Issue Three NO ONE WANTS TO THINK ABOUT August ‘26 ˙⋆✮ THE COW THE ALF A BRIEF HISTORY THE HIPPIES WERE RIGHT! y h c r a An and n o i t a r e b i L
p.2 - No One Wants to Think About the Cow p.8 - The Animal Liberation Front - A Brief History p.16 - The Hippies Were Right! Issue Three August ‘26 y h c r a An and n o i t a Liber
E WAN THIN T S K ABO TO UT W H E T CO On why compassionate people participate in animal suffering. 2
by meat eaters, I always said to myself ‘OMG, they are SO unaware... Like, only if they knew the truth, they would also feel sick. Only if…’ But recently, my friend confronted me about one of my posts. ‘Your post about the dairy industry was really informative.’ ‘I’m glad.’ ‘But it won’t stop me from drinking milk.’ ‘OK.’ ‘I mean, I always drink milk… Like when I am bored i just drink milk. I love it, I just lie in bed and drink so much milk…’ So, the problem lies not in the ‘not-knowing’ but elsewhere. Here is the thing: I don’t want everyone to change their diet. Well, I do ideally, that would be nice. But we still have a long way to go until we reach a vegan world—for now I just want people to care. And I so naively believed in the famous words, popularized by Paul McCartney (and originally said by his wife Linda): “If slaughterhouses had glass walls,everyone would be vegetarian”. If only people were informed well, I thought, they would stand against factory farming. Because, after all, who would let innocent beings live in a constant state of terrorizing discomfort and agony? But we let humans experience this all the time. There are human people that are being bombed every day, that 3
unjustified, opressed, and tortured. Do we care? I guess we do—but our compassion extends to social media outreach and peaceful protesting. Why aren’t we outraged? Why aren’t we rioting, blocking ways, demanding? Such distressing events should linger in our minds until we do something about them, until we succeed. No one, not even the mind, should be free until everyone is free. Subsequently, how would people care about animals if they don’t even care about each other? What enables this dissociation from others’ suffering is denial. It refers to the maintenance of social worlds in which an undesirable situation is unrecognized, ignored or made to seem normal [1]. And what feeds denial is silence. Without conscious negotiation, we have established what should remain unspoken. This is most prominent in our vocabulary: we discuss the ‘tenderness’ of meat (rather than how young the animal was) and the ‘juiciness’ of the steak (not how much blood and lymph it contains)[2]. We say veal, pork, and beef instead of flesh of a young calf, a pig, a cow. The truth becomes taboo and the dissociation between meat and animal is built in our minds. Denial protects us from unpleasant feelings— those of guilt and helplessness. 4
how would people care about animals if they don’t even care about each other?” 5
an idealized version of ourselves and being deemed as a ‘bad person’ would take a bad hit on our ego. However, silence and secrecy is a weapon. We remain silent about suffering and thus we become complicit. By normalizing cruelty we allow potential offenders to regard it as morally acceptable. When being met with the reality of factory farming, most people give a response of ‘I love steak’ or ‘I can never quit cheese’. This ensures that the social norms are upheld, the tact is kept, and the topic of discussion is successfully deflected from the taboo. This societal denial extends to other distressing cases as well. For instance, when someone posts a lot about genocide, the response of the audience is usually ‘They are so annoying, we get it!’. Do we really get it? We as people have so much power—it lies in unity. When we are separated, we give the power away for someone higher to claim it. That’s why silence is so powerful —it creates distance, where as open communication brings us closer. Animal activists are encouraged to keep quiet about animal cruelty— they shouldn’t be too pushy or too annoying, and they should respect the choice of others to eat the flesh of a tortured animal, even when it is happening on their table. 6
must strive to break the silence—that is the way to destroy the wall of denial and to end the complicity of good and compassionate people in widespread suffering, both animal and human. Animal rights/welfare activists must be annoying, they must break the established ways of society, and they must show the distressing until society truly ‘gets it’. In other words: they must keep fighting. References: 1.Cohen S. States of Denial Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Polity; Cambridge, UK: 2001. 2.Silence and Denial in Everyday Life—The Case of Animal Suffering. Deidre Wicks 7
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