Author: Sandra Kyle

Mental Illness in Animals

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

 

It seems self-evident that animals, who suffer from the same physical diseases as we do, can also suffer from similar mental disorders.   Post Trauma Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Self-harm, Anxiety, Depression have all been studied in animals in the wild and especially in captivity.    If you want to know how animals feel begin by asking yourself:   How would I feel without freedom to express my natural instincts, with extreme boredom and confinement, with trauma and loss…..?  

Read the BBC Earth article by SHREYA DASGUPTA here:

 

THAILAND’S SHAME IS TYPICAL OF SOUTH EAST ASIAN SLAUGHTERHOUSES

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

South-East Asian slaughterhouses are clearly among the worst in the world.  No humane slaughter standards are enforced, and sentient beings are violently clubbed to death.   There is little concept of animals as sentient beings, or animal cruelty, in these countries and the animals pay dearly. 

Read The Guardian article here:  WARNING:  Contains distressing images.

Changing The World In Bite-Sized Chunks

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Veganism offers an immediate and logical alternative to the reality of the slaughterhouse, writes PAUL TRITSCHLER.  The author recounts childhood memories of roughly handled and severely distressed chickens, and a pig born on a slaughter truck sliding out of the slats to be crushed by traffic on the highway.  

Within the industry that caters to the desire to eat animal flesh, blood lies pooled on concrete floors where helpless animals are ‘beaten, broken, scalded, skinned and dismembered’,  and unspeakable cruelties against them are devised by bored slaughterhouse workers for their entertainment.

The problem is not our desire to consume animals, it is their desire to live.     We have the power to change the brutal, industrialised killing system, as well as positively impacting global problems, if we approach it ‘one bite-sized chunk at a time’. 

Read the CounterPunch article here:

It’s Time For A New Ethic In Our Relationship With Other Animals

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Our treatment of farmed animals is a serious moral transgression, writes End Animal Slaughter contributor LYNLEY TULLOCH.  

 

We’ve all had a bad day every now and again. Some are worse than others, involving a threat to our lives or our safety. Imagine if that kind of bad day were also your last?

I remember someone telling me a while back about some steers that she raised on her property for their meat. These steers were friendly and loved eating apples. When the time came for them to be killed, she would call one of them over. As she was giving the steer an apple, the home kill chap planted a bullet in his head. The steer was having a good day that turned into a very bad one.

They trust us, and we betray them.

In her book ‘The Ultimate Betrayal. Is There Happy Meat?’ , Hope Bohanec discusses the ethics of such a betrayal. When an animal trusts you with their life, says Bohanec, killing them is the worst act of violence and inhumanity possible. She says, “the more humanely an animal is treated, the greater the bond of trust, and the greater the bond of trust, the more severe the crime of betrayal.” There has been a moral transgression, which includes fraud, betrayal and violence.

There has been a moral transgression, which includes fraud, betrayal and violence.

Furthermore, Bohanec discusses the lies we tell ourselves about ‘humane slaughter’ and the idea that it is acceptable to kill an animal as long as she or he lived a good life. You often hear people talk about how the animal had a great life, and only had one bad day (the day of his/her death). One bad day, when the sun was shining down through dappled leaves, and the apple’s sweetness burst in the steer’s mouth. Maybe out of the corner of his eye the steer saw the man raise his gun, but it was too late. One bad moment of realization, and he was dead.

We need to become very real about what we are doing when we kill animals for their meat. We are taking the life of a living, sentient being. This animal does not want to lose their life, it is all they have. Once they are gone their individuality and sentience goes with them, and any possibility they ever had to enjoy themselves drains out of them with their blood.

Too often we have minimized an animal’s suffering on the basis that she or he is not human. We reduce their rich emotional lives to one-dimensional instincts. But animals, just like us, are driven not just by instincts, but by subjective feelings.  Current scientific research convincingly demonstrates that animals can feel the same emotions as humans.

The scientific consensus is that animals feel similar emotions to ourselves.

This much I know to be true. But there are some things I don’t know.

