Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.
This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.
People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than the rule).
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Agree. There's a provocative word you don't mention: hypocrisy.
This has become my reflexive internal response when I hear complaining about small-beer animal cruelty. Why are we so quick to empathize with this sunfish, and so slow to do it for creatures whose products most of us eat every single day? The horror show of factory farming creates many orders of magnitude more suffering than all these little anecdotes put together.
Zoos are cruel? Hypocrisy. Circuses are cruel? Hypocrisy. Bullfighting is cruel? Hypocrisy. Euthanizing stray dogs is cruel? Hypocrisy. Using animals in a film shoot is cruel? Hypocrisy. Keeping a single guinea pig is cruel? Hypocrisy (but against the law in Germany). And so on.
People in developed countries have become very good at dealing with cognitive dissonance.
I've seen some very large farms and they didn't seem like a horror show to me. Maybe they exist somewhere but I'm starting to get the feeling that "factory farm" is a term that people throw out to conjure a mental image of something that doesn't actually exist (or is the exception rather than the rule).
If factory farms were so benign, they wouldn’t need laws designed to encumber whistleblowers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag