chickens come home to roost

Nearly two hundred years ago the poet, Percy Shelley, felt compelled to write of the cruelty inflicted on livestock:

“How unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised towards these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery”

The author of Animal Farm, George Orwell, stated:

“Men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat”.

On January 1st a new EU directive will abolish the battery hen cages when egg producers will have to provide hens with larger cages enabling them to spread their wings and move around. The old-style cages had just 550sq cm of space – less than a sheet of A4 paper.

In the UK alone over 750 million cattle, sheep, pigs, turkeys, ducks, geese and rabbits are slaughtered annually. Pollution of the environment as a result of farming intensively for profit is massive: millions of tonnes of a potent, noxious cocktail containing nitrites, antibiotics, heavy metals, pesticides and parasites are washed into UK rivers each year. Farm animals are also the second largest source of the greenhouse gas methane. BSE and its human-variant CJD are just two of the diseases attributable to the production of animals as food items produced for sale with a view to profit.

However, those who advocate animal rather than human liberation put the cart before the horse. Socialists consider that a human’s first loyalty should be their own species. Nevertheless, the degree to which human society is ‘civilised’ can reasonably be gauged by its treatment of animals and the natural world as well as by its treatment of humans, and socialism, in its abolition of all aspects of the appalling savagery of capitalism, will undoubtedly do its part to abolish all unnecessary suffering by non-human sentient creatures.