ABSTRACT
Are we more or less humane towards non-human animals than our parents were? This may seem a rather surprising question. Undoubtedly, during the last few decades the more articulate among us have talked and thought much more than we used to about our responsibilities towards them, and have quite often acted on our new thoughts. What is unlucky is that, almost without our knowledge, at the same time our society’s actual practical exploitation of them has been, and still is, steadily increasing. Much the biggest factor here has been industrialized food and fur production, which now processes huge numbers of quite advanced social animals away from public sight, treating them with total disregard for their natures and feelings, exactly as if they were lifeless objects. Life for animals on the traditional farm was of course often hard, but it did necessarily involve some degree of concession to their natural wishes-a concession which modern technology has now eliminated. I cannot cite details here, but in case anyone thinks this problem has already been contained, it is perhaps just worth mentioning the effects now beginning to flow from the recent US law allowing the patenting of newly bred animal life forms. Commercial research is now in full flood. Grossly large pigs have already been produced, and have proved to be chronic invalids suffering from arthritis and crossed eyes. Conditions such as these would not at all necessarily affect the meat value of animals, so they would not prevent their being produced. To quote-not from any animal welfare source, but from the Meat Trades Journal (London) for 30 April 1987-we should expect
in twenty-five years’ time, truly bizarre farmyard scenes-cows with hugely distended rumps for meat; vastly extended pigs for prime back bacon; featherless chickens. With their anatomies so grossly distorted, the animals would function through life-support systems. In fifty years’ time, ‘tumour-farms’. A tumour is a swelling caused by the abnormal growth of perfectly natural tissues. This would be a very efficient form of meat production, requiring little space and husbandry [emphasis mine].