I don’t know what the steer’s big thumping heart felt like when it beat its last beat.  I don’t know if the steer choked on his apple on the way down. I don’t know if he was in pain. I don’t know if nearby birds took flight in fear at the sound of the gun, or if the other steers bolted in panic. I don’t know how the steer was feeling when he woke up that very morning and stretched his legs. I don’t know if the sun was shining that day, his last.  I don’t know so many things.

And I don’t know how humans can hold life in such contempt.

But I do know a whole lot more than the Eighteenth century Western philosopher Rene Descartes. Descartes did not agree that animals feel pain. Despite loving his dog and caring for him, he stated that animals were mere automatons – reacting to external stimuli as a matter of mere reflex or impulse.

I don’t need to do scientific experiments to know animals have deep feelings. There is a pig pen at the back of my house and every Saturday one of them is killed for meat. There is no denying the absolute terror in the squeals. The last guttural horrified gasp as the pig chokes to death on his own blood is harrowing. That last grasp at life sinks into my stomach like a stone, turns my own blood to frozen water. I can sense his feeling of powerlessness as he realized he was being killed. It travelled though my body too. We are all one.

That last grasp at life sinks into my stomach like a stone, turns my own blood to frozen water.

Helpless, terrified pigs awaiting their turn for ‘backyard’ slaughter.  

In focusing on the sameness between humans and animals, new questions are beginning to emerge regarding our treatment of them. Currently humans parade around the Earth as if animals are the mere backdrop to our superior existence, instead of our kin. We often treat them as nothing more than stuffed puppets to look at, or bags of meat encased in skin to eat.

This is a plea to re-think our relationship with animals, especially farmed animals. Farmed animals are the most abused and betrayed animals on Earth. We breed them specifically to satisfy our desires for food and clothes. We mutilate their bodies, forcibly impregnate them, incarcerate them in filthy concrete pens, cages and feedlots, and jam them full of antibiotics to keep them alive just long enough for them to get big enough to eat. We also kill their offspring if they are not wanted ( for example male chicks in the egg industry and bobby calves in the dairy industry).

Animals are our kin, not our inferiors. We need to develop a new ethic guiding our relationship with them based on compassion, respect, and care.

 

 

‘Thumping’ and other slaughterhouse terms

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 2 Comments on ‘Thumping’ and other slaughterhouse terms

Do you know what ‘Thumping’ or ‘PACing’ means?   It is a slaughterhouse term used to kill piglets (and also baby goats) by swinging them around and pounding their heads against concrete.    

The  act of murdering innocent animals in slaughterhouses, and the cruel methods employed, have their own terms and definitions that ‘sanitise’ the horror of what goes on.   For example, ‘C02 stunning’ may sound as if the animal quietly goes to sleep, but as undercover footage has shown, this method causes pigs to gasp for breath and hyperventilate, causing both pain and panic, for up to 60 seconds.  The ‘scalding tank’, while meant for dead pigs, sometimes holds conscious animals whose last minutes are filled with indescribable agony.  

Slaughterhouses are places of cruelty and injustice, and they need to close down.

Here are some common terms.  (Acknowledgement:  ‘Slaughterhouse’ by Gail A Eisnitz)

 

