“What vegans know and what meat eaters and vegetarians often deny.”  Isn’t that great?  I love that.

More from Roger Yates at On Human-Nonhuman Relations:

On Saturday March 24, 2001, the Welsh edition of the Liverpool Daily Post featured a single large picture on its front page. Under the headline ‘HEARTBREAK’ a man is pictured standing in front of a cow. The man’s hand is raised, the cow’s head is raised too, as if she is trying to smell what the man holds in his hand. The smell is likely to be metallic because the man holds a primed captive bolt pistol. The gun is pointed at the head of the cow who is locked into a large red restraining device. The subtitle under the headline reads: ‘The chilling moment which graphically illustrates the horrific reality of the farm outbreak’. The caption under the photograph reads: ‘GRIM TRUTH: A slaughterman shoots a cow in Lamonby, Cumbria, yesterday. We apologise to readers who find this photograph distressing. After much thought, we decided to publish it to show the full effect of the foot-and-mouth crisis’.

Apart from the newspaper’s masthead, two adverts for the content of other pages and an advert at the bottom of the page for mobility scooters, the picture and the words above take up the whole of the tabloid-sized front page.

This is at the beginning of a great post on veganism that I think you should go read.  Right now.  It’s one of the most succinct essays that I’ve read in a long time.

The essay goes on to say:

As might be suspected, many meat eaters do not overtly recognise themselves as purchasers of parts of the carcasses of dead animals, just as meat eaters and vegetarians may not have the fact that they are consumers of animal products at the forefront of their minds. Apart from the case of some fishes, care is generally taken to remove eyes and heads or other parts that would result in ‘meat’ being seen as a piece of an animal (when does a pig end and a pork chop begin? – see Singer 1983: 165-66).

[1] How many recognise that the white liquid lined up on the shelves is, first and foremost, baby food: the food of calves? However, despite this, or because of these points, one question I pose here is relatively blunt: why should people take active steps to know any of the details about the animal products that they intend to consume?

Yes, I agree.  How many of the omni’s think about what they are eating before they eat it?  My personal belief is that we can trace it back to the way we desensitize our children.  We teach that bacon isn’t a pig and a burger doesn’t come from a cow.  It’s always “Old MacDonald has a farm” but never “Old MacDonald has a factory farm.  See, because if our parents had told us that animals are tortured before they are horribly killed, most likely the children wouldn’t go near a hamburger.

I would encourage any meat eater to take some time to research where their food comes from.  Maybe once you open your eyes and see how gruesome it really is, you will open you mind to a more compassionate way of life.  I hope so, I really do.