In this blog post, we will look at the rights and dignity of animals that are ignored in the midst of human selfishness and privilege, and how we should treat them.
Episode 1
In a small, cold room, the mother warmed up. But as if she had been waiting for this moment, the mother was unable to resist the crowd that came in and was robbed of her baby. Left alone in the cold room, the mother continued to live, taking solace in the occasional cries of her child from the next room. Then one day, the mother noticed that the cries of her child were different from usual. It was more like a scream of pain than a cry. The mother instinctively realized that they were going to do to her child what they had done to her, and she broke down the iron door and ran. But the chain that was holding the baby did not break easily, and even at that moment, the young child was writhing in pain, with a hole in its stomach and body fluids oozing out. The mother had no choice. Believing that it would be easier to die by suffocation, she strangled her child and then took her own life by hitting her head on the wall.
Episode 2
I was born in a crowded farmhouse. There were many other families around my family, so my birth in the cramped space seemed to be not very welcome to them. Then one day, a friend who looked different from me gave birth to eight babies. I watched for a long time because it was cute to see them wandering around in search of their mother’s milk without even opening their eyes, but then something terrible happened. The man, who often brought us food, grabbed the babies’ legs and repeatedly slammed them on the floor. As blood flowed from their noses and mouths, he carried the limp babies in a bucket and headed somewhere. That night, I couldn’t sleep. As time passed and I grew to be as big as my mother, I had to move to another place. As I was riding on the conveyor belt, I was hung upside down when a cliff appeared. I cried out for them to let me down, but no one heard me. Before I knew it, I saw a huge blade in front of my eyes. I struggled to survive, but my legs were cut off. My whole body was slashed by the blade, and I died like that.
Animals, too, need the right to die with dignity!
The lives in these two stories are not the tragedies in the movie. They are a cross-section of reality that is constantly happening even at this very moment. If the protagonists of these stories are all animals and we are the biggest beneficiaries of this tragedy, what should we as humans think about?
The first story is about the suicide of a moon bear that occurred in September 2011 at a farm in China. The world media was amazed by the mother bear’s maternal love and was shocked once again by the fact that bears also commit suicide. Currently, only two countries, South Korea and China, keep bears in captivity. Captive bears are killed before they reach the age of 10 to collect 19 grams of bear gall, and are forced to have their bile collected through a hose throughout their lives. In South Korea, the Asiatic black bear is thought to have gone extinct naturally, but the fact that about 1,400 of them are still being bred on farms is a bitter reality. The second story is about the slaughter process in a large-scale livestock complex in the United States. Newborn pigs are easily killed by hitting them on the ground to make their meat tender, and whole cows are ground up in a grinder. There is no end to the painful screams, but those who seek the highest efficiency have no intention of changing the way they slaughter. And this product is the top-selling worldwide by a ridiculous clown. It’s from McDonald’s. At this point, we sadly cannot escape the category of perpetrators.
Humans cannot live for even a single moment without nature, but we are not afraid of nature at all. For the sake of human survival, the existence of nature has been reduced to a tool, and this bizarre sense of privilege is just embarrassing. What good is animal protection or the preservation of the natural ecosystem? They didn’t give us food or shelter. We had to move forward as a society that prioritized utility over value based solely on pragmatism. In this context, bears were imported in large quantities in the early 1980s to increase farm income, and fast food restaurants sprung up like mushrooms to supply humans with fuel more quickly. Has it given them the time to look back? Public opinion has begun to rise in regret and remorse, and civil society groups have begun to advocate for animal rights. But what has changed in the decades since? McDonald’s is still the world’s number one fast food company, and the pace of destruction of nature has accelerated due to advanced science and technology. Humans are gifted with intellectual abilities, but their coexistence is no different from that of a newborn child, who only cares about himself.
In 1988, before the Seoul Olympics, an actress who belonged to a French animal protection group made a scathing criticism of the dog meat culture in South Korea. “We must never eat our highly intelligent human friends in a barbaric manner!” Let’s leave aside the conventional wisdom of cultural relativism and the threats of powerful nations, and think about how contradictory her argument is. All animals on Earth do not eat their own kind for no particular reason. However, it has been the rule since time immemorial to prey on species at the lower levels of the food chain according to the logic of the survival of the fittest. The behavior of animal groups that arbitrarily distinguish between what is edible and what is not edible on the basis of the intelligence of their prey is another form of violence and nothing more than biased sophistry. Does this mean that a goose with low intelligence will not feel pain even if it has a funnel stuck on its neck and only eats oil for the rest of its life? Acting only in favor of what one likes is ultimately only for oneself. In this way, the claims of ecologists who ignore the laws of the ecosystem and protect animals at the expense of others are not truly correct.
Let’s cool off for a moment and think about it. Humans need to eat meat nutritionally, and as long as we don’t eat our own kind, it can all be justified. But is it really necessary to drink the raw juice of animals that has not been scientifically verified at all? Is it really important to eat food made from whole ground up animals quickly? Not only is it not good for the body, but it is not a worthwhile enough thing to drive life into suffering. Nevertheless, we have been riding the tide or, at times, acquiescing in silence.
We turned a blind eye to the obvious absurdity, and now we see that their suffering has come back to us in the form of a boomerang. Various studies show that eating a lot of meat can lead to various adult diseases. However, this premise is missing an important word: “breeding.” Meat from animals that have been free-range is not harmful to the human body even if you eat it three times a day. This is because even if it is the same breed, the fat composition of free-range meat and farmed meat is nearly three times different. It is as if we have turned tonics into poisons in order to eat more and live better. I wish we would have stopped at this point, but we seem to have been too stingy to even pay for the feed that goes into raising animals in groups. Once it became possible to mass-produce corn by manipulating its genes, animal feed was inevitably switched to corn, and they had to eat corn nonstop in a small space. As the cost of feed fell, more food could be given, and the size and number of individuals increased accordingly. As people’s meat consumption increased significantly, the amount of corn accumulated in our bodies also increased. Corn has an abnormal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids of 66:1, compared to the normal range of 4:1 in the body. As corn accumulates, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in our bodies naturally becomes more and more unbalanced. In fact, when we examine modern people, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in those who eat a lot of meat is over 100:1. This is a big problem because too much omega-6 in the body causes various diseases by increasing fat cells and causing an inflammatory response. The entire animal is ground into a patty, which includes parts that should not be eaten, making it unsuitable for human consumption. If the lives of the animals we eat are not happy, then our bodies will also be unhappy.
What do we gain by treating living beings in such a sadistic way, making them scream in pain? It is sad that the solution, which should be common sense, is still a future that we have yet to reach. Let them live their lives as living beings and die with dignity. We have no right to take their lives so cruelly.
