{"id":760193,"date":"2020-04-11T08:42:04","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T12:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=760193"},"modified":"2020-04-12T08:16:35","modified_gmt":"2020-04-12T12:16:35","slug":"matthew-scully-chinas-wet-markets-americas-factory-farming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=760193","title":{"rendered":"Matthew Scully: China\u2019s Wet Markets, America\u2019s Factory Farming"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Chinese guards now try to stop anyone from taking pictures at live-animal markets , who does that remind us of? How about our systematic efforts to criminalize the taking of pictures in factory farms?<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

MATTHEW SCULLY:<\/strong> Already, in the Western media, chronologies of the pandemic have taken to passing over details of the live-animal markets, which have caused viral outbreaks before and would all warrant proper judgment in any case… Easy to blame for all of this is the government of China. Authorities took forever, for example, to enforce prohibitions on ivory carving, despite an unquestioned competence in carrying out swift crackdowns. And in general, at every level, the government tends to tolerate a culture of cruelty, or else to actively promote it at the prodding of lucrative industries, both legal and illicit…<\/p>\n

Acknowledging that Western societies have every moral reason to condemn the barbarism and recklessness of the live-animal markets only invites, however, a tougher question: Do we have the moral standing? And if any of us are guilty of blind cultural prejudice or of a smug sense of superiority toward Chinese practices, a moment\u2019s serious thought will quickly set us straight.<\/p>\n

When the Daily Mail describes how Chinese guards at the live-animal market now \u201ctry to stop anyone from taking pictures,\u201d who does that remind us of? How about our own livestock companies, whose entire mode of operation these days is systematic concealment by efforts to criminalize the taking of pictures in or around their factory farms and slaughterhouses? The foulest live-animal-market slayer in China, Vietnam, Laos, or elsewhere would be entitled to ask what our big corporations are afraid the public might see in photographic evidence, or what\u2019s really the difference between his trade and theirs except walls, machinery, and public-relations departments…<\/p>\n

No, we in the Western world don\u2019t get involved while grim-faced primitives execute and skin animals for meat. We have companies with people of similar temperament to handle everything for us. And there\u2019s none of that \u201cstaring back\u201d that the Post\u2019s Paula Froelich describes, because, in general, we keep the sadness and desperation of those creatures as deeply suppressed from conscious thought as possible. An etiquette of denial pushes the subject away, leaving it all for others to bear…<\/p>\n

Following the only consistent rule in both live-animal markets and industrial livestock agriculture \u2014 that the most basic animal needs are always to be subordinated to the most trivial human desires \u2014 this process yields the meats that people crave so much, old favorites like bacon, veal, steak, and lamb that customers must have, no matter how these are obtained. When the pleasures of food become an inordinate desire, forcing demands without need or limit and regardless of the moral consequences, there\u2019s a word for that, and the fault is always easier to see in foreigners with more free-roaming tastes in flesh…<\/p>\n

We in the West don\u2019t eat pangolins, turtles, civets, peacocks, monkeys, horses, foxes, and wolf cubs \u2014 that\u2019s all a plus. But for the animals we do eat, we have sprawling, toxic, industrial \u201cmass-confinement\u201d farms that look like concentration camps. National \u201cherds\u201d and \u201cflocks\u201d that all would expire in their misery but for a massive use of antibiotics, among other techniques, to maintain their existence amid squalor and disease \u2014 an infectious \u201ctime bomb\u201d closer to home as bacterial and viral pathogens gain in resistance…<\/p>\n

In China and Southeast Asia, they have still not received our divine revelation in the West that human beings shall not eat or inflict extreme abuse on dogs but that all atrocities to pigs are as nothing. They\u2019re moving in our culinary direction, however, and more than half the world\u2019s factory-farmed pigs are now in China and neighboring countries… Plagues, as we\u2019re all discovering, have a way of prompting us to take stock of our lives and to remember what really matters. If, while we\u2019re at, we begin to feel in this time of confinement and fear a little more regard for the lives of animals, a little more compassion, that would be at least one good sign for a post-pandemic world.\u00a0 SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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