Namit Arora has a gem of an essay on 3 Quarks Daily. I think the curse of being alive in this century is that one has to live and die being consciously aware of the inability to leave behind a compassionate world for our fellow non-human animals. But yet, history has taught us to be patient and find solace in small steps to a better world.
What can shake up our colossal indifference? Clearly, most of us don't even know about the horror and pain we inflict on billions of birds and mammals in our meat factories. But there is no good excuse for this, is there? It's more likely that we don't want to know—cannot afford to know for our own sake—so we turn a blind eye and trust the artifice of bucolic imagery on meat packaging. Many see parallels here with the German people's willful denial of the concentration camps that once operated around them, or call those who partake of factory-farmed meat little Eichmanns. "For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka", wrote Issac Bashevis Singer.
Predictably enough, many others are offended by such comparisons. They say that comparing the industrialized abuse of animals with the industrialized abuse of humans trivializes the latter. There are indeed limits to such comparisons, though our current enterprise may be worse in at least one respect: it has no foreseeable end; we seem committed to raising billions of sentient beings year-after-year only to kill them after a short life of intense suffering. Furthermore, rather than take offense at polemical comparisons—as if others are obliged to be more judicious in their speech than we are in our silent deeds—why not reflect on our apathy instead? Nor should criticizing vegetarians and vegans for being self-righteous—or being moral opportunists in having found a new way of affirming their decency to themselves—absolve us from the need to face up to our roles in perpetuating this cycle of violence and degradation.
Few things strike me as more absurd than calling oneself an animal lover while patronizing industrialized meat, though people will surely continue to deceive themselves about this and even offer variously unthinking arguments to defend their habit (like those which cling to such simplicities as humans are the top of the food chain, other animals also eat animals, people need meat protein to live, our traditions or religions sanction meat eating, and so on; David J Yount has compiled many good responses to such arguments).
What can shake up our colossal indifference? Clearly, most of us don't even know about the horror and pain we inflict on billions of birds and mammals in our meat factories. But there is no good excuse for this, is there? It's more likely that we don't want to know—cannot afford to know for our own sake—so we turn a blind eye and trust the artifice of bucolic imagery on meat packaging. Many see parallels here with the German people's willful denial of the concentration camps that once operated around them, or call those who partake of factory-farmed meat little Eichmanns. "For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka", wrote Issac Bashevis Singer.
Predictably enough, many others are offended by such comparisons. They say that comparing the industrialized abuse of animals with the industrialized abuse of humans trivializes the latter. There are indeed limits to such comparisons, though our current enterprise may be worse in at least one respect: it has no foreseeable end; we seem committed to raising billions of sentient beings year-after-year only to kill them after a short life of intense suffering. Furthermore, rather than take offense at polemical comparisons—as if others are obliged to be more judicious in their speech than we are in our silent deeds—why not reflect on our apathy instead? Nor should criticizing vegetarians and vegans for being self-righteous—or being moral opportunists in having found a new way of affirming their decency to themselves—absolve us from the need to face up to our roles in perpetuating this cycle of violence and degradation.
Few things strike me as more absurd than calling oneself an animal lover while patronizing industrialized meat, though people will surely continue to deceive themselves about this and even offer variously unthinking arguments to defend their habit (like those which cling to such simplicities as humans are the top of the food chain, other animals also eat animals, people need meat protein to live, our traditions or religions sanction meat eating, and so on; David J Yount has compiled many good responses to such arguments).
There is no evidence that farm animals suffer any less than dogs or cats. They too are lovable, intelligent, and have individual personalities and social-emotional lives; many of them even bond with humans. They too have behaviors that in our pets we describe as fear, elation, loneliness, anxiety, playfulness, etc. More of us rediscovering this may be a prerequisite to bringing greater dignity to their lives and deaths—and in doing so, greater dignity to our own.
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