Who Pays the Slaver Calls the Tune

Marko Lepik
Aug 27, 2017 · 13 min read

(Originally published in Eesti Päevaleht, the ‘Estonia Daily’, 08/26/17)

August 21, outskirts of the EU. A local media outlet Delfi receives a video showing newly born birds chirping away in large plastic bags amongst corpses in trash containers behind a broiler production operation at a borough near Tallinn, Estonia. A quiet, routine non-event for the locals for probably nearly half a century. The representative of the factory, having quickly consulted with PR-experts, makes puppy eyes. With each ensuing statement in the escalating media chaos, their comments get milder and guiltier. They then play the joker of transparency, and finally pull the absurd ‘it is all humane’-card.

Classics of crisis clean-up. An exquisite PR-Béchamel. On social media, animal advocates say they are saving the texts of the published news on their hard drives. They have seen cases of the titles or sentences having become revised into softer formulations as days in such crises pass.

For those consumers who have invested time into learning about the shadow sides of modern industrial ‘animal production’, and similar issues related to the need of an Ethical Consumerism, this report was both appalling and wonderful. It was, of course, obscene to hear of yet another ‘batch’ of children of another species desecrated by homo sapiens. The upside was a sigh of relief voiced on social media: ‘Finally, such stuff was exposed in Estonia, like has been in many Western countries already.’

Unfortunately, what happened was nothing special. This is something that is actively being hidden from sight via ‘product marketing’ and walls without windows with tedious care. The fact that a few poor workers may get fired and we will never again find birds in these specific containers will not eradicate the totality of the absurd and horror of industrial ‘animal production’. Our grandmothers probably can not even begin to imagine what is being done to animals in the name of pleasure eating in the 21st century. Neither, in fact, can the grand children. One simply does not want to imagine this, even though there is a vague intimation of the truth. A mental image of a humane small farm nicely replaces the reality of factories.

In 1999, I had to explain to my fellow students at Duke University in the US what were the Soviet deportations of civilians that killed and displaced altogether millions of Russians, Chechens, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tatars and others, and why it happened. In 2005, I simply tried to shed light on the violent reality of the Soviet experiment of Communism to fellow Ph.D. and masters students at the LSE in London, upon hearing idealistic glorifications of theoretical Stalinism and Marxism.

The first kind of reaction was a complete and total blocking of the new, shocking information. One would simply continue on the old trajectory of reasoning, even more convinced this train of thought was correct. Psychologists and people who expose animal abuse know this as the Backfire Effect; a close cousin of protective denial. PS. This process is likely to also start taking place in the minds of at least half of the readers right now.

The second outcome was a painful — but empty, not an intellectually rich — silence. The social blame, the responsibility for damaging the momentary group harmony and homogeneity, fell on the messenger from the stark reality. This unpleasant, to say the least, information was of course very hard to digest for someone who had grown up immersed in a different field of information. Even an intelligent and educated person will experience the activation of the complete arsenal of ego and self-esteem defense mechanisms in such situations. This can be counteracted, but it requires effort, understanding, and self-compassion.

Industrial Animal Torture Is Mundane

‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.’
(Loved musician Paul McCartney)

The glass walls for large slaughterhouses dreamt up by the caring opinion leader are slowly starting to become a reality. For example, in the UK and France, they might soon take the form of CCTV. The daily debasement of sentient, emotional and social individuals is widespread. Also, the ways in which the clinical anxiety and depression that arises in the workers of an industry that systematizes the torture of animals finds its expression in animal abuse have been convincingly demonstrated by undercover investigations in a number of Western countries, including Estonia’s northern neighbor Finland. This has sparked some progressive changes because it clearly does not align with our written and unwritten family, community and social values.

The torture, careless treatment and abuse of frightened and stressed animals are the quotidian of large scale industrial ‘animal production’. We can spare only ethical small farmers from this accusation. Small farms carried the Western civilization to where it is now. And they are being pushed out of business by large machine-like corporations as we speak. There is still one problematic narrative that remains even the case of the former. Namely, the ritualized murder of a loved friend supported by a belief that there is no other way, because we have been doing this for thousands of years. The ways in which it could be done in the 21st century due to our advances in scientific knowledge, and the reasons it should be taken seriously as best we can, instead of demonizing the pioneers, is a matter for another writing.

We Are in Contradiction With Our Values

The fact that living birds somehow end up in a trash bin is a manifestation of standard disregard and objectification of living beings. The mannerisms of distancing language familiar to humanity from concentration camps also help. ‘A batch’, not birds. ‘Raw material’, not chicks. ‘Humane execution’ and ‘maceration’, not live shredding. ‘What’, not who. However, collectively, we consider the torture of animals impermissible. Yet, we financially support the organizations who do it instead of us, in order to fulfill our pleasures — and not to simply alleviate the pain of hunger.

