This article criticizes the harsh way humans treat animals, disregarding their lives and dignity, and calls for us to ensure that they are treated fairly and given a dignified death.
Episode 1
In a small room filled with cold, the mother warms up, but before she can resist, her baby is snatched away by a group of men who seem to have been waiting for this moment. Left alone in the cold room, she continued her life, comforted only by the occasional cries of her child from the next room. One day, she realized that her baby’s cries were different than usual. It was more like a scream of pain than a cry. She instinctively realized that they were about to do to her what they had done to her, and she rushed to break down the gate. But the chains holding her baby were not easily broken, and even at that moment, her child was writhing in agony, with a hole in his stomach, leaking fluid. The mother no longer had a choice. Deciding that it would be easier if he stopped breathing, she grabbed him by the throat and choked him to death, then took the extreme step of banging her head against the wall to end her own life.
Episode 2
I was born in a crowded farmhouse. There were many other families around, and my birth in the cramped space didn’t seem to sit well with them. One day, a friend who didn’t look like me gave birth to eight babies. I watched them adorably as they searched for their mother’s milk without opening their eyes, but then something terrible happened. The man who often brought us food grabbed the babies by the legs and threw them to the ground again and again. As blood flowed from their noses and mouths, he put the limp babies in a bucket and headed off somewhere. That night, I couldn’t sleep. As time passed and I grew to the size of my mother, I had to move on. I was traveling on a conveyor belt when a drop appeared, and I was hanging upside down. I cried out for help, but no one listened. Before I knew it, I saw a giant blade in front of me. As I struggled to stay alive, my legs were sliced off. My whole body was ravaged by the blade, and that’s how I died.
Animals need the right to die with dignity!
The lives in these two stories are not movie tragedies. They are a slice of reality that is happening all the time, right now. If the protagonists of these stories are all animals, and we are the biggest beneficiaries of this tragedy, what should we think as humans?
The first story is about the suicide of a half moon bear that took place in September 2011 on a farm in China. The world’s media was stunned by the bear’s maternal instincts, and then again by the fact that bears kill themselves. Currently, there are only two countries that keep bears in captivity: South Korea and China. Farmed bears are killed before they reach the age of 10 to harvest 19 grams of bile, and are force-fed gallbladder juice through a hose for the rest of their lives. In South Korea, the moon bear is believed to be naturally extinct, but it’s bittersweet that around 1,400 bears are still farmed. The second story is the slaughter process that takes place on large-scale farms in the United States. Newborn pigs are easily killed by slamming them to the ground for tender meat, and live cattle are ground whole in grinders. Despite the constant screams of pain, the pursuit of maximum efficiency has no intention of changing the method of slaughter, and the product is a top seller worldwide, marketed by a comical clown. McDonald’s, that is. At this point, we sadly cannot escape the category of perpetrators.
We can’t live without nature for even a moment, but we don’t fear it at all. Natural beings are reduced to tools for our better survival, and this bizarre sense of privilege is just baffling. What’s the point of protecting animals or preserving natural ecosystems? They don’t give us food and shelter. We had to move towards a society that was based solely on utilitarianism and prioritized utility over value. In this context, bears were imported in large quantities in the early 1980s to boost farmers’ incomes, and fast food restaurants sprang up to fuel humans faster. The public opinion of regret and reflection began to emerge, and civil society organizations advocating for animal rights began to emerge. But in the decades since, what has changed? McDonald’s is still the world’s largest fast food company, and the pace at which we are destroying nature has accelerated due to technological advances. Human beings have been gifted with intellectual abilities, but their attitude toward coexistence is no different from that of a newborn child, who only cares about himself.
Before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, an actress from a French animal protection organization criticized Korea’s dog meat culture. “We should never barbarize our highly intelligent friends!” Putting aside the conventional wisdom of great power intimidation and cultural relativism, consider how contradictory her argument is. Every animal on the planet doesn’t sample its own kind without a specific reason. However, it is an ancient practice to prey on species lower on the food pyramid, following the logic of the weakest link. The behavior of animal organizations that arbitrarily create hierarchies and distinguish between what can and cannot be eaten simply because of the intelligence of their prey is another form of violence, and is nothing more than partisan rhetoric. Does a goose with low intelligence feel no pain when it has a funnel around its neck and is fed nothing but oil all its life? When you only care for what you like, you are only caring for yourself. Ecologists who ignore the laws of ecosystems in favor of singling out and protecting animals cannot be truly right.
Humans have a nutritional need to eat meat, and as long as we don’t eat our own species, it’s all justifiable. But is it really necessary to drink the raw juices of animals that are not scientifically validated at all? Is it really that important to get a quick fix of ground up whole animals? It’s not good for you, and it’s not worth the pain and suffering it causes. And yet, we go along with the crowd, or sometimes we remain silent.
Having closed our eyes to the obvious absurdity, we now find that their suffering has boomeranged back. Studies have shown that eating a lot of meat can lead to a number of adult diseases. However, this premise is missing a crucial word: “farmed”. Eating three meals a day of free-range meat will not harm you. This is because free-range and farmed meat, even of the same breed, can differ by as much as three times in fat composition. In order to eat more and live better, we’ve turned medicine into poison. We wish we could stop there, but it seems we’ve gotten away from the cost of feeding animals in large numbers. Once we were able to genetically engineer corn to produce it in large quantities, the animals’ food was always corn, and they were forced to eat it in small spaces. As the price of feed dropped, they were able to feed more, which allowed them to grow in size and population. As people’s meat intake increased dramatically, so did the amount of corn we accumulate in our bodies. Corn has a 66:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids, which is abnormal compared to the normal range of 4:1 in the body. Naturally, as corn accumulates, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the body becomes increasingly imbalanced. In fact, if you look at modern humans, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 is over 100:1 in people who eat a lot of meat. This is a big problem because too much omega-6 in the body causes fat cells to proliferate and triggers an inflammatory response, which contributes to a variety of diseases. Whole ground animal patties also contain parts of the animal that shouldn’t be eaten, making them unfit for human consumption. If the animals we eat are not happy, our bodies are not happy either.
What do we gain by treating living beings so sadistically and making them scream in pain? It’s sad that a solution that should be common sense is still so far in our future. Let them live their lives and die with dignity, we have no right to take their lives so senselessly.
