Do you get upset at the idea of ‘Gated Communities’? – Fenced and guarded residential areas where rich and fearful people live.
Don't you yourself live in one? One much larger.
A backyard where the wind doesn not blow, the rain does not fall, where it is warm and the entertainment flows. Richness streaming from the periphery to a shielded centre.
One late evening, on a bike home from work two miles on a gravel road in darkness along log piles and dark firs. It was raining and windy. I suddenly understood why in the old days it was not so obvious with close contacts between the parishes. Travel on an open carriage with a harnessed horse, many miles away from home and safety. No mobile. Big forests, unknown dangers, robbers, strangers ... you never know ... rain, wind, cold. At least it was far from today's comfortable vehicles.
Hasn't the idea of civilization been to design a comfortable space under human control where disturbances from nature are minimized? But what if you understood the full consequences of that idea? The consequences you see today.
Mental shielding – a persistent denial of unpleasant facts – is part of the existential core of the rich, industrialized world. There is so much violence and dark history to bury, so much abuse still going on, so many excuses. Mental shielding it is a prerequisite for our industrial civilization as it is.
In the car, I sit in a climate that I can control. There are buttons for light and entertainment. A slight pressure on the gas multiplies my ability to bodily movement. My body, fellow travellers plus several hundred kilos of sheet metal and plastic—plus everything needed to make it work.
With radio and mobile I can tailor the sound environment, I can dim the lights, regulate the ventilation, keep rain away fr. Outside there is the road, rain, darkness and oncoming traffic. The landscap becomes a backdrop, as present and real as a poster in an outhouse.
Cycling made home and work in some strange way form a context—I landed in the same air I started in.
By car, the trip became more like a parenthesis—start and finish divided as two separate realities, with an insulating distance between them.
Fossil energy made industrialism possible and thus man's ability to fill the oceans with plastic, cause storms, floods and forest fires, to melt glaciers, create droughts and other extreme phenomena.
Millions of years ago, plants created an atmosphere suited for today's living life. They converted atmospheric carbon dioxide into reservoirs of oil and coal. What is the name for a thinking that burns us back to the past again?
Then there are those who think the Climate Movement wants us backwards!
Dissatisfaction is a fundamental force in the industrialized world. Everything is based on dissatisfaction, a constant longing for more and better—at any price.
Dissatisfaction creates compliant people, and is a weapon that can be aimed at chosen social groups. Dissatisfaction makes it easy to create scapegoats who are the root of threats and misery.
The world is on fire and politicians hope that growth will create space for technological innovations that will solve the world crisis without a change in the life for the people of the rich world. Small adjustments possibly, just to show good will. Like changing coal for hydrogen, oil for electricity and the like, but not the real changeover that is needed for survival.
For those who have to walk several kilometres for a can of water, a spring nearby means a lift in life. For those who have a spring nearby, a well in the yard means relief. For those who have a well in the yard, a faucet in the kitchen is convenience. For those who have a tap in the kitchen, a water heater is a matter of course. Anyone who only needs to turn a faucet to get hot water has lost touch with reality. Maybe sitting in a room with the curtains drawn, fearing losing everything.
Earth Overshoot Day moves backwards year by year. In 2023, the year's reasonable and sustainable resources for Sweden ended on April 3, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 2, the rest of the year we consume at the expense of our children's future. There can't be many surviving organisms in the history of earth that prosper by harming its offspring.
In s Swedish city it happened recently that a father swan was killed because he protected his family. People wanted to paddle their canoes in peace.1 The father swan died because he protected his wife and young. Why didn't they just let them be? Why does discontent so often win?
In Norway, the walrus Freya2 was killed for hanging around sunbathing on boats and docks. Curious people couldn't stay away. Some thought that Freya could harm people, so Freya was killed.
Still decent people exist: Money was collected for a statue of Freya. It got the name ’For our sins’.
The gorilla Harambe3 was shot because he wanted to save a little boy from screaming people. The boy had fallen into Harambe's watery grave. The spectators chattered and shouted and created a very unpleasant atmosphere. Had there been peace and quiet, Harambe, like other gorillas in similar situations, would have left the boy to whoever came to get him.
The danger and violence came from the people. Why do those who are scared and loud so often win?
What mental grafts have created such a distance from other living beings? Descartes ghosting? Skinner? Materialism? Greed? Stupidity? Fear? Bad conscience? The technical system?
