyors, one behind the other, to have their throats cut by revolving blades. Cattle have a bolt fired into their foreheads before they have their throats cut and are bled to death. Pigs have electrified tongs clamped to their heads to immobilize them before being knifed. Male chicks are thrown live into mincing machines because they are useless to the egg-laying industry, and so it goes on.

            The way in which we kill and mutilate animals is cruel by any standard and yet the consumer accepts this as part of the essential food that they must have, glad enough to use the ‘end-corpse’ for food. The supermarket trolley, filled with styrofoam packets of the muscle tissue of killed animals are a familiar sight in the supermarket. We never get to see a dead whole animal, unless with fish, where often their whole bodies can be seen, dead, laid on ice and gutted. As gruesome as the sight of a dead fish might be, it’s such a familiar sight that the customer doesn’t turn a hair. They’ve been familiar with this sight since they were children.

            The way these animals are caught or killed at abattoirs is not often witnessed, the customer only sees the body of the dead animal when it has been cut up and packaged, by which time it bears no resemblance at all to the whole animal. We rarely see the animal in the process of dying; the animal is either fully alive and then fully dead. That’s a long way from being personally involved in the complete process. It’s a very long way from fulfilling our hunting instinct which involved stalking, killing, skinning and butchering.

            Today we eat animals that have been caught or imprisoned by other people and then killed and butchered by others people. We’re not too fussy how it all happens just as long as we don’t have to know too much about it. If we use animals for food or clothing we comply with an industry that cares nothing about the feelings of the animals they use; they simply coral, breed, fatten and execute them for us. 

Killing in the wild & Angling

679:  

Once upon a time people were more in touch with how animal foods came to them. Long before ‘food animals’ were held captive they were hunted, and without the use of high-powered rifles and four wheel drive vehicles. Back then hunting might have been  essential for survival, but now it isn’t. There is a kangaroo meat industry providing income in rural areas but mostly the wild  animal being hunted will be hunted for recreation. The government are even encouraging this ‘sport’ into National Parks, allowing people to shoot at ‘feral’ animals, causing terrible injuries to the animals themselves and putting human Park users at risk.

Angling

The fishing industry is denuding the oceans of fish with trawl nets hundreds of meters in length, dredging up both target fish and many other non-target sea creatures which are either too badly injured when caught and dragged to the surface in the nets or which die in the process. Ecologically the damage to the sea environment by large-scale fishing is well known, but little is being done about it. On a smaller scale the very popular pastime of angling does terrible damage too.

            My next door neighbour hangs his fishing rod over the sea wall to relax from his stressful job, as a chef. He’s an intelligent, kind man and probably never thinks for a moment that the fish he catches are sentient creatures who share with us very similar pain receptors and nervous systems. He may not realize or want to know that the fish he hooks will slowly suffocate to death over a period of twenty or so minutes.

            He (like thousands of others) fishes for fun, unconcerned about how fish feel when a barbed hook pierces the fish’s mouth and is hauled out of the water and left to die a slow death. As a chef he’s dealing with animals all the time, but his ‘working-animals’ are already dead. He doesn’t have to make any connection between the living creature and the body parts he uses. He simply cooks what his customers ask for (which is mostly meat, sea foods and rich dairy concoctions) without any thought of animals suffering or dying. Most people who go fishing care nothing for the creatures they ‘catch’. It doesn’t occur to them that they are causing fish such suffering. 

Wild animals used for food

678:                 

In my local supermarket, at the meat counter, I see that there are some ‘wild’ products - notably kangaroo meat. They stock various cuts of kangaroo including fillets, steaks, minced meat and 'kanga bangas'  (kangaroo sausages). While some kangaroo is sold for human consumption it is mainly sold as dog meat.            People don’t really want to know what happens to these animals when they are being hunted. The kangaroo here in Australia is a wild creature. It is not farmed because it can’t be domesticated or fenced in or made docile in captivity, so the teams of hunters go out at night, and in the glare of spotlights the kangaroos are shot at. Their young, too small to be useful, are clubbed to death or left alive for predators to kill. Perhaps the killing of these animals supplement the income of farmers but I suspect there’s some pleasure involved in ‘sport’ of the kangaroo-shoot.