J.M. Coetzee: Exposing the beast-factory farming must be called to the slaughterhouse

[Guest guest]

Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/02/21/1171733846249.html

Exposing the beast: factory farming must be called to the slaughterhouse

 

J.M. Coetzee

February 22, 2007

 

To any thinking person, it must be obvious there is something

terribly wrong with relations between human beings and the animals

they rely on for food. It must also be obvious that in the past 100

or 150 years, whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as

traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using

industrial methods of production.

 

There are many other ways in which our relationship with animals is

wrong (to name two: the fur trade and experimentation on animals in

laboratories), but the food industry, which turns living animals into

what it euphemistically calls animal products and by-products, dwarfs

all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects.

 

The vast majority of the public has an equivocal attitude to the

industrial use of animals: they make use of the products of that

industry, but are nevertheless a little sickened, a little queasy,

when they think of what happens on factory farms and abattoirs.

Therefore they arrange their lives in such a way that they need be

reminded of farms and abattoirs as little as possible, and they do

their best to ensure their children are kept in the dark too, because

children have tender hearts and are easily moved.

 

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the

late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one

warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply,

cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere

units of any kind.

 

This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it

impossible to ignore. It came when, in the 20th century, a group of

powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting

the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected

in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the

processing - of human beings.

 

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been

up to. What a terrible crime to treat human beings like cattle - if

we had only known beforehand. But our cry should more accurately have

been: what a terrible crime to treat human beings like units in an

industrial process. And that cry should have had a postscript: what a

terrible crime - come to think of it, a crime against nature - to

treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.

 

It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the

standard by which the animal products industry falls short.

Traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller

scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be

the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that humans

are capable of?

 

The efforts of the animal rights movement - the broad movement that

situates itself on the spectrum somewhere between the meliorism of

the animal welfare bodies and the radicalism of animal liberation -

are rightly directed at decent people who both know and don't know

that there is something going on that stinks to high heaven.

 

These are people who will say: " Yes, it's terrible what lives brood

sows live; it's terrible what lives veal calves live, " but who will

add, with a helpless shrug of the shoulders - " what can I do about

it? "

 

The task of the movement is to offer such people imaginative but

practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted

by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they

die. People need to see that there are alternatives to supporting the

animal products industry.

 

These alternatives need not involve any sacrifice in health or

nutrition, and there is no reason why these alternatives need be

costly. Furthermore, what are commonly called sacrifices are not

sacrifices at all. The only sacrifices in the whole picture, in fact,

are being made by non-human animals.

 

In this respect, children provide the brightest hope. Children have

tender hearts - that is to say children have hearts that have not yet

been hardened by years of cruel and unnatural battering. Given half a

chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard

them (the happy chooks that are transformed painlessly into succulent

nuggets, the smiling moo-cow that donates to us the bounty of her

milk). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child

into a lifelong vegetarian.

 

Factory farming is a new phenomenon - very new indeed in the history

of animal husbandry. The good news is that after a couple of decades

of what the businessmen behind it must have regarded as free and

unlimited expansion, the industry has been forced onto the defensive.

 

The activities of animals-rights organisations have shifted the onus

onto the industry to justify its practices, and because they are

indefensible and unjustifiable except on the most narrow economic

grounds ( " Do you want to pay $1.50 more for a dozen eggs? " ), the

industry is battening down hatches and hoping the storm will blow

itself out. Insofar as there was a public relations war, the industry

has already lost that war.

 

A final note. The campaign of human beings for animal rights is

curious in one respect: the creatures on whose behalf human beings

are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if

they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in

which animals do not know what is wrong - they do certainly not know

what is wrong in the same way that humans do.

 

Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to animals,

the animal rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to

end.

 

J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. This is an

edited version of a speech to be given this evening to open the

exhibition Voiceless: I feel therefore I am. It will be at the

Sherman Galleries until March 10.

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

Postal mailing address: P.O. Box 960, Clinton WA 98236 U.S.A.

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Website: http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/ with French and Spanish

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