Do Your Words Mean What You Think They Mean?

File under: Signs of Failed Humanity

I’m confused. So many people say they are angered and horrified when they see posts showing how animals are brutalized and tortured from day one to day last in factory farms. They see the immoral suffering inflicted on these sentient, helpless-to-resist, agonized beings and express how disgusted it makes them.
And then they go right ahead, and continue to eat the mutilated bodies and produce of these animals and smacking their lips. Today. In a supposedly enlightened era. When good substitutes this meat are ever more available.

Today., every time I hear a meat eating friend express outrage at the torture and brutal murder of animals while posting pictures of their oh-so-delicious meat dishes, I’m prompted to say, like Inigo Montoya, you keep using these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

One word does come to mind. Hypocrisy.

I was one of these people myself, into my seventies. But those of my generation lived in a vacuum of denial. We deluded ourselves with the idea that animals were treated well, and lived well, right up to the moment of their death. I finally LEARNED.

I wish my friends and acquaintances would learn. I wish everyone would learn.

There is, in the 21st century, no excuse for not knowing not learning, not being better. There is no excuse today. There is no longer any denying the horrors of the meat and dairy industry.

If we are decrying and condemning those horrors while using our next breath to express how delicious our ham and bacon, beef, chicken, and turkey dishes are, we should at least have the honesty to stop using words that don’t mean what they say.
It’s 2021. We can’t love eating that meat and also say we care about the suffering attached to it. Because we don’t mean it.

It’s called hypocrisy.