GLOSSARY OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE TERMS

Antemortem inspection:  The examination of live animals prior to slaughter.
Blood Pit:  The area of a slaughterhouse where animals are bled out.
Bloodsplash: The rupture of capillaries in muscle tissue during electrical stunning which causes unsightly blood spots in the meat.  Bloodsplash hemorrhages are problematic from an aesthetic viewpoint, and cause a reduction in meat value.
Bung:  A slaughtered animal’s anus.
Captive bolt gun:  A gun, powered by compressed air or gunpowder, that drives a bolt into an animal’s forehead to render the animal unconscious.
Carcass: The skeleton and musculature of an animal, minus the head and legs.
Chain: The overhead conveyor that carries shackled animals from worker to worker through the slaughter and dressing processes.
Chain speed: How fast the chain is moving, measured in number of animals per unit of time. (Aka Line speed)
Chill tank: A giant refrigerated vat of water where chickens are communally cooled after dressing.
Chitlins: The intenstines of hogs (pigs) used in prepared foods.
Chutes: Enclosed passageways that lead animals from their pens to the stun area.
CO2 stunning (carbon dioxide anaesthesia):  A method used to render an animal unconscious for slaughter.
Downer:  A sick, spent, or disabled animal that cannot stand or walk.
Dressing:  Removal of the hide, appendages and viscera.
Gutter:  A worker who takes the guts out of slaughtered animals.
Hot shot: An electric cattle prod.
Kill floor: Where animals have their necks or chests sliced.
Legger: The worker who cuts off and skins an animal’s legs.
PACing  (sometimes called ‘thumping’):  Method of killing piglets whereby the piglet is picked up by the hind legs and slammed against the floor.  This causes massive head trauma, resulting in death (though not always instantaneous).
Render: The process whereby animal parts are cooked down, to separate fat from protein, and then sold for use in animal feed, fertilizer, oils, plastics, cosmetics and a host of other household and industrial products.
Ritual slaughter:   Religious slaughter done according to the requirements of either the Muslim or Jewish religious faith. The animal is slaughtered, often without being stunned, with a razor sharp knife.
Scalding tank:  A long narrow tank containing 140 degree water through which hogs are dragged to loosen hair for dehairing.
Shackler: A worker who places a chain around an animal’s hind leg so that it can hoisted and hung on the overhead rail.
Stunner: The worker who stuns the animals before they are shackled and hoisted.
Sticker: The slaughterhouse worker who cuts the animal’s throat open to bleed it.

 

 

‘There Is a Sense of Trust Between Us’

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 3 Comments on ‘There Is a Sense of Trust Between Us’

This moving  story of human/non-human friendship is one of the most unusual we have seen.  It is the story of a Japanese Diver and his friend Yoriko, a humphead wrasse. 

The wrasse is a large, diverse and remarkable fish.  There are more than 600 species of wrasse, ranging in size from 20 cm to 2.5 metres, and they can live up to 50 years.  The most well known wrasse,  the ‘cleaner fish’, lives in symbiosis with larger, often predatory, fish, grooming them (sometimes swimming into their open mouths and through their gill cavities) and benefiting by consuming the parasites they remove. They can clean many hundreds of ‘clients’ every day, and as many visitors to Aquariums know, it is a sight to behold to see a line of fishes congregated at cleaner stations, waiting for their turn! 

It has been well established that fishes feel pain, and it is thought increasingly likely they feel emotions too.   Why then do we cause these sentient creatures, trillions of individuals a year,  so much suffering?   We happily teach our children to impale them in their sensitive mouths and haul them into a medium where they cannot breathe.     Our appetite for fish means that cruel commercial and factory farming practices prolong their suffering and also risk depleting the ocean of its inhabitants.  Is this not madness?   

It’s time we called a halt to the carnage.   It’s time we stopped eating fish.    

Read the article and watch the video about Hiroyuki Arakawa and Yoriko. 

See also:

Marc Bekoff’s article on fish sentience.

‘An Earth Without Insects?’

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

 

Eighty percent of the biomass of insects has disappeared in just thirty years, and intensive agriculture, particularly the heavy use of pesticides, is  the main driver of this collapse.    

The decline in populations worldwide is devastating not only for the insect species but also for many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects.     It should also be of huge concern to us:- 

“Insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more.”

Widespread deforestation to grow grains to feed cattle over the last 30 years is a major cause.   Stopping animal agriculture is one of the ways we can begin to reverse this worrying trend.   

Insects are an essential part of the web of life.  We need to learn the lesson that exterminating other species for our own ends is not only morally wrong, it is bringing about devastation in the natural world.  

Read the Guardian article here:

Slaughterhouse Vigil, Land Meats, Whanganui, NZ: 28 July 2019

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

End Animal Slaughter website owner Sandra Kyle does regular weekly, or twice-weekly, slaughterhouse vigils in her home town of Whanganui, New Zealand, under The Save Movement banner. 

