Proposition 2 Is A Good Start
This is the third and final blog in a series concerning the ethical treatment of animals that are raised for food.
We Americans like to consider ourselves as being an ethical and humane culture. And we are....mostly. However, there seem's to be two sides to our "humaneness". We have on one hand, the side that we like to think we are....ethical, humane, fair, and compassionate. On the other hand, there is the reality. We are not always as fair and compassionate as we like to think we are.
The industrial age has created at least as many problems as it has fixes. Corporations and large industry make our lives easier, no doubt. The downside is, they have no soul. Their whole motivation is profit. Profit is a good things, in fact, it's a necessary thing. But when we place profit above the welfare of other living creatures, we are acting contrary to being the humane and ethical society that we like to think we are.
No group has suffered more from being "industrialized" than have animals. And the thing is, we don't even try to justify it because there is no justifying the horrors these billions of animals go thru from birth to our dinner tables. So we just don't think about it. If we did, we would have to do something about it, and I believe we would because we are basically a descent, humane, and compassionate society.
I know there are many of us who can hunt and kill as well as clean and eat an animal. Some can even do it with animals they have raised. There's a certain honesty to that and I can respect that because at least those people are not living in total denial. They are doing what they do consciously and with intent. Hooray for them. Most of us could do that with a fruit or a vegetable, we could harvest our food and eat it, no problem. But how many of us could eat an animal, raised in an industrialized environment, if we knew the truth of what that animals experience has been?
I'm not harping about being a vegetarian here nor am I even saying we should eat any less meat. Were gonna do what were gonna do. But don't we have a moral duty to at least know what the truth is, to know what animals experience from birth to the slaughter houses, so that we can exercise our so called compassion, humaneness, and ethical behavior? If we knew, I believe we would act. Proposition 2 is a good start.