Awareness of animal suffering is breaking her heart
Dear John,
Recently I realized what happens to animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Now I am haunted by the suffering I've learned is going on every minute of every day.
I'm taking action, I pray. But what can I pray? That the animal slaughter taking place every hour in every slaughterhouse in every state is less horrific? I do pray for such things. But I feel this urgency to MAKE IT STOP.
How does one come to terms with this? It's breaking my heart. I don't want to shut down, become callous, numbed. I don't know how to hold up under this knowledge either.
Savannah
Dear Savannah,
Thank you for caring.
If people knew how badly animals are treated in today’s factory farms, if people knew how completely confined and immobilized these creatures are for their entire lives, if people knew how severe and unrelenting is the cruelty these animals are forced to endure, there would be change. If people knew. But too many of us choose to look the other way, to keep the veil in place, to remain unconscious and caught in the cultural trance. That way we are more comfortable. That way is convenient. That way we don’t have to risk too much. This is how we keep ourselves asleep.
It’s painful to awaken. It’s painful to break the shell of repression. It takes courage to see what today’s farm animals are forced to endure. It is painful to see how callused human beings can become. It can be shattering to see that in our ignorance we have eaten the products of such a system. It takes courage to open our eyes to such tragedy, and our hearts to our deepest human responses.
The feelings that arise when we learn what is being done to today’s animals are proof that there is still hope for us, that our hearts are thawing from the prevailing apathy and psychic numbing. In a culture that takes indifference and denial for granted, we may feel that our distress at what is being done to animals is a failure on our part, a signal that we can’t cope, evidence that we have a problem. But the distress we feel at what is being done is real, valid, and healthy. It speaks of our commitment to stopping this madness. It is a measure of our humanity.
The pain we feel is not ours alone. Many of us, conditioned to take seriously only those feelings which pertain to our individual needs and wants, may not realize that we can suffer on behalf of others. But we can, and we do. We suffer on behalf of animals when we learn of their plight. We suffer on behalf of the people who in their blindness are the instruments of such cruelty. We suffer on behalf of a society that perpetuates such tragedy. And we suffer on behalf of life itself whenever it is demeaned and exploited.
Our pain arises from our kinship with life. We hurt because we are not separate from animals, nor from the people who are the agents of such suffering. We hurt because these animals are our fellow mortals; and because the people administering such cruelty are our fellow human beings. We hurt because we are part, as they are, of the great web of life.
Our pain is not something to fear, for in the heart of our grief we can find our connection to each other, and our power to act. Our power lies in our connection to all life. Our power lies in our deepest human responses to pain. Our power does not lie in looking the other way.
I stand with you in seeing it all. I stand with you in facing what is happening. I stand with you in doing all that we can to awaken others so that the cruelty will stop.
We who are alive, with breath in our bodies and love in our hearts, have so very much to be thankful for. With all the pain and challenges that life can bring, let us never lose track of that.