Sandra has been bearing witness to animals going to slaughter for nearly four years, and putting her accounts and photos up on her Facebook page.  Here is her latest blog:-

‘I think of them now as the sun goes down and the temperature drops and the only comfort they have is the warm bodies of their friends. Tomorrow morning these warm bodies will become slabs of meat. If you are reading this and you eat meat, please think of them as you fill your supermarket trolley this week’.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE VIGIL, Whanganui, 28 July, 2019

Whanganui was in communicative mode today. In the two hours we were in front of Land Meats we received more than usual toots from the roughly 400 cars that passed (I’m basing this estimate on previous counts). I have recently had my cataract-correcting lenses cleaned, and my vision has improved. As a result I can now clearly see the expressions on the faces of the car drivers.

They fall into two categories: those who don’t react/those who react, roughly 50/50 percent. Of those who don’t react they are just pretending they didn’t see us. 😊 Of those who react we have the hornblowers (the ones who give short toots are approving, those who sit long and loud on the horns are usually hostile), the smilers, the friendly wavers, the stoney-facers, the gesturers (thumbs up and down, middle finger up), the headshakers (up and down and side to side) the yellers of expletives (the majority) the yellers of encouragement (only a few) the neck craners, the jaw droppers, a couple of times we have had the throwers (fruit and glass beer bottle) and for the first time today a man who took his hands off the steering wheel to clap!

Only one small truck arrived, and while Monica stayed on the road with the signs, I tried to get some photos. Several cows had their faces above the truck as the driver stood on the roof using his electric prodder. I kept missing the good shots (typical), but in the photos I took you can see part of the cows’ heads. The groundsman came out and took photos of me taking photos of them. As usual, I had a lump in my throat and not feeling at all humorous, but I should have done some posing. Like a model. Haha. Only thing is my sense of humour seems to escape me when I’m at the slaughterhouse. I wonder why…

I sang to the cows as they waited to be offloaded, and then sneaked around the side and took a very short video of them in the pen. I think of them now as the sun goes down and the temperature drops and the only comfort they have is the warm bodies of their friends. Tomorrow morning these warm bodies will become slabs of meat. If you are reading this and you eat meat, please think of them as you fill your supermarket trolley this week.

 

They Tried to Escape Their Fate

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

Standing at slaughterhouse gates bearing witness to the animals, Save Movement activists all over the world take photos and videos to share on social media.  This documentation clearly show that animals are worried and fearful.    On the trucks going to the slaughterhouse, on live export ships, animals also sense something is wrong.  A tiny minority make a bid to escape.  Here is some of their stories, that often ended very badly for the animal.  We have to stop treating sentient beings as commodities.   When enough people transition to a vegan diet, slaughterhouses will close.

Read the Mercy for Animals article about animals who tried to escape:-

A Plate of Scrambled – Roosters?

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 2 Comments on A Plate of Scrambled – Roosters?

What’s behind your plate of scrambled eggs? End Animal Slaughter guest contributor SARAH OLIVER reminds us of a couple of things we may have overlooked.

 

It often crosses my mind that our ability to ignore the blindingly obvious makes us, and those we share the planet with, vulnerable.  A case in point is the short and painfully difficult lives of chickens.  We love to eat their flesh, as well as the fruits of their female reproductive system.  Tucking into our plate of scrambled eggs, chances are we don’t consider two major components that have been involved in producing our eggs.      One is the mysterious case of the disappearing males, the other is the ability of the modern layer hen to produce huge quantities of eggs.  No other bird in history has ever done this, for a good reason.

Before humans intervened, the ancestors of today’s hens produced around 15 eggs a year, in spring.   However, in order to satisfy our seemingly unquenchable desire to eat eggs, modern birds have been bred to lay on and on and on, at huge detriment to their small bodies, leading to them being ‘spent’ at only a fraction of their natural lifespan.

