iAnimal

On my first night in Bath, my ‘strange eating habits’ came up at the dinner table as they are wont to do. Uncle Peter asked me about milk and how I get my protein, and how people who ate no meat could possibly be strong, and I answered as best I could. And then he tried to tell me that the killing of animals in England couldn’t possibly be inhumane, because there are standards here, and regulations. And so I tried to tell him what I had seen when I volunteered with iAnimal.

"iAnimal is a virtual reality project that creates a 360 degree, immersive experience in which the viewer is transported inside factory farms and slaughterhouses.

The animals we eat suffer from the time they are born to the time they reach our plates. iAnimal allows the viewer to access the day-to-day abuses that are hidden from the public by the agricultural industry.

This project includes footage obtained over the last 18 months during our investigations into factory farms and slaughterhouses in the United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and Italy."

It was near the end of term, and Will had asked if I'd like to help out with iAnimal which i agreed to do. I watched a virtual reality film through a pair of goggles, which was very much like some other recordings I'd seen before which expose the cruel practices of modern day factory farming. Then I helped other people use the goggles, and talked to them afterwards about what they'd seen. All in a days activism.

Since I'd seen factory farming practices before (a similar video was what initially brought me to really understanding the ethical motivation behind vegetarianism) I expected I would be able to watch it with some sort of emotional removal, and use it as a platform to engage in conversation with people who might not have seen something like that before. And initially I could handle it.

But when I was trying to explain what I'd seen to Uncle Peter, I found myself trying to stem a rising tide of tears, to no avail, and I became a weepy mess at the dinner table. And now when people talk about factory farms, or when I see trucks on the highway filled with sheep, or ducks, presumably on their way to the slaughterhouse, the heaviness is so much greater than it was before.

So what did I see?

I watched as piglets were taken away from their mothers, castrated without anything to staunch their pain, kept in cages so small they were driven mad and bit their brothers.

I watched as they were stunned, or worse, half stunned, and then their legs chained to a conveyor belt which hoisted them into the air to the knife that cut their throats.

One pig, screaming as its life blood streamed out of it, broke the chains and fell to the ground. Unable to stand, its leg broken by being hung on that conveyor belt and weakened from blood loss, it thrashed about in the blood and muck from countless murders. It was stunned again and hung again, again again again again this happens to animals everywhere and is called ‘legal’ and ‘humane’.

If this is what it is to be ‘humane’ then I renounce my humanity and call myself an animal, for the beast is kinder than Man. At least they feel pain, while humans deaden the guilt and soul-ripping sorrow of killing another living creature as we pick up Styrofoam trays of flesh in the supermarket, with labels showing a pig grazing peaceably in a field slapped on to hide the barbarity of the slaughterhouse, words like ‘pork’ and ‘shank’ and ‘sirloin’ euphemizing the truth that we are sinking our teeth in to the blood and muck and filth of that floor.

It hurts me so much, that people haven't made the connection that this is murder. Massacre. Genocide. On the most insidious and normalised level. 

Typing this is so unsatisfactory, and somewhere in my belly is the tearing feeling of frustration because I just want a universal enlightenment, for people to realise that this is not a matter of convenience, appetite, or taste, but a matter of life and death.

Please, please, don't do nothing. Don't stay silent and let the animals scream. Be a voice for the voiceless and live with kindness.