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“I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money… Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?”

J.M. Coetzee, “The Lives of Animals”

Photo by Joanne McArthur, We Animals

To Close the Slaughterhouses They Must Be Opened

        Pour fermer les abattoirs il faut les ouvrir

Of all the gratuitous suffering that humans inflict on animals, the industrial-scale breeding and slaughter for meat is the most flagrant. And yet most people are not aware of the enormity of the agony it really causes. Nor of the fact that all that unspeakable misery is completely unnecessary for human survival or health.

There is no horror that we inflict on animals that we have not also inflicted on people. — But we have made laws to abolish human enslavement, murder and torture. And most decent people would never violate those laws, nor wish to.

It is time to extend those laws to the suffering of nonhuman victims too. And the slaughterhouses are the most urgent place to begin — to end it.

To close the slaughterhouses we must open them — to the eyes and hearts of that vast majority of humane humans who could never again — not for a single second — continue contributing to the torments that take place there every moment, once they had witnessed it.

Audio/video cameras, rotating 360 degrees, 24 hours a day, positioned at all the industrial sites of the horrors — breeding, rearing, transport, slaughter — recording and transmitting the truth online, streaming continuously and permanently for millions upon millions of witnesses worldwide on the Internet.

Crowd-sourcing compassion.

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De toutes les souffrances gratuites infligeées aux animaux par les humains, l’élevage et l’abattage à l’échelle industrielle, pour nous fournir en viande, sont les plus flagrants. Pourtant, la plupart d’entre nous ne sommes pas conscients de l’immense agonie causée aux animaux, ni du fait que ce tourment indicible n’est nécessaire ni pour notre survie ni pour notre santé.

Il est vrai qu’il n’y a aucune horreur que nous infligeons aux animaux que nous n’avons déjà infligée aux humains. Mais nous avons adopté les lois pour abolir l’esclavage humain, l’assassinat et la torture. Et la plupart des gens ne violeraient jamais ces lois grâce à la décence ordinaire. Il est grand temps d’étendre ces lois et préceptes aux souffrances inutiles des victimes non humaines. Et les abattoirs sont le lieu le plus pressant – pour commencer à y mettre fin.

Pour fermer les abattoirs, il faut les ouvrir – aux yeux et aux cœurs de cette vaste majorité d’humains décents qui ne pourront ensuite plus jamais, les ayant témoignées, continuer à contribuer aux agonies qui s’y déroulent. Il faut insister sur l’accès ouvert aux pratiques industrielles dans l’élevage, le transport et l’abattage:

Les caméras audio-vidéo, pivotant à 360 degrés, 24 heures par jour, placées partout aux lieux des abominations, captant et diffusant la vérité en ligne à des millions et des millions de témoins sur Internet.

La prise de conscience ne peut qu’inspirer la clémence.

Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur

The Human Condition?
compared to what?
the nonhuman condition?
the animal condition?
When?
Then?
Now?
The condition we imposed
unconditionally, relentlessly, mercilessly
on them?
The Inhumane Condition?

We did our worst
to our own
too
but thought the better
of it,
bit by bit,
outlawed it
eschewed it,
toward kin and kind,
mostly…

But do we deserve mercy?
can we even show it?
while we deny it
to them?

A very moving testimony by a very beautiful soul.

The story, as Ibi Gábori notes, we all know already, from books and movies.

Lifelong, this gifted, intelligent, sensitive human being has loved music, books, people, the Hungarian language, and Hungary. She lost everything — mother, father, brother — but survived and became a librarian, as she had always wished, first in Hungary, then in Canada.

And she holds no rancour in her heart, just sadness, gratitude and hope.

One understands (or thinks one understands) it all: the love of music, books, people, language. These are all real, and deserve this love. The love of a place — land, landscape, landmarks — too. These are all real things.

But when it comes to love of a “haza” (patria, nation) one balks.

Apart from those other real things, this abstraction is a fiction, and a fiction — like gods, angels, devils and supermen — that has already done enough real harm in this world not to deserve Ibi Gábori’s gentle, heartfelt loyalty.

As she says, some of her expatriate countrymen loudly proclaim that they are eager to go back and vote for Jobbik, to start it all over again. Some don’t.

Ibi’s heart still gives patriotism the benefit of the doubt. It still swells not only at the sound of Mozart but at the sound of “Oh Canada” — and “Isten áldd meg a magyart.”

She has earned the right to judge — and we to reserve judgment.

Thoughts prompted by Salt of the Earth.

Some points frequently made about priorities are bit like saying “You should contribute to Muscular Dystrophy instead of to Cystic Fibrosis.”

But here are few more thoughts on the more serious side of the question, when it comes to human and nonhuman suffering:

1. Although they are not always enforced or obeyed, there are nevertheless formal laws to protect humans against enslavement, torture and murder. No such laws protect animal victims.

2. On the contrary, almost all the horrors that are outlawed (and relatively rare) with human victims are allowed and done, every minute, with countless animal victims.

3. And apart from (some) medical research and subsistence cultures where meat eating is still a vital necessity, what is being done to animals, with impunity, everywhere, is definitely unnecessary for human health or survival.

4. Could it not be that as long as we do not outlaw our needless, monstrous cruelty to helpless animal victims we will not lose the inclination to keep doing it to human victims too?

