Transcript:
Hi!
Today I'm gonna talk to you about animal cruelty yay! Fun topic, right?
No, not really, true. But some topics are necessary to talk about even if they are not fun :( if anything, #JamesMadeUsDoIt
When we think of animal cruelty, one of the things that probably comes to mind first is animal testing or those despicable videos of people kicking and hitting cats or dogs for no reason or refusing to feed them to the point of starvation because, well... there are some crazy peeps out there.
However, it's harder to get into the topic of eating animals as a lot of us don't consider it cruel to eat animals. We do it every day since we were kids, It's a part of our regular diet. It's become so much a part of our daily lives that we've normalized it to the point of not even thinking about it when we are ordering food or when someone offers us a treat of some sort.
But, why and how is it that we don't consider eating animals cruel unless it is done in a certain context?
Cruelty is defined by Oxford to be the "callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain and suffering" so why is it that when we eat animals we just don't see it this way?
I'm pretty sure someone out there is killing all these animals because they're not alive when we go to the supermarket or to restaurants (mostly) and I don't know about you guys but when I imagine the way in which these animals are getting killed, I don't picture princesses and rainbows putting all the sheep to sleep.
When I was 16 I went vegan for this same reason, I was really against animal cruelty and I believed that the pain these animals have to go through to get on my plate was just not worth it.
Because of that, I've had a ton of conversations with other people who eat meat and whenever I brought the cruelty matter up, most of them were quick to excuse their actions in some way or another.
I've also had a lot of people be quick to point out how the Chinese who celebrate the Yulin Dog Meat festival, are the disgusting and weird ones.
But really, how is eating a dog so different from eating a cow, a chicken, or a pig as we so commonly do in Western societies? Yeah, dogs might be considered common "pets" here but there are a lot of people who have cows, chickens, and pigs as pets too in other places of the world as well... and they don't end up in their ovens I'm pretty sure.
Listen, I'm not here to tell you to stop eating meat because that would make me a hypocrite which I would hate. I, in fact, have to let you know that I am not even vegan anymore. I went back to a vegetarian diet a few years ago and I currently eat fish sometimes, so I am really not hating on all you meat-eaters. I've done it all and learned all about these fancy and non-fancy diets in the process.
However, I do believe that by educating myself about how all of this works and why is it that some people consider cruelty to be relevant only in some situations I have learned so much about the world, the way people think, and the correlation that eating animals has with so many diseases and climate change.
The effects of the meat industry are so impactful that it ends up not only affecting our health personally but also our home, the planet that we are all living in together and that is currently decaying at a rapidly concerning pace.
If you take a look at the current pandemic that has swallowed our world completely and that has caused so much pain and endless stress and anxiety, you'll realize how it could have been avoided by the simplest measures.
By now I'm sure we are all aware that Covid-19 has been confirmed to have originated from a wet market in Wuhan, China. And just for a little bit of a recall, a wet market is basically an open-air marketplace in which vendors sell fresh meat, fish, and other perishable foods (most likely all coming from an animal).
I am not going to sit here and blame the Chinese again because it just isn't fair to them. But I am going to point out the fact that if you do some research, you'll quickly find out that most infectious diseases that have riddled our world at some point in history are linked directly to an animal.
The swine flu, the Spanish flu, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS, SARS, Ebola, etc, etc. have all had their origins in some kind of animal. Whether it was a bird, pig, bat, monkey, or fish it is not relevant. What is relevant, however, is that these are all diseases that have originated from humankind's ubiquitous exploitation of said animals.
We produce a ridiculous amount of animals so that we then can kill them and eat them. We pump a ton of drugs in their system so that most of them don't get sick, but in that process, the diseases that they are then infected with only become more resistant to death as well.
Again, what is there to take from this?
First, please don't think I am criticizing you for choosing to eat meat as I also do so myself sometimes.
I just want to explain why the practices that are so common in our world are particularly wrong and cruel and just by bringing up this issue, keeping in mind what is really going on behind the scenes, we probably won't have to deal with this again in the future.
If we really care about our lives and the life of our planet, we need to be conscious about the practices that are contributing to our's and our planet's health, especially the indirect practices, because they are so subtle and it is hard for us to notice them but, they might be the most impactful.
So, please, be curious about everything, keep asking questions, and educating yourselves. Keep looking into why is it that these viruses keep originating in animals and why they are so quick to infect humans. There are actually a lot of books out there that talk about this matter specifically. After all, all of us are in university to learn and by now we should all be aware that ignorance is humankind's true greatest enemy.
So yeah, just keep wondering where your food comes from. And every time you eat, maybe look into it and be conscious about what you're eating because it might be costing someone their life.