Food for Thought

This made me laugh, but it also reminded me of the countless living souls suffering all over this planet because our species continues to insist on being cruel in ways that are no longer necessary.

People often get angry when you ask them to question their own notions about ethical eating.

The cruelest irony is that if animals could tell us how it feels to be tortured, we would almost certainly stop. (Or the vast majority of us would.) But because our fellow creatures lack this faculty and can only bellow or cry out in pain that cannot find words, we use our species privilege to ignore it.

This is why slavery was so easy for many Americans in previous centuries. The “institution” continued because the voices of slaves themselves were silenced. Slaves were treated as human livestock and property. To speak up as a slave could mean execution. It was because others (abolitionists) spoke up for slaves that slaves ultimately were freed. It was because others took a stand and moved history forward in an ethical direction.

Why do we continue to pretend that evolved mammals with every sensitivity to pain we posses deserve to suffer horrible lives and deaths merely because we choose to get our protein in a certain form? Many of these animals have developed cognitive systems and rich inner lives psychologically. They form familial bonds and feel…