Compassionate
'A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
'Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace ail living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.' (Albert Einstein.)
'If true, the Pythagorean principles as to abstaining from flesh, foster innocence; if ill-founded they at least teach us frugality, and what loss have you in losing your cruelty? It merely deprives you of the food of lions and vultures ... let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed.' (Seneca.)
'I, for my part, wonder of what sort of feeling, mind or reason that man was possessed who was first to pollute his mouth with gore, and allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered being; who spread his table with the mangled form of dead bodies, and claimed as daily food and dainty dishes what but now were beings endowed with movement, with perception and with voice.' (Plutarch.)
What would such compassionate and thoughtful men as these have said of the catalogue of misery and suffering we now inflict on animals in the name of profit and of science? For the abuses they wrote of were trifling compared with the scale and quality of the practices of factory farming, or the wholesale abuses inherent in the routine testing on innocent and defenceless creatures of the unnecessary, trivial products of the cosmetics industry?
Most omnivores, if they were forced to spend a single day enduring the conditions of the average factory farm would renounce meat-eating for life. It is not lack of imagination that prevents them from discovering this, but a deliberate, conscious decision to remain ignorant for fear that knowing the full consequences of their demand for cheap meat would be too painful too endure. Such people are more guilty of the suffering inflicted on animals in their name than any German citizen was, in the Second World War, who sought to prove afterwards that he or she simply 'didn't know' what was going on in the concentration camps.
But if what is done in factory farms is appalling, it pales into insignificance compared with the horrors inflicted in laboratories in the name of science.
'In Britain, where experimenters are required to report the number of experiments performed, official government figures show that 44,431,843 experiments on animals were performed in l98I. In the United States there are no figures of comparable accuracy. Under the Animal Welfare Act [sic] of 1970 the US Department of Agriculture publishes a report listing the number of animals used by facilities registered with it, but this list is incomplete in many ways. It does not include rats, mice, birds, reptiles, frogs, or domestic farm animals used for experimental purposes; it does not include animals used in secondary schools, or by government agencies; and it does not include experiments performed by facilities that do not transport animals interstate or receive grants or contracts from the federal government. According to this very incomplete report, somewhere between 1.6 and 1.8 million animals are used in experimentation each year. The number of dogs is 200,000, cats 570,000, primates 50,000, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs around half a million each... surely one day ... our children's children, reading about what was done in laboratories in the twentieth century, will feel the same sense of horror and incredulity at what otherwise civilised people can do that we now feel when we read about the atrocities of the Roman gladiatorial arenas or the eighteenth-century slave trade.' (Animal Liberation, Peter Singer.)
Ask yourself what possible response can any sane and compassionate person have to this unforgivable lapse on the part of humanity, other than determinedly and single-mindedly to boycott any or all of the products of such practices?
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