Out of the mouths of babes!

I perfectly understand this youngster's feelings. As children so often do, he has spoken the truth. He is reacting with the same revulsion and outraged anger he would if the adults killed their human friends. It is the deliberate killing of a being one knows - especially that one has befriended - that revolts his sensibilities.

Compassionate people put spiders outside, spiders that they only just met - they don't kill them. It's amazing the number of people who put spiders outside because they don't like to personally kill; they don't like the savagery of crushing the life out of a helpless weak unsuspecting creature; and this a creature that they haven't even got to know.

But to kill a helpless weak unsuspecting creature that you have befriended is to ramp up the savagery to levels that sickens not only this child, but many other people too. To know them, talk to them, care for them, and then kill them is the stuff of horror movies and Grimm brothers' tales, if children are the victims; that is what this boy was feeling. To an increasing number of people, animals are as helpless as children and deserving of the same treatment and protection.

I have read countless times that people who eat animals which they haven't personally killed and then decry farming and slaughter methods, are hypocritically hiding from the truth and ought to actually witness farm life and slaughter.

I've always thought that not seeing the lives and deaths of meat animals is critical to the process of thinking of animals as friends who have feelings and who need protection. Farming for meat is an extension of hunting. Farming for plants is an extension of gathering. The former is bloody and brutal, the latter is peaceful. Meat farmers belong to an old culture that is on the wane thank goodness. Not very long ago, every villager raised and killed a pig, chickens, etc. It was the norm and not many people were bothered by knowing the animal they killed. Except children. Young children have always been horrified and saddened by the brutal killing of a creature they came to know. On farms, most grew out of this as they saw the process repeated many times and as they absorbed the attitude of their parents. In modern times 4H clubs have helped in the emotional hardening process.

Even now the attitude of farmers to animals is revolting to the sensibilities of a growing number of the people who are called hypocrites by many in the animal rights/welfare movement because they let someone else do the killing of their meat.

These people may still be blind, even wilfully blind, to the savagery of killing other beings, but this separation of eater from eaten is necessary to the evolution of civilization. It isn't civilized to abuse or kill human beings; a civilized society has that at its roots. We are actually seeing the process of extending our standards of civility to animals take place at an amazingly rapid rate. All over the world the fight is being waged by more and more people and groups to end factory farming, for better protection from cruelty, for protection of habitat, to stop the hunting of animals, to stop the exploitation of animals in zoos and aquariums and races, and to stop eating them.

We aren't going to go back to everyone callously raising and killing their own meat thank goodness. The separation is what has made possible the anthropomorphism that is leading to more and more people seeing that we share emotions, and suffering, and social needs with animals, and then demanding that we stop abusing them. You can't get to that point if you are slaughtering your own food. People who kill animals can't let themselves think too hard about what they are doing.

Where others chronically see gloom, I see progress. That the large majority of people no longer live on farms and kill animals, is a good thing.