How do we pull off this hat trick, day in and day out, in front of the mirror?

Denial and numbing that alleviate this psychological contradiction are some of the simpler forms of postponing the resolution of this internal emotional conflict. It does not feel alright to just give up familiar tastes. It feels almost as if one were to give up one’s heritage or identity. At the same time, there is this machine that operates in an utterly unacceptable manner, but it also seems unstoppable. It is easier to carry on living with as little information as possible and to think that it can not be that bad. Perhaps all these were just unique cases. However, both logic and overwhelming evidence from across the globe where activism is not suppressed, tell us that this is not true. This is wishful thinking.

We Raise Our Children to Care About Animals

Most people, when trying to think about it rationally, think they do indeed love animals. In reality, this thought is buffered by a series of cognitive distortions and denials. And so it continues that most food consumers hand over their money to animal factories that handle living beings like logs of wood. Mistakenly thinking that there is no other way.

This brand new specific ‘discovery’ of a small event in a small Estonian parish with a big factory will simply shock the average media consumer for a week, or a month. After this basic urges retake the stage. All of this is already familiar in the more affluent parts of the West with a longer history of animal advocacy. A denial, screaming for the next injection of heroin, jumping to shield a self-image built up since childhood from being injured. Those lucky enough can grow emotionally and morally, ignoring the anger of compatriots, and look for solutions. Be it in the form of supporting small farms, changing the structure of their consumption, switching off entire groups of animal products, or even pro-actively creating alternatives. Those not so lucky are left suspending their innate compassion and kindness and directing the inevitable anger at the messengers. It can indeed feel disempowering.

The latest comments of the Estonian producer Tallegg — a subsidiary of the Nordic corporation HKScan — may have left the consumers with the impression that the industry ‘humanely’ crushes only 1% of their newly born chicks. For a moment this is a soothing number. This is also a half truth. As of 2016, this specific producer only deals in meat, and indeed, the males are also edible. In reality, however, in its sister industry dealing in eggs, live shredding or gas chambers are the most common fate of all or most male chicks. This makes it sound more like 50% in the grand scheme of things.

Only those small producers who are trying to actually be as humane as they can by avoiding both shredding and gassing are avoiding these practices. For example, they try to give away male chicks to people in rural areas for free. If the total surplus of male chicks is around ‘a mere’ 15 000, a producer deems it possible. An operation, such as Eggo, a subsidiary of the Scandinavian Dava Foods Group in Estonia, producing around 90 000 000 eggs annually, will probably not even glance at such an idea. When one’s mind is set on efficiency, a bird shredding machine in one’s own or in one’s supplier’s backyard is inevitable. Eggo issued a prompt statement that they have nothing to do with such practices as heard used in the other unaffiliated company, Tallegg, and that they only buy female chicks. They thus made an understandable attempt to distance themselves from the responsibility of the execution of chicks. They simply forgot to mention the faith of male chicks in the operation of their supplier.

It is not overly back-breaking to change or limit one’s consumer behavior in a healthy and ethical way. Nevertheless, many of us do not have the courage to jump, or can simply not be bothered to do so. One might even not want to change in defiance of the messengers. One might also simply refuse to take action because of deficient information — because, after all, this is just ‘the propaganda of people unfamiliar with real life’. We do not have the courage to admit that responsibility lay just as much on each individual member of the market place as it lay on lenient legislators, efficiency driven producers, and inexistent supervision.

Humane Industrial Animal Husbandry Is Impossible

A growing number of the members of the Y- and Z-generations have learned the facts about the world as it has become by the 21st century. They have weighed the ethical and emotional implications of this state of affairs, and have reduced or given up their consumption of animal products or products gruesomely tested on animals. Every time one jeers any of these persons, one also mocks the basic value injected into every child via cartoons: ‘Animals are to be loved and protected, a good person does not harm them.’

In order to satisfy the various needs, interests, and whims of 7.5 billion people, each year 65 to 100 billion animals are slaughtered, depending on whom and how one counts. 100 000 000 000. In an industrial, capitalist world, one of the few realistic means of voting that we have is our consumer behavior. The people who have radically adjusted theirs, are acting and voting. Every single day.

This does not necessarily mean that the people who have seriously limited their meat intake in accordance with the pleas and recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), or vegetarians, or vegans, might not find pleasure the taste of a chicken leg, fried eggs or bacon. As a human animal, they have simply opted to employ their divine advantage over other animals — one’s freedom to choose more intelligently. They also acts in accordance with an obligation accompanying this superpower — to burden to choose wisely. As best as one can.

