We love our pets.
Pet care and food products is a multi billion-dollar industry and pet supplies stock for companies like PetSmart trade for over $80 bucks a pop.
We spend money on grooming services, gourmet food and even massages for our little furry companions at places with names like Spoiled Paws, Barking Babies or Pawsh.
Yet when it comes to other species, we turn a blind eye.
The difference is shocking.
123,000,000 pigs are kept in captivity and slaughtered every year in the US alone, often in brutal conditions. Each year we hear about a truck of pigs freezing to death, or hundreds drowning in a flood or dying from exhaustion and heat. No one blinks an eye.
It seems normal, but it shouldn’t be.
For a country who prides itself on the freedom it affords to its inhabitants, the animal industry remains a giant blind spot.
A food staple for many, did you know that pigs have greater intelligence than cats and dogs? (fourth in the world, after humans, monkeys and dolphins)
So why the lousy treatment? They are simply too delicious some would claim.
Or are they?
The great writer, George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.’
He saw things differently and refused to be conditioned by cultural habituation.
Neither should you.
Delicious or not, every Big Mac, Whopper, McNugget represents the life of a creature that had to be slaughtered (usually in the most grotesque manner). But of course we don’t talk about that.
Pigs are obviously not the only animal whose bodies are treated like a resource. Cows, chickens, fish and fur bearing animals all suffer the brunt of our ‘freedom’ to use them as we see fit.
Perhaps what animals need is an unlikely superhero? Perhaps that can be YOU.
Whether it’s chosing not to buy leather and fur, or cooking up a veggie burger for dinner tonight, you are taking an incredibly powerful step to end animal suffering and exploitation!
Ex-special forces agent, Kenneth Pearce in the book “If They Could Shoot Back – Ending the War on Animals” takes the fight for animal freedom quite a bit further than that, with a pan North American adventure with his trusty comrades in arms to help protect the bears, mink and lab animals.
You don’t have to go that far. Your life doesn’t have to become a faced-paced action adventure.
But every small step in the right direction multiplied by millions of caring people, is a giant leap on behalf of our animal friends, who just like you and your beloved pet, have the inalienable right to life.
By: Victoria Hansen, guest contributor
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