Hens can undergo horrific conditions as a result of this intensive laying.  Treated not as sentient beings but as food production units on factory farms, we can only imagine the toll on their frail bodies.  Alongside other conditions and infections, they suffer from osteoporosis.     So much calcium is used in the production of egg shells that the birds are left with brittle bones.  I once talked to an ex-chicken factory worker who said that when handled, their wings can just snap off because their bones are so weak.

The second component we miss when we are tucking into our scrambled eggs is that hens produce both male and female offspring, so what happens to all the males?    They cannot lay eggs so the Industry considers them a financial liability.   They therefore get rid of them as soon as possible after birth. For the baby roosters this means getting minced alive, (imagine throwing baby chicks into a blender) or gassed, within a few hours of hatching.  This is what we do to over 3 million baby birds each year in New Zealand.  In the UK it is 30 million, so we can only imagine the numbers of roosters macerated worldwide.

In 2001 I read an article about workers in New Zealand who were being re-organised into different roles in the egg industry.   Their new role in the production line was to feed otherwise healthy rooster chicks into the shredding machine. Their complaint was that they were ill-prepared to deal with the emotional difficulties of this role.   It is not hard to imagine how horrific such a job would be, spending your day picking out and throwing live healthy baby animals into a machine that grinds them up.  But this is what goes on, and this is what we ask of others when we purchase eggs. If we are horrified at the thought of mincing baby animals alive, then is it right to ask others to do it for us?

 

We live in an overpopulated world which makes our food choices more weighted than they have ever been. Bombarded with marketing and often conflicting nutritional advice on an unprecedented scale,  eating eggs and chicken meat seems to be winning on the promotional front.  We are turning away from red meat, but consuming a staggering amount of chickens and eggs worldwide.  According to one estimate, we kill more than 50 billion chickens every single year, an astronomical number that does not include the killing of male chicks, and hens who can no longer produce eggs.

Such is the prevalence of chickens, those we eat and those who lay our eggs, that there has been the suggestion that a mark of our modern world will be the chicken bone fossil record we will leave behind us.  Who would have thought that the humble chicken would be the defining characteristic of our age?

There is a huge amount of often contradictory information from the medical, food and dietary industries about the kind of food we should be eating, and we are also subjected to compelling advertising from the fast food industry. This can muddy the water when it comes to deciding what food is best for us.   I have a suggestion that may help our decision.   What if we put ethics and compassion first, then decide what goes on our plate from there?

I have a suggestion that may help our decision.   What if we put ethics and compassion first, then decide what goes on our plate from there?

There is a wealth of researched information on the benefits of eating a vegan, plant-based diet.  Fortunately,  over the last few years many plant-based alternatives to eating animals have emerged, and there is a wide variety to choose from.   Eating a plant-based diet is now easy, and like any other diet, it can be cheap or expensive, whole food or processed, depending on your preference and budget.  I think it is time that we rethink our relationship with the most prevalent, invisible, abused bird on the planet, the poor old Gallus gallus domesticus.  Just as we can only empathise, but not experience, another human’s pain, we cannot know precisely the level of suffering that goes on for a chicken. However, we can be sure that as sentient, complex, social animals, they do suffer, as they endure the cruel and unnatural life we have subjected them to.

Surely no plate of scrambled eggs is worth all that suffering.    Vegan scrambled eggs, on the other hand, are just as tasty, and cruelty-free.

 

 

Q&A: Casper Hilt, Full-time Animal Activist

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle | 6 Comments on Q&A: Casper Hilt, Full-time Animal Activist

Jobless and without a home, 36-year-old Danish activist CASPER HILT works 60 hours a week to change the reality for sentient beings.   

 

Was there anything in your background that set you on your path to animal activism?  

Personally, I have experienced a lot of injustice, suffering and illness in my life and I believe it shaped me into choosing, not just a compassionate way of life, but an active compassionate way of life. I truly want to help the helpless, those who suffer the most and those that are oppressed, and I can’t find anything in life that’s more important than that. I believe that if you have experienced suffering yourself, your empathy towards others’ sufferings grows, it’s like you lose the privilege of ignorance. Their pain becomes your pain, becomes our pain.

