It’s understandable that we focus first on our parents and family in trying to protect animals from their monstrous and needless fate: if our call to justice falls on deaf ears with our own kin, what hope is there for the victims when it comes to trying to persuade the rest of the world to stop hurting them?
No one knows what will work, but I have less faith in the appeal to justice than the appeal to compassion. I believe it is the realization that horrors that we would never support and sustain if they were being committed against our kin, including our family animals, are just as horrible when committed against any feeling being: that all the victims suffer, just as we would suffer, in their place. And that — just as Emilia Leese states — we cause their suffering just “because [we] like how they taste and [we] are used to it,” not because it is necessary for our survival or our health. It is cognitive dissonance about that profound moral contradiction, of which we are all aware, that gives rise to the excuses and the discord.
But just as it is a waste of time arguing with heartless strangers who just want to debate their defence of taste over torment, and better to move on to try to reach the hearts of decent people with hearts (the majority, I believe), we should stop trying to reach the hearts of our next of kin once we see we are not making progress. The victims urgently need wider support than that. If charity fails to begin at home, go out and seek it elsewhere.
Harnad, Stevan (2016) CCTV, web-streaming and crowd-sourcing to sensitize public to animal suffering. Animal Justice UK, 2, Winter Issue