Chris Hedges: www.truthdig.com/report/item/choosing_life_20150419
… I no longer accept that cows must be repeatedly impregnated to give us milk, must be separated immediately from their newborns and ultimately must be slaughtered long before the end of their natural lives to produce low-grade hamburger, leather, glue, gelatin and pet food. I can no longer accept calves being raised in horrific conditions before they are killed for the veal industry, developed to profit from the many “useless” males born because dairy farms regularly impregnate cows to ensure continuous milk production.
Once the right of the powerful to exploit the powerless – whether that exploitation is of animals by humans, other nations by an imperial power, other races by the white race, or women by men – once that right is removed from our belief system, blinders are lifted. …
Farmers often display genuine affection for the animals they abuse and send to slaughter. They do this by normalizing the abuse, believing that it is a practical and unquestioned necessity, and by refusing to emotionally confront the suffering and fate of the animals. This willful numbness, this loss of empathy and compassion for other living beings, was something I encountered frequently in the wars I covered as a reporter. Prisoners could be treated affectionately, much like pets – the vast disparity of power meant there was never a real relationship – and then killed without remorse.
A culture that kills, including for food, must create a belief system that inures people to suffering. …
“Because cruelty is inescapable in confining, mutilating, and slaughtering animals for food, we have been forced from childhood to be distracted and inattentive perpetrators of cruelty,” Will Tuttle writes in “The World Peace Diet.” …
The animal agriculture industry is an integral part of the corporate state. The corporate state’s exploitation and impoverishment of workers and its poisoning of the environment, as well as its torture and violence toward animals, are carried out because of the obsession for greater and greater profit. …
