For many of us who are aware of the multitude of ways that animals
suffer at the hands of humans around the world, this ubiquitous cruelty
is the most pressing social justice issue of them all. From declawing
to debeaking, ear clipping to tail docking, the suffering that human
beings inflict on animals being used for food, clothing, research,
‘pets’ and entertainment appears to know no bounds, and the many brutal
ways in which we force animals to succumb to our desires appear to be
limited only by the scope of our imaginations.
But why does all this cruelty take place? And what can we do about
this horrifying brutality as individuals? It’s easy to point the finger
at the direct perpetrators of animal cruelty as being villains who
need to be brought to justice. It’s much harder – and yet much more
significant – to turn that critical eye inward and ask oneself, ‘What
am I doing to contribute to this?’ But it is only by asking that
question that the path toward emancipation from barbaric injustice
becomes clear.
The vast majority of the time, money and effort of animal welfare
organizations goes toward trying to develop new laws and regulations to
address the many separate issues relating to animal cruelty, while at
the same time trying to force the industry to adhere to those currently
in place. As explained in Are Anti-Cruelty Campaigns Really Effective?, these efforts consistently fail to create any significant improvement for animals.
Behind these campaigns lies a hidden assumption that the animal
industry is responsible for animal cruelty. But is this assumption
warranted? Isn’t industry simply a middle agent put in place to do the
dirty deeds requested by consumers of animal products? Although it’s
true that the animal industry is an eager and aggressive
middle agent, its role is only that of middle agent. As such, while
institutionalized exploiters certainly have a lot to answer for, it is consumers who are primarily responsible for animal cruelty through their purchases of animal products.
Many people will likely respond that their concern is not with the
rights of animals not to be enslaved and killed, but with the excessive
brutality in the animal industry; gratuitous violence for instance,
and the cruelty that is inflicted on animals along the way to being
slaughtered and butchered – debeaking, dehorning, detoeing, mulesing,
castration, tail docking, etc. But as long as our society continues to
treat animals as property and economic commodities,
our legal system will continue to accept such mutilations as a
necessary evil on the way to providing goods and services to a human
population largely indifferent to what is hidden behind remote sheds and
slaughterhouses.
In any case, even if we did find some way to eliminate every single
practice involving physical mutilation, it’s impossible to make slavery
and murder anything other than slavery and murder. We can slap fancy
labels on the products of animal misery and market them as
‘humanely-raised’, ‘animal compassionate’, ‘ethically-produced’ or
‘guilt-free’, but needless killing is needless killing, and no amount
of regulation can change that.
It is understandable that individual stories of horrific suffering
make people want to seek out the perpetrators, bring them to justice,
and protect potential victims from experiencing the same treatment. But
pointing the finger at institutional exploiters ignores the most
significant issue – that no matter what the suppliers do along the way,
consumption of animal products ultimately requires taking animals’
lives.
Image: Flickr (Glen Bledsoe)
How can we expect morally decent behavior from the people we ask to
carry out the task of breeding, confining and ultimately killing and
butchering the animals we choose to enslave and eat? These are innocent
beings who most people would rather caress and embrace than hurt and
kill.
There is something very unjust about the fact that we delegate the
most obscene work of our society to a select few who are emotionally
hardened enough to carry it out, only to later denigrate them for their
disconnection from their natural sense of empathy. When thinking about
it honestly, most of us would be hard-pressed to find it in ourselves
to slaughter an animal – or to rip off her skin, or slice open her body
to remove the entrails, or butcher her flesh into supermarket-sized
pieces… And yet, we continue to ask others to do it for us, while most
people refuse to even watch these things on video or hear others
describe them.
But our distaste toward being involved in such violent acts isn’t
something that should be squelched and suppressed, as Michael Pollan or
Julie Powell
would have us believe. No – we should be grateful for the revulsion we
feel when we imagine what happens to animals in between being born and
being on our plates. Our horror is a sane reaction to practices that
are nothing short of horrifying.
We cannot separate ourselves from depravity simply because we have
found a way to tuck the dirty deeds out of sight – behind the walls of
slaughterhouses and other obscure buildings. And all the disconnection
and indifference in the world cannot change the fact that it is
impossible to distinguish the immorality of a Pollan-style DIY approach
from the immorality of any other act of unnecessary violence.
In any court of law, those who are complicit in a crime are considered to be responsible along with those who carry it out.
As expressed so eloquently by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the
slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is
complicity.”
