The egg industry grinds baby male chicks alive because they’re “useless.”
“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, A Love Story, Nobel Prize, 1978
Neither their innocence nor their helplessness merit any consideration from the factory farming system where animals are mere cogs in a gigantic and impersonal money machine. How much does this brutalize the humans who carry out these tasks day and day out, obviously out of desperation and sheer necessity? That is also carefully hidden from view.
A great deal of our food is derived from such ghastly but rarely seen methods.
Can it be produced differently? You bet.
But for that people must be educated and mobilized, and that’s a lot harder than said. Human blindness to these issues is deeply embedded in our customs, idiotic religions, and value systems, including the brutal capitalist approach to food production (imitated without much thoughtfulness by other systems, unfortunately) but philosophically justice and compassion are indivisible, so keeping two ledgers—one for humans and one for animals—is a gross breakdown of essential moral integrity.
Incidentally, I do not speak from a high perch; I am not a vegan, not yet at least, it’s a very difficult journey for most, including me, and I am far from thinking that everyone who fails to agree with my passionate desire to see animals liberated from all forms of human tyranny are monsters. Animal exploitation is so, pervasive, so common, the numbers of victims so mind-boggling, that most people fail to take the measure of the problem or react as one should hope.
Decency, however, is a hard thing to suppress, and that’s why I believe, with my colleague Roland Vincent, that, while at the moment many people on the left are still indifferent and even hostile to the cause of animal liberation, many actually operating under the super-humanistic legacy of the 18th and 19th century philosophers who enthroned “man” in the place hitherto occupied by “God and King”, it is among progressives, among self-defined socialists, that this cause will eventually gather most of its support. For socialism has no inherent stake, seeks no profit, in the exploitation of anyone, including animals, and it is based on the idea of combating all forms of oppression. Thus, it is possible to conceive of different models of food production. Kinder to animals, kinder to this beautiful but tortured earth, and kinder to us.
That kind of possibility will always be closed under capitalism.
—P. Greanville