I wrote about the matter of welfare policies for farmed animals being something of a red herring. In outlining my position on this matter, I responded to arguments put forward by Temple Grandin. I pointed out that Temple’s claims rest on the proposition that we MUST eat animals, a proposition I regard as flawed. It seems to me that while better welfare policies and practices do confer some improvements for the experiences of farmed animals, this is something of a salve to conscience that legitimises the very fact that we farm them with all the harm this entails.
The following post reblogged here from There’s An Elephant In The Room succinctly captures a similar view…
All of us are sentient individuals, the majority of whom have never been confined, never been tortured, never been mutilated deliberately and without anaesthesia, never been forcibly impregnated, never had our babies taken from us, never been hooked up to milk pumping machines or egg conveyors, never been starved and loaded onto trucks that take us to a place that smells of blood and fear, where we will hear the screams of our friends alongside the sounds of saws and machinery and know that our own death is coming.
With absolutely no personal experience of the horrors that we inflict on our sentient and desperate victims, who are we to decide how our ‘treatment’ of them while all this is happening, can be improved and better regulated? Yet this is exactly what we are presuming to do when we petition and protest for what we think are ‘better’ conditions in which…
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Just Us Too 