How long have you been vegan? 

6 years and 6 years as an AR activist. I was vegetarian before that for many, many years. I thought I was doing all I could do and I believe I lived a very ethical life, but I was lied to. When I finally discovered the truth about the wool, dairy and egg industries I got very upset.  Then I saw Gary Yourovsky’s ‘best speech you will ever hear’ on YouTube, and this was the turning point for me. I knew for the first time in my life, from the bottom of my heart, that I would never support any form of animal exploitation ever again. A fire was lit.

You gave up your job as a psychiatric nurse to work 60 hours a week on Animal Rights activism; street outreach, bearing witness at slaughterhouses, factory farms rescues, writing, editing videos and movies, administering your website and so on.   Activism is therefore your full-time job.  How do you manage to pay the bills?

First of all, to make this possible, I lowered my expenses to an absolute minimum. I don’t have a home; I have no mortgage or rent or any other large expenses, so I really don’t have any bills to pay. Secondly, I never use any money on myself. I never go out, never buy new clothes, never go on vacation etc., so I don’t need money for that either. I only use money for travelling to where I do activism, for staying there and to put  food in my mouth. Mostly it can be done quite cheaply.  I wish I had funds to buy better equipment though, I would love to be able to upscale  the quality of material I get with different types of cameras and lenses, lights, microphones etc. Hopefully I will be able to afford that in the near future.

What is the hardest part of your work emotionally? 

Not being able to stop this,  or save everyone I meet!   But also to become aware of the massive scale of the abuse, something I didn’t know before I witnessed it myself.    On another note, It is  truly draining and emotionally hard to witness and experience how the vegan and AR community has so much infighting, drama, cliques, backstabbing and so on,  and that is mostly why I choose to work alone. I am not here for saving a community, I am actually not even a very social person,  I am only here for helping the animals and inspire other people to do the same.

What is the most dangerous part?

The most dangerous part is the emotional stress. If you break (and you will break from time to time), you change, you will never be the same again. That doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, it can ‘just’ lead you in to a different path, because you now have new experiences and newly-gained wisdom. But we all need some kind of balance to not break completely. We need to be able to do this for as long as possible, as this massive abuse won’t end tomorrow or the day after.

What is the most rewarding part? 

To see that you make a difference.   If you just continue and do this long enough, you will see the differences you have made, the people you have changed, and the animals you have saved. And you will see that the stone you threw in the water actually created ripples that will work for you on and on and continue to make an impact.  The work you do has an impact, maybe not instantly, but it has an impact. Sometimes it has a huge impact.

What skills do you need to make you a successful activist?

Any skill! I always tell people to find out what they are passionate about and good at and then do way more of that!  Become even better and grow, become even more skilled at your skills!   And be open to that fact that whatever your passion is, it might change after a while and that is alright.   Sometimes a path leads to another path and that is completely fine, you are growing and you are being a stronger advocate for the animals. But the best skills are, if you ask me, integrity and decency.   Do what you do and let others do what they do. Let your inner fire guide you and let what other people think of your work, be their business. Treat others with decency, loyalty, respect and kindness, and ignore those who might not treat you with the same decency.

The film making, video editing and so on that you do.  Do you have any formal training in this or do you learn as you go along? 

I am self-taught and I was terrible at it to begin with, but I am so glad I continued and therefore got better. Hopefully, in a couple of years, I will think that some of the work I do now is ‘terrible’, because I will have become even better at it at that time!

Do you believe that animal exploitation is coming to an end? 

Yes, I do believe that and I do believe it will happen faster than we expect.
On the other hand, to be more specific, I do not believe we will end animal exploitation totally, we will end 99 percent of it. There will always be criminals and sociopaths who will exploit those who are the easiest to exploit, but we will change the cultural and legal paradigm into not accepting exploitation of vulnerable innocent beings, and we will succeed in shifting all animal exploitation industries in to cruelty-free and plant-based industries instead, using modern knowledge and modern technology instead of slaves.   Everyone will agree that it is the best solution for all of us, both humans and non-humans, as well as our planet earth.   It will not be easy to get there, it will be with great cost and great loss for many of us, that’s why we have to be united.

