To everyone who is here tonight, I would guess, it is
obvious there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and
other animals; furthermore, that whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge
scale in the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, as traditional animal
husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of
production.
We can make a long list of the ways in which our relations
to animals are wrong, but the food industry, which turns living animals into
what it euphemistically calls animal products – animal products and animal
by-products – dwarfs all others in the number of individual animal lives it
affects.
So it is a good thing that Voiceless has been concentrating
its efforts on combating the animal-farming industry, without ignoring other
practices – the use of animals in laboratory experiments, for example, or the
trade in wild animals, or the fur trade – that we might also call cruel and
inhuman but for the fact that inhuman
is the wrong word, such practices are all too human.
Those of us – that is, those of us human beings – gathered
here tonight are pretty much at one in our criticism of industries that use
animals as raw materials. As for the people not here tonight, there are some –
a diehard few, I would guess – who know exactly what goes on in factory farms
and know the philosophical arguments for and against these practices, yet continue
to say that these practices are justified and don’t need to be changed. And
then there are the vast majority, people who in one degree or another support the
industrial use of animals by making use of the products of that industry but
are nevertheless a little sickened, a little queasy, when they think of what
happens on factory farms and abattoirs and therefore arrange their lives in
such a way that they need be reminded of farms and abattoirs as little as
possible, and do their best to ensure that their children are kept in the dark
too, because as we all know children have tender hearts and are easily moved.
The transformation of animals into production units dates
back to the late nineteenth century, and since that time we have already had
one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically
wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This
warning came to us so loud and clear that it you would have thought it was impossible
to ignore it. It came when in the middle of the twentieth century a group of powerful
men in Germany had the bright idea of adapting the methods of the industrial
stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what
they preferred to call the processing
– of human beings.
Of course we cried out in horror when we found out about
this. We cried: What a terrible crime, to
treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry
should more accurately have been: What a
terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And
that cry should have had a postscript:
What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a
unit in an industrial process!
I have no desire to hold up traditional animal husbandry as
the glowing ideal by whose standard the animal-products industry falls short. I
happen to think there is another and better standard we can use, the standard
of humanity and what humanity can be; but that is another question for another
day.
Voiceless works for the amelioration of the conditions under
which animals spend their lives. In a longer time-frame, Voiceless works for
the elimination of factory farming. It does so not by direct action but by
persuasion, and its persuasive efforts are directed at the vast majority of the
public who know and don’t know that there is something bad going on, something
that stinks to high heaven. What is going on stinks so badly that most people
don’t really require a lot of persuading. The problem is to persuade people
enough for them to take action in the way they run their lives. For, confronted
with the evidence, people all too easily say: “Yes, it’s terrible what lives brood
sows live,” or: “Yes, it’s terrible what lives veal calves live,” or: “Yes,
it’s terrible what lives broiler chickens live.” The crunch comes with what
they say next, usually with a helpless shrug of the shoulders: “But what can I
do about it?”
That is where organizations like Voiceless come into the
picture: to offer people imaginative but practical options for what to do next
after they have been revolted by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live
and the deaths they die.
Factory farming is a new phenomenon, very new indeed in the
history of animal husbandry. The good news is that after a couple of decades of
what the businessmen behind it must have regarded as free and unlimited expansion,
the industry has been forced onto the defensive. The activities of
organizations like Voiceless have shifted the onus onto the industry to justify
its practices; and because its practices are indefensible and unjustifiable
except on the most narrowly economistic grounds (“Do you want to pay $1.50 more
for a dozen eggs?”) the industry is battening down its hatches and hoping the
storm will blow itself out. Insofar as there was a public-relations war, the
industry has lost that war.
The efforts of Voiceless and like-minded organizations must go
to demonstrating to ordinary people that there are alternatives to supporting
the animal-products industry, that these alternatives need not involve
sacrifices in health and nutrition, that there is no reason why these alternatives
need be costly, and furthermore that what are called sacrifices are not
sacrifices at all – that the only sacrifices in the whole picture are being
made by non-human animals.
In this respect, children provide the brightest hope.
Children have tender hearts, that is to say, children have hearts that have not
yet been hardened by years of cruel and unnatural battering. Given half a
chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the
happy chooks that are transformed painlessly into succulent nuggets, the
smiling moo-cow that donates to us the bounty of her milk). It takes but one
glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.
In the struggle to rid ourselves of the blight of the
animal-products industry, the crucial battle is for the hearts and minds of the
young, and it is a battle that can easily be won. What celebrity, after all, will
be so dumb as to sell his or her services to the industry to speak for the
happiness of the caged sow or the joy of the broiler chick (to broil: to cook
on a hot gridiron – Oxford English Dictionary). Voiceless is absolutely right to
focus so much of its attention on children.
A final word about the enterprise we are engaged in –
Voiceless and the friends of Voiceless and the friends of the ideas behind
Voiceless all over the world. This enterprise is a curious one in one respect: that
the fellow beings on whose behalf we are acting are unaware of what we are up
to and, if we succeed, are unlikely to thank us. There is even a sense in which
they do not know what is wrong. They do certainly not know what is wrong in the
same way that we know what is wrong. So, even though we may feel very close to
our fellow creatures as we act for them, this remains a human enterprise from
beginning to end.
It is an enterprise in which we are increasingly
making use of the one faculty where we have an indubitable advantage over other
creatures: the faculty of abstract thought. This age will be looked back on, I
am convinced, as one in which huge steps were made in our thinking about relations
between human and non-human living beings, in a range of fields from the
philosophy of mind to ethics and jurisprudence. With such a flow of
intellectual energy joining in with the practical energies of organizations
like Voiceless, it is impossible to believe that we cannot effect a change in
the present sad, sorry and selfish treatment of animals.
Text written by J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize for Literature Winner 2003 and Voiceless Patron
Spoken by Hugo Weaving at the exhibition opening of ‘Voiceless: I feel
therefore I am’, Sherman Galleries, Thursday, 22 February 2007
© J. M. Coetzee 2007
