I CARE ABOUT ANIMALS: True or False?

I understand that some people genuinely do not care about animal lives, their welfare and their death. Those people... I considered disturbed. Those are the people who will not read this blog in its entirety.

What I find, in speaking with farmers and most omnivores, is the disconnect that plagues them all and most everyone who eats meat and dairy.

I hear over and over and over, "I care for them," "Without me they would die," "I love animals."

What I think I've come to realize is this:

Yes, some farmers genuinely do care for the animals they spend their daily lives with. But, what they suffer from is something called 'cognitive dissonance', it is described by Wikipedia as this:

"In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values." 

Citation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance


I, myself, ate meat and dairy for 31 years. I get where most people are coming from. I was ignorant and unquestioning for most of those years. For a few years, when I started to hear bits and pieces of the whole truth of livestock farming, I suffered very drastically from cognitive dissonance. Essentially, I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it was culturally accepted (everyone was doing it) and even mainstream promoted, and therefore, I put it out of my mind. It ate away at me (pun not intended), and when I took it upon myself to find out more, the pieces fell into place and I freed myself from the lies and the discomfort and from being a contributor to the antithesis of my own beliefs.

I didn't care for animals, I killed and ate them. It just doesn't make sense. I let someone else raise them however they saw fit, or I let a factory raise them, abuse them, destroy them mentally and physically, so I could eat their carcass. We don't need to eat animals. We're better off not eating animals and there are so, so many credible studies that prove this. I've learned through personal experience, I learned for myself. And that is key.

We don't need to eat animals. We want to. 
We don't need to kill animals. We want to.

I ate animals for decades. I've been there, done that. I can knock it 'cause I've tried it.

But, what most people are forgetting is this:

You say care for them, but you are the reason they die. You brought them into this world specifically to die, so you could collect the money that their carcass will bring you. That is the cut and dry of it.

Compassion and caring, in the presence of money, is a conflict of interest. 

This is why no farmer slaughters their own livestock, and we're sheltered from seeing them die.

Your livelihood is nothing if it weren't for their suffering and their death. But you don't need to do what you do, many farmers are solely crop farmers, and most, if not all livestock farmers are already crop farmers. If people ate less meat, they would eat more crops. If you farm animals because you love animals, you need to realize the only true reason you do this is to kill them, as there is no profit in keeping them alive.

There is massive irony and hypocrisy in seeing so many genuinely nice, caring people (farmers) saying they care for and love animals. If we applied the same logic to caring for our friends, family, our pets, our children... we would have no one in this world. Consider this:

• Our friends, family, pets and children would never see love in us confining them, impregnating them, taking their children from them at birth and killing male calves within weeks of being brought into this world. Female children would be put back into slavery. Mothers would be slaughtered at a quarter of their full life when their milk production wanes. This is dairy. 

• Our friends, family, pets and children would never see love in us 'caring' for them, only to send them off in a freezing cold or scalding hot trucks with our other friends, family, pets or children. They would feel abandoned and terrified at being locked in a vehicle, standing in their filth, being thrown around and having no food or water for (legally) over two days. Often, they are half dead, known as 'downers' before they even arrive at their destination. This is livestock transport.

• Our friends, family, pets and children would never see love in us letting strangers pull them from these hellish transports, drag them down hallways that reek of abuse, torture and death, into a slaughterhouse where they know they are going to die. This is a slaughterhouse.

• If your friends, family, pets and children thought you cared for them, they would want, no, expect you to save them. They would wonder where you are, and why you abandoned them, and why you're letting them die. THIS... IS NOT CARING.

Killing is not caring. Abuse is not caring. And whether or not you choose to see it for what it is, entirely depends on empathy, and whether or not you can put yourself in their shoes and acknowledge your feelings, ethics and morality.

Animals have personalities: They are happy, sad, depressed, anxious, scared, terrified. They have no words and they cannot communicate this, which is why it is so easy to pretend the characteristics don't exist. This is also why I speak for them. But if you spend time with them, if you got to know even one of them, you would know, without a doubt, that they are more like us than you could ever imagine. This is slavery, this is abuse, this is inhumane, this is murder, on a massive scale.

150 billion, yes, ONE HUNDRED FIFTY BILLION animals each year (land & water), succumb to our cognitive dissonance to become food we do not need.

If you've had a dog or a cat, etc., you know without a doubt that they have personalities. Person-alities. The question of whether or not they are people is moot. They know full well the difference between caring and neglect, and it's time we learned that too. It's time to stop ignoring ourselves.

<3


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