HEARD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
I heard gratitude and praise for teachers who demanded quality work. “But it was years later we appreciated this,” one young woman commented……”About all we gave credit for at the time was being recognized as people instead of mass robots.”
This quote is from the aforementioned “From the Orange Mailbox” by A Carman Clark. These were students of the 70’s speaking of chafing ,at the time, at hard work, but even then, appreciating that they were being seen as individuals with unique talents and ideas to share.
Industry would prefer them to be mass robots.
When I read and write about CAFO’s I often wonder how I can get through to folks about the evils of treating animals as cogs in a machine when we as people are pressed more and more into little boxes and expected to perform as machines. Henry Ford be damned, the assembly line has certain advantages and benefits to production, but when pushed to today’s extremes it is simply a meat grinder chewing people into psychosis.
Livestock forced to exist in confinement on unnatural surfaces develop foot, joint, skin and mental disorders that I believe can be seen also in human society. To the mind of the corporations we are simply consumer machines. Our duty is to buy and use and dispose. Our jobs are actually becoming less skilled, in that we are expected to not make judgements but to follow a proscribed script and not vary from it. Corporations have no qualms admitting that the less people they have to use, the better.
The same goes for corporate farming. More livestock, fewer operators.
Confine animals, feed them all the same, fill them with antibiotics so they hopefully won’t get sick and die, push them out the other end. I have been reading that livestock veterinarians are being told that “the animal is not worth the cost of doctoring”. One vet offered to treat an animal for free. They could not afford the “time” for an employee to help. This sow with a broken leg was expected to live that way until she gave birth. Then they would knock her in the head and foster her piglets off.
Farm hands forced to treat animals inhumanely, managers forced to treat employees inhumanely, big shots too closed off in their glass offices staring at bottom line figures. All this time spent being treated, and treating others as worthless, replaceable bits of machinery, turns us into little Hannibal Lechters.
In a dog eat dog world, we develop a taste for dog meat.