Unanesthetized castration of infants. Immobilization of male newborns to yield a softer taste of weaker child muscles. Unanesthetized cutting of tails. Unanesthetized removal of teeth of children. Unanesthetized removal of horns of children. Unanesthetized cutting or burning of beaks of newborns or teens. Forcing someone to live their life with a metal tube stuck down one’s throat in order to enlarge their liver for increased human eating pleasure. Gas chambers for children. Live shredding of male children. Separation of mothers and newborns right after birth. Extinguishing cigarettes in the faces of individuals in slaughterhouses. Beating them with random objects. Etc, etc, etc. All these are mundane industrial practices requiring interference and change.

Last year, Dava Foods OÜ bought and transferred the production of 40% of all the eggs on the Estonian market from under the Tallegg brand to the Eggo brand. The chairman of the board of the company, Vladimir Sapožnin, was reported to have told a local newspaper, with a smirk, in April 2017: ‘A happy chicken is a marketing slogan, a pure marketing gimmick. There is no such thing.’ Nevertheless, we hold on to the illusion as if it were possible to conduct this ‘converting animals into food’ thing in an industrial manner in some sort of a ‘humane’ way. Our grandma could. The small farm owner we knew could. A factory can not.

It is within our power to go against the euphemisms of ‘Dutch roses’. These simply mean near-slavery of single mothers in Africa. One needs to never ever give anyone blood roses for Valentine’s Day again. Instead, one can give a basket of fruit. We can take a stance against the humiliating, dangerous and serf-like working conditions in the factories of Zara and H&M in Bangladesh. Likewise, we can act against the torture of animals in entertainment and circus industries, fur farms, and large-scale meat factories across the industrialized nations. One does not need to consume the chocolate coming via the hands of child slaves. Once we, the people, understood the power we hold via our daily actions and choices, the changes could be rather fast…

The Problem Is Global, the Solutions Individual

The WHO and the national health agencies of several developed nations implore their populations to drastically reduce the consumption of meat. We are talking reduction in hundreds of percents. For example, a 2016 governmental health survey in Estonia indicated that women consumed 3 times and men 4 times as much meat as would be healthy.

This whole ensemble concerns both health, environmental protection, and ethics. A small segment of the more informed populace will indeed reduce their consumption. Some patient ones will start looking for Fair Trade labels. Those a step even more courageous and feeling stronger might replace entire groups of animal products with plant based ones on their menu. Yet, many of us will not execute any of the above. Even though there might be a feeling that one should, and despite the fact that we do have access to adequate information nowadays. Why?

Could it be because we are rather primitive animals, addicted to dopamine, who have not learned to skillfully regulate our emotions that have evolved a bit further compared to other animals? This regulation would necessitate the seeking of dopamine in new places and avenues in a more intelligent and knowledgeable manner. Modern science is far beyond being aware that animals are conscious, experience complex emotions and create intricate, intimate social bonds.

The intimacy of food, and the pleasure derived from it, which includes its erotic stimulation, sits deeper in us than the pleasure derived from ordinary sexual intimacy and pleasure. When we perceive an attack on our food via a cognitive distortion, we perceive an attack on ourselves. And a base fear is activated: ‘I am being robbed of my food — I will starve to death — attack!’. This is one level closer to death than the fear of having to go on living without a chance to mate. This, and the feeling that one’s identity is in danger, could be the reasons why everything food is such a trigger-laden minefield.

However, these fears are often unjustified. A sign of emotional maturity and heroism is the ability to commit right and noble acts in-spite the sometimes absurd but noteworthy, and sometimes important, screams of the oldest reptilian survival mechanism of our brains. Were we not in possession of the power to voluntarily step beyond our fears and the distortions of our internal dialogue in the name of a greater good, there would be not a single war hero, there would not be anyone to rescue a child of a stranger, or to give a hand to a wounded animal. But there are. And we admire and respect this.

Nevertheless, unawares, we pay someone every day for keeping animals imprisoned in huge closed factory buildings for us. There, out of sight, they can be abused at will, hurt in unimaginable ways and subdued. Finally, after being murdered, they can be turned into an anonymous plastic product with a lovely yellow sticker. Informed alternatives do exist. The science behind them is good. Learning is possible. Shall we choose to change the world with every purchase decision we make, or is too late for us already?

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Marko Lepik

Written by

‘Be soft as a flower. Be firm as a rock.’ // Coach // Copywriter // Consultant // Been a monk. Been a yuppie. Not getting out of here alive. :)

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