To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves.
LORI MARINO: ‘We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our answer: plenty… While most people accept that farmed animals possess simple emotions such as fear, they are less open to the idea that the animals’ emotions can be familiar and complex…
One of the most insidious misconceptions about farmed animals (indeed almost all animals aside from human ones) is that they do not care about their young, who do not need a mother for normal development. This mythology of emotional detachment has become the lore for chickens, cows, turkeys and other farmed animals. But what is the evidence for this convenient fabrication?… The inner lives of farmed animals cannot be characterised entirely on a species level. Instead, they are unique individuals with personality to spare. Those personalities map familiarly onto the same characteristics that comprise human personalities… One must ask: why, despite all of the information, the problem of meat-eating seems to be so intractable?
Perhaps the answer can be found in the inner lives of members of our own species. We are masters at erecting psychological defences and justifying behaviour that we know is not ethical but feels good, such as pleasuring the palate. The main form that these defences, these mental pushbacks, take is a cultural mythology that promotes a view of farmed animals as devoid of feeling, awareness, intelligence and concern about their own quality of life. In the face of unimpeachable evidence for their suffering and our health risks, the last bastion of defence for human carnivores is to convince oneself that farmed animals do not care whether they live or die or how they live. We tell ourselves that their suffering isn’t the same as ours and that they don’t really care about life the way we do, so why should we care?..
The inner lives of farmed animals depend upon who the farmed animal is, but also overlap into familiar territory within our own minds. Each species has its own nature, and each individual his or her own life. But the scientific literature on everyone from pigs to chickens points to one conclusion: farmed animals are someone, not something. They share many of the same mental and emotional characteristics that we recognise in ourselves and acknowledge in the animals closest to us – dogs and cats. To continue our self-indulgence, we resist the evidence and reinforce the status of farmed animals as objects, as commodities, as food. Their inner lives have become ‘the forbidden territory’ we dare not enter lest we deprive our palate and shatter our sense of ourselves’. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: