Finishing... we’re talking about the premeditated, violent, gory and unnecessary killing in cold blood of defenceless young creatures, mere infants in most cases.
Image by Konrad.Lozinski@Flickr
https://www.flickr.com/photos/xsanssoleilx/
‘Finishing’ is yet another of the words with which the animal use
industry glosses over the monstrous activities of our species.
‘Finishing’ is part of the practice of making victims out of gentle and
defenceless individuals for nonvegan consumers to eat their bodies or use
them to death. Largely unchallenged and mistakenly thought to be bucolic and
wholesome, the activities inherent in ‘farming’ innocent lives and bodies
for financial gain are so inherently brutal that it’s littered with such
euphemisms. Every challenge is met by the industry with rhetoric about
‘welfare‘, another glossy euphemism that has zero to do with victim
wellbeing and everything to do with easing consumer conscience so
they keep on spending.
These are the soothing, feel-good words of a business that absolutely
depends on preventing the consumers who pay them from realising that what’s
actually happening on their behalf is an affront to all that’s decent; the
words of a business that – by its very existence – goes against every value
we all think we have; values like the appreciation of fairness, respect for
the lives and habitats of other animal species and contempt for those who
cause needless harm to defenceless, innocent creatures.
Finishing. It sounds so cosy and wholesome, doesn’t it? Finished; like
adding the final touches to a new garment, plumping sofa cushions and
tweaking the curtains in a newly decorated room.
Except that we’re not talking about garments or rooms. We’re talking about
the premeditated, violent, gory and unnecessary killing in cold
blood of defenceless young creatures, mere infants in most cases. The focus
is on maximising the profit that can be made from the selling of their
corpses and body parts once their warm throats have been hacked open and
once everything that they have has been wrenched from them in terror and
agony.
The ‘finishing period’ is when members of such species as sheep, cattle and
pigs whose bodies are destined to be eaten by humans, are fed an
energy-dense diet so that they will grow rapidly, adding muscle/flesh to
their frame and optimising fat cover in preparation for their slaughter.
‘Finishing’ relates to a period of several days or weeks immediately prior
to the slaughterhouse ordeal that we inflict on all our land-based victims,
and it’s done for the purpose of getting a ‘good conformation of carcass and
a favourable price’ to quote the industry’s own words. As always, follow the
money. It’s a business. ‘Farming’ defenceless creatures is a million miles
away from being the ‘labour of love that we’re indoctrinated to think it is.
Once we realise that our victims are sentient like ourselves, with friends,
families, minds and lives that matter to them; once we accept the science
that using and consuming other individuals is unnecessary for our own
wellbeing, as well as being ecologically unsustainable, many – like me – can
scarcely believe how we’ve been taken in, funding a gore-spattered nightmare
for so long without stopping to consider the consequence of what we put in
our supermarket trolleys.
So that’s today’s new verb; to finish.
How about making the decision to finish taking part in such horror and
become vegan? It makes perfect sense.
Number of animals killed in the world by the fishing, meat, dairy and egg industries, since you opened this webpage.
0 marine animals
0 chickens
0 ducks
0 pigs
0 rabbits
0 turkeys
0 geese
0 sheep
0 goats
0 cows / calves
0 rodents
0 pigeons/other birds
0 buffaloes
0 dogs
0 cats
0 horses
0 donkeys and mules
0 camels / camelids