Let’s Prevent The Genocide That Ends Up On Our Dinner Plates

I work in a multidisciplinary team in London one of the perks of working in such a teams that you benefit from the array of mutually beneficial relationships that is culturally and spiritually rewarding. Within such working environments there is a well spring of knowledge, ideas, differences in beliefs, attitudes and approaches to life and work prove to be either a challenge or an inspiration.

My job is situated in an open plan office where I share a very good relationship with a Scottish female Psychologist who is a vegetarian and a avid animal rights supporter She adopts cats from animal hostels who have physical or psychological and rehabilitate them providing a good quality of life for these animals who would have ordinarily been put down or left to live an horrible existence. She is passionate about animal rights so much that whenever I eat my chicken sandwich at lunch time I am subsumed by guilt of the pain and suffering of the poor little chickens that end up in my sandwich. It has recently dawned on me that it cant be business as usual in terms of my diet which for the most part vicariously contribute towards a cruel capitalistic driven food industry that is underpin by an orgy of violence towards animals.

The question of animal rights is a call to our entire collective consciousness. Have we ever stopped to wonder about the pain and suffering of the animals that end up on our dinner tables when was the last time did a turkey according to Professor Benjamin Zephaniah- live to see Christmas. When last did a piglet get pass a thousand grunts before it ended on your barbecue grill? When will the cow in our nursery rhyme book get to live out its existential dream of jumping over the moon? Instead it ends up in a lasso that pulls it to the abattoir where it slaughtered violently and ends up on our dinner plates. The news last year of drug dealers posing with expensive trophy dogs in the crowded annual Notting Hill carnival last year was appallingly cringe worthy. How would you like to be led like a dog in the crowd at the Notting Hill Carnival on an expensive lead by a selfish opportunistic drug dealer? While collared by a chain- you watch him sell £10 bags of cannabis to his customers while his shadowy customers blow cannabis smoke down your nostrils and make fun of you-well that’s an abused dog’s life. Or better still-how would you feel if you were a panda rented from a Chinese zoo to a Zoo keeper in Europe under a disgusting fraud of a lie. That he is holding you captive to breed under the pretext that you are a endangered species and you are reproducing fast enough in the wild in China. He brought you to the west in a non-consensual arranged marriage with a female pander who demands sex from you at a pace that you are not accustomed to. While this is happening you get six million visitors in one year while you dodgy zoo master stuff his bank account from the visitors that come to see you while you are fed on boring diet of boring imported bamboo.

Animal rights is the idea that some or all nonhuman animals are entitled to the possession of their own lives, and that their most basic interests – such as an interest in not suffering – should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings Advocates oppose the assignment of moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone – an idea known since 1970 as speciesism, when the term was coined by Richard D. Ryder

The term ‘speciesism’ is used to embrace two ideas: “human specialism,” which is the exclusion of all nonhuman animals from the protections afforded to humans, and the more general idea of assigning value to a being on the basis of their species, so that human beings favoring rights for chimpanzees over rights for dogs because of human-chimpanzee similarities, would be an example of “human-chimpanzee speciesism”. The abolition of animal abuse is necessary, because the key point is animals are not in fact property, they have a right to their lives. Regulating industry is impossible, and is fundamentally wrong, we don’t talk about how to make slavery more humane, or make rape or child abuse less harmful, we say it’s wrong because people aren’t property.

The next time you break wind from having a five course meat fest at an expensive restaurant when the obnoxious smell comes back to you like a boomerang consider this: A Humane Society of the U.S investigations into slaughterhouses and cattle auctions have revealed, animal abuse abounds in the factory farm industry. There are millions of animals that die each year in slaughter houses, and sickening accounts of ongoing abuse even in licensed slaughterhouses. A person who hits, tortures, abuses an animal in any sort of way is in no way entitled to be called a human. Animals may not have a voice we can understand fully or an oppose able thumb, but they have feelings and they definitely can feel pain. Do not be so insensitive to their pain. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if you were beaten up, burnt by caustic substances, drowned or smothered to death? What would go through your mind, if someone pulled out the skin off your body while you were alive and conscious? When last did a broiler chicken, a goat or a cow had a natural death?

While nearly a third of us in the developed world are work shy and often ending up on the dole- animals working in a circus or the tourist industry are often overworked are tortured all their lives. They are forced to perform on stage for an audience who is least bothered of their pain. Wild animals like tigers, lions, elephants, etc., are forced to perform shows and look fierce to keep the audience captured with awe. No one ever notices the tight collars, the whips lashing on their bodies, beatings and deprivation of food. Have you ever gone backstage and had a look at the living conditions that these animals are kept in? It is against their wild nature to jump around prancing like a kitten. And when an animal cannot take the torture anymore, he attacks the abusers. These abusers are then labelled victims and the poor animal is shot dead. The old, sick and weak animals that cannot perform anymore are sold off to people who too are looking for a fast buck. These animals are killed in the most gruesome way, one cannot even imagine. Their fur, body parts, bones are sold off illegally. Few are sold off illegally in pet trade to people who have no idea about their care. These poor animals are either abandoned or further abused by the ignorant pet owners.

Animal rights activists especially those in favor of a push towards the abolition of all use of animals are not fanatical. They make a sober observation that human beings are more self-aware, and more able to choose their own course of action than other animals. Awareness of animal rights, they say, enables us to think and act morally and compassionately, and so entitles humans to a higher moral status they should not abuse. We may argue forcefully that it is biologically natural to treat one’s own species favorably over another. However, it does not give us the right to inflict harm or use other creatures for our personal gain. Rather, it places a moral obligation and an innate understanding for us to be compassionate to other species. So I have gone from having to cut meat out of my diet for six days a week and only having to worry about eating meat on Sundays that is ethically sourced. I am on my way to becoming a vegan as dead animals deserve to be in the wild enjoying life not on my dinner table.