In other words, I think the (quite natural) intuition that “humans are more important” is a non sequitur here: The wrongs we do to humans are illegal; the wrongs we do to animals are not. To help humans is to enforce and comply with the laws that already protect them: animals are not only suffering in incomparably greater numbers and intensity, but they are not even protected by laws.

And whereas most of us don’t know — apart from contributing to charity — how we can help the victims of Boko Haram or ISIS, most us are still collaborating, every single day, in animals’ suffering, even though we don’t need to, and could stop at any moment.

Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur

Life’s looking-glass
Bits of vitreous humor
Mirthlessly jumping ship
Occasional flashes
Floating blithely by

Yes, our limitless creativity in inventing and executing moral abominations will go on.

But what has to stop is the needless, heartless hurting and killing of innocent, feeling, suffering victims just to satisfy our tastes in foods, fashions and entertainment that are essential for neither our survival nor our health.

And that is the overwhelming majority of the moral abominations and suffering on the planet today (and perhaps the impetus and inspiration for all the rest):

As to waiting and gradualism. I can wait to stop smoking, because there the only one I am hurting is myself. But if I treat my meat-eating, fur-wearing and bull-fighting habits the same way, it is like leaving my neighbor under whip and chains while I contemplate whether I’m ready to give them up.

It’s often said that it is not religious principles that are at fault but their practice (or rather their non-practice).

On dit souvent que ce n’est pas les principes religieux qui sont fautifs mais leurs pratiques (ou plutôt leurs non-pratiques).

Although that already makes me somewhat uneasy, calling to mind the slogan of the US National Rifle Association (“Guns Don’t Kill, People Do”), I’d say that with the religious principles on the treatment of animals — unlike the principles on the treatment of humans — it is the utilitarianism and permissiveness of Judeo-Christianity that I find horrifying.

Bien que ça m’inquiète déjà un peu, faisant penser aux dictons de la National Rifle Association américaine (“Guns don’t kill, people do”), je dirais qu’avec les principes religieux pour le traitement des animaux — contrairement aux principes pour le traitement des humains — l’utilitarisme et la permissivité du judéo-christianisme m’horrifient.

My non-belief is empirical, based on the observable, objective facts. But I have to say that even if there were empirical evidence for the truth of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, I would never, ever become a practitioner. Instead of being an atheist I would then be an anti-theist, not just because of the treatment of animals approved by an omnipotent deity but also because of the treatment of humans — not approved, but not prevented either — in the name of a divine game, capricious and psychopathic, called “free will,” which would not only be immoral, but the apotheosis of immorality (rather like breeding pit bulls so as to watch them fight it out).

Mon incroyance est empirique: Elle est basée sur l’ensemble des faits observables et objectifs. Mais j’avoue que même s’il y avait des preuves empiriques de la vérité des écrits saints judéo-chrétiens, je ne serais jamais, jamais adhérent. Au lieu d’être athée je serais alors anti-thée, non seulement à cause du traitement des animaux approuvé par une déité omnipotente, mais à cause du traitement des humains aussi — non-approuvé, mais non-prévenue non plus — au nom d’un jeu divin, capricieux et psychopathe, intitulé le « libre arbitre », qui serait non seulement immoral mais l’apothéose de l’immoralité (comme élever les pitbull pour s’amuser à les voir combattre).

(On the other hand, I would immediately become a faithful follower of any creed that really did put an end to the horrors.)

(Par contre, je serais adhérent fidèle de n’importe quel culte qui mettait fin aux horreurs pour de vrai.)

I did not read the entire exchange entitled “The Limits of Discourse As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky” verbatim, but I read equal portions on both sides.

Professor Chomsky was indeed rather impatient, as Sam Harris notes, yet on matters of substance he was quite to the point. Harris was concerned about erroneous judgments he thought Chomsky had made about him and his views; Chomsky was concerned with errors of substance (not “misreadings”) and agreed to try to sort them out in a private exchange with Harris. Harris was evidently from the outset aiming for a public exchange, for their respective “readers.” Chomsky is remarkably generous in private, one-on-one communication, but he is clearly impatient with grandstanding (exhibitionism), as he notes. And although Chomsky notably neither expects nor demands it, it is evident to an onlooker that Harris did not show him the respect that he has most assuredly earned, if anyone has. Harris seems to think the exchange makes Chomsky look bad; perhaps that was Harris’s intention. I think the exchange makes Harris look extremely bad.

Chomsky’s main point, as is often the case, is that defenders of power often overlook or minimize the wrong done by their side, reckoning only the wrongs done by their enemies. And that the Western powers often inflict a far greater scale of carnage than their enemies. All this without reference to who is in the right or the wrong, nor what their intentions — actual or avowed — are. Chomsky is uncannily skillful in detecting and providing evidence of these double standards and imbalances, and the moral blindness they represent. Harris does not seem to show understanding of that, nor the motivation to discuss it head on. He seems too concerned about Chomsky’s having done him wrong (whereas it’s Harris who wrote a not too courteous critique of Chomsky, not Chomsky of Harris: “Leftist Unreason and the Strange Case of Noam Chomsky“).

Harris’s is not an unusual reaction toward someone of the intellectual and moral stature of Professor Chomsky. See “Chomsky’s Universe”

Despite Chomsky’s generosity with his time, this was yet another opportunity missed.

(I do not, by the way, think that benign intentions are irrelevant, and that only quantity of carnage caused counts; but I don’t think Chomsky thinks that either… He’s right, too, that self-righteous nationalism can be every bit as monstrous as any other creed or credo.)