MandM said:
It shouldn't have to be an "either/or" issue! The more compassion and kindness that is expressed in the world, the better. No one is chosing BETWEEN children and animals -- I certainly want the best for both. Indeed, by protesting against cruelty to animals, we are also working against child abuse -- since many child abusers begin as pet abusers -- and we are trying to prevent the notion that cruelty to any living being is EVER acceptable.
If you read Patterson's "Eternal Treblinka," you will see that many of the top level organizers of the Nazi Holocaust had experience and training in slaughterhouses and in genetic animal breeding laboratories. <...> Arguing that we don't need to care about the feelings of animals is needlessly introducing cruelty into our cultural dialogues.
Brilliantly put!
Also, many psychopaths who went on to torture and kill humans started on animals, so it really is an indicator of a whole society's mental health, how it treats its helpless animals.
My mum eats meat and like me, she's coming from a place of her own ethics, and she only buys meat that has been farmed ethically and with due concern for the animal's welfare.
To me, eating meat at all is a completely seperate issue to turning a blind eye to cruelty and it's only the latter issue that I would ever be unyielding about, as there may be justifications and reasons why people eat meat, but there is never any reason to tolerate cruelty - it helps no-one and corrupts us all.
Having been veggie for so very long, I have noticed that the minute anyone mentions avoiding meat or slaughterhous products, meat eaters start saying about people being "judgemental" - even where it's very clear no-one is judging them!
I think that says more about meat eater's feelings than anything veggies are saying or doing....
And regarding prioritising starving children, if we took the money used to pay for the medical treatment of ten individual kids with cancer in the west we could save 1,000s of lives of people dying from starvation in the developing world. Yet if it was (God forbid) our child who was sick, who'd consider letting them die and donating the money to Oxfam for even one millisecond?!
My point being, you cannot quantify whose suffering is more important and just have to do what you can, where you can, for the beings you feel the deepest connection to.
Animal welfare in the fur industry is notoriously appalling and while to my mind a mink's life is as precious as, and equal to, a cow's, the inherant cruelty of the uregulated farming practices would put me right off it.
I do buy eggs occasionally, but always free-range and never, ever battery farmed! Same product, better welfare, is why I mention that.
Finally, most animals only eat their young where they are ALL threatened with starvation or are losing their habitats, and that is to prevent their young from dying painful deaths and to preserve the mother's own life - humans have late-stage abortions for much less serious reasons.
Outside that, it's well known that the best way to endanger yourself in the wild is to threaten a female animal's young, she'll go for you whether she's a tiger or a house cat, and so please don't think that animals never care for their "children" because they do, very much so!
Check out
http://www.animalsentience.com/ if you want to see how very much animals can be like us at times, whether or not you eat meat it is interesting reading!
Cx