How can our readers follow you, and support the valuable work you are doing?

I’m working on a website as we speak, but it continues to be delayed because of other more important projects. But people can always find me and follow my work, contact me and support me on ‘Casper Hilt – Animal Rights Activist’ on both Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.  On www.Patreon.com/casperhilt you can directly support my work for our beloved animal friends.

 

Thankyou for your time Casper.

The conflict between instinct and intellect in exploiting animals

Posted on | by Sandra Kyle

End Animal Slaughter contributor PAUL STEVENSON writes that we will never self-actualise so long as we cause other animals to suffer.

 

Man is a social, innately moral, animal. When we treat others with kindness and respect we feel good about ourselves, but being cruel destroys us.

Human beings have needs of different kinds, ranging in priority from basic survival needs to ultimate self-fulfilment. Like the foundations of a building, basic needs must be met before we can begin to achieve higher ones. The psychologist Abraham Maslow termed these our “Hierarchy of Needs”

Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970) was a famous American clinical psychologist. He was particularly specialized in the area of humanistic psychology and became famous with his ground-breaking theory on the Hierarchy of Needs. This model is known as Maslow’s pyramid.

 

All humans have similar survival needs – food, clothing, shelter – and all share similar needs for esteem and a feeling of belonging. However, although our highest needs are more personal in nature, morality and integrity are absolute essentials. The house of our being requires a sound foundation and the mortar of integrity to bind all the bricks.

The brain is central to this issue. The human brain is comprised of parts of varying ages dating back millions of years to our earliest reptilian ancestors. In general, older parts perform automatic, unconscious maintenance activities and control unthinking responses. Only the cerebral cortex, the most recently evolved part, permits rational thought. Although we can think rationally, we are not fully rational animals as much of our behaviour is controlled by the ancient, unconscious parts of the brain.

Internal conflicts can arise when we get different messages from both older and newer parts of our brain. Man has an instinctive preference for animal foods as they contain complete protein and are rich in energy and vitamins. People consume them eagerly whenever they get the chance. We also crave foods high in fat, sugar and salt as these are of high survival value and scarce in nature. Although instinct tells us that such foods are highly desirable, our cerebral cortex – our “advanced” brain – allows us to consider them rationally.

 

We are thus confronted with the following problems regarding the consumption of animal products:-

1. We know we can nourish ourselves perfectly adequately on plant foods alone, without having to consume animal foods.

2. We know that the consumption of animal foods causes unspeakable suffering to the animals concerned because we can empathise with them as we too are animals.

3. We know that the production of animal foods causes immense environmental destruction both on land and at sea. It also creates hunger and poverty as it is grossly wasteful of energy and requires vastly more land than is available.

4. We know that eating animal foods causes many “lifestyle diseases” that lead to debilitating illness and premature death.

Thus we face a dilemma over the consumption of animal foods. We appear to be driven by ancient, unthinking instinct, but our rational mind tells us that eating animal products is indefensible. Because we are moral beings we must deceive ourselves to justify it. When we deceive ourselves we generate self-contempt and damage our self-respect. However, self-respect, or self-esteem, is a primary psychological human need as Maslow shows. We must approve of ourselves in order to function fully as human beings.

Integrity and morality are essential components of self-esteem. A false image of integrity may fool others but never oneself. When we deceive ourselves we cannot be comfortable within ourselves and cannot have peace in our heart.

The ultimate irony therefore is that when we steal from others we end up stealing that which is most precious of all from ourselves: our self-esteem and integrity. The harm we so callously inflict on others returns to destroy us along with our dreams.

If we wish life to be good we must practise it. Intellect must rule instinct. Good lives are moral lives. Moral lives consist of showing respect, not just to other humans, but especially to those poor innocent creatures whose lives we so abominably abuse by our execrable behaviour. Only when we do that can we achieve our full human potential, ultimate “Self-actualisation”.