Shocked by the truth
Announcement posted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Australia 29 Jan 2019
Dear Editor,
Here’s a novel idea – how about we tell kids the truth?
PETA’s event in Sydney CBD where we put a simulated dog on a barbecue has caused howls of fake outrage about "exposing" kids to the reality of animal slaughter and consumption.
Children see pigs on spits, chopped up body parts on their summer BBQs and supermarket shelves, dead fish, crabs and lobsters at fish markets, and carcasses hanging in butcher shop windows all the time – all of those should be far more distressing if we hadn’t normalised violence, given that they were real animals, with lives and families, who didn’t want to die, unlike our rubber prop. It’s only prejudice that allows us to protect certain species, to take them into our homes and make them part of our families, while we treat others as nothing more than commodities. In the meat industry, lambs are torn away from their loving mothers to be packed into filthy trucks bound for the abattoir, piglets are castrated and their tails are cut off without as much as an aspirin for their pain, their mothers are confined to metal cages so small that they can’t even turn around, chickens are raised in massive windowless sheds where the stench of ammonia is so strong it burns their lungs and all of them are later strung up and have their throats slit, some while they’re still conscious and able to experience every agonising second of it.
Children are naturally empathetic and care about animals and don’t want to see them hurt. If we need to lie to them about the reality of what’s on their plates, we should be asking ourselves some questions. None of us would think twice about taking kids to a vegetable patch or to pick fruit at a farm, but who would want their kids seeing the inside of a slaughterhouse? Maybe that’s because, as Paul McCartney said, "if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we’d all be vegetarian".
Mimi Bekhechi
Campaigns Consultant,
PETA Australia
PO Box 20308 World Square
Sydney, NSW, 2002
(08) 8556-5828
mimib@peta.org.au
Here’s a novel idea – how about we tell kids the truth?
PETA’s event in Sydney CBD where we put a simulated dog on a barbecue has caused howls of fake outrage about "exposing" kids to the reality of animal slaughter and consumption.
Children see pigs on spits, chopped up body parts on their summer BBQs and supermarket shelves, dead fish, crabs and lobsters at fish markets, and carcasses hanging in butcher shop windows all the time – all of those should be far more distressing if we hadn’t normalised violence, given that they were real animals, with lives and families, who didn’t want to die, unlike our rubber prop. It’s only prejudice that allows us to protect certain species, to take them into our homes and make them part of our families, while we treat others as nothing more than commodities. In the meat industry, lambs are torn away from their loving mothers to be packed into filthy trucks bound for the abattoir, piglets are castrated and their tails are cut off without as much as an aspirin for their pain, their mothers are confined to metal cages so small that they can’t even turn around, chickens are raised in massive windowless sheds where the stench of ammonia is so strong it burns their lungs and all of them are later strung up and have their throats slit, some while they’re still conscious and able to experience every agonising second of it.
Children are naturally empathetic and care about animals and don’t want to see them hurt. If we need to lie to them about the reality of what’s on their plates, we should be asking ourselves some questions. None of us would think twice about taking kids to a vegetable patch or to pick fruit at a farm, but who would want their kids seeing the inside of a slaughterhouse? Maybe that’s because, as Paul McCartney said, "if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we’d all be vegetarian".
Mimi Bekhechi
Campaigns Consultant,
PETA Australia
PO Box 20308 World Square
Sydney, NSW, 2002
(08) 8556-5828
mimib@peta.org.au