Some believe that big issues cannot be solved by individual responsibility; major social problems must be solved politically. Certainly a point there, but what happens if one refrains from taking responsibility for actions in everyday life, the part of life that one can actually influence.
All is doing the best they can, but how many are prepared to face knowledge of the fates contained in a lunch box? You can have heard about, have seen on TV, but to realize reality? As an insight, a tangible reality, as for those who are now minced meat, cod fillets, French fries, hamburgers, hot dogs, black pudding, liver pate, caviar, herring.
What will uncomfortable messages do to an otherwise comfortable and functioning everyday life? What changes in everyday life will new insights and thoughts demand from you? Is the fear of what they might disturb a reason to shut down? Don't see, don't hear.
Cognitive dissonance, carrying within oneself opposites or acting against better knowing, is an unpleasant condition, but there are strategies that alleviate the discomfort: denial, excuses, intellectual constructs, scapegoats and the like.
The prerequisite for there to be meat, fish, eggs and dairy products in today's quantity and low prices is violence, boredom and anxiety. Confiscated lives.
Forget the commercials' rural idylls with pecking hens and rooting pigs, grazing cows with a suckling calf. Modern animal husbandry is an industrialized business that has no place for tenderness, closeness or anything that could endanger the results in the accounting.
Industrial animal husbandry devastates rainforests and poisons oceans. Why? Eating animals are no longer a prerequisite for survival for people of industrial society. We don't have to kill animals. On the contrary, abstaioning would benefit both the climate and food supply.
Bessie, Dottie and Nellie on green pasture have become staple food. A cow can live fifteen, twenty years, but is usually killed after five when you can get greater profitability by switching to a new one.
Hens, which could stand with their heads in the flowerbed and bounce in the gravel, are confined in cages with mesh floors, or are called free-range and crowded onto strewn concrete.
The trauma starts in a plastic tray in a hatchery crowded with others who also cannot find their mother. From the plastic tray they are huddled over to a conveyor belt for review and sorting. If it applies to laying hens, rooster chicks are sorted out and killed, by gas or by something that looks like a large parsley grinder. They have the same status as bull calves on dairy farms, as by-products.
On the conveyor belt, the chickens flow like a yellow, woolly river. Hands dig and throw them like freshly picked cotton. From the conveyor belt over to a new plastic tray. Some fall on their backs, but bounce back up. This is the way they are welcomed into the world in the closed premises of industrial animal husbandry.
On the broiler farm, they are not allowed to live longer than five to six weeks. Then they are driven by truck to the slaughterhouse, some with sprained wings and broken legs, hung upside down from the hooks on a conveyor belt and on to an electrified water bath. The idea is that the electric shock will stun them to the next station, where their throats will be slit. The stun does not affect everyone.
Chicken was considered a luxury food in the 50s. Now chicken is even included in pet food. Annually more than 50 billion chickens are slaughtered worldwide. Some sources say 70 billion but I will calculate on 50 billion. The result will be absurd enough anyway.
Imagine the road from Kiruna in the north of Sweden down to Cape Town in South Africa. A trip by car passes through Romania, Turkey, Egypt, Zimbabwe to name a few, in all 16 600 km (about 10 300 miles).
50 billion is just number, hard to imagine, but imagine along this road four chickens per meter all the way from Kiruna down to Cape Town. A lot of chickens, but not more than about 60 million. We have to add a width, not a single chicken, but 750 chickens sideways to a width of 150 meters. The density of this parade will be 20 chickens per square meter (almost two chickens per square foot).
The world's most common bird does not live a single second of its life for its own sake. Its life is dedicated to supermarkets and pet food industries and must therefore deliver “good performance and high meat setting”. Or lots of eggs. In other words, to generate black figures in the accounting and good stock return.
Industrial society can deliver such boundless nonchalance towards the lives of others. Why would Earth accept a species that treats life on Earth that way?
The hen looks at you. Who would you be if you did not see the eyes of a sentient, conscious being?
The vast majority of birds and mammals on earth are humans and human livestock. This causes that the vast majority of birds and mammals do not participate in the natural cycle, but are trapped in modern society's process of annual growth.
Earth is deprived of the vast majority of vertebrates.
Anyone who never meets living animals may still discreetly partake of their body parts, body fluids and unborn offspring in medicines, cakes and sandwich spreads, jelly rats and pancakes.
In our violence-marinated civilization, there is of course a kind of weapons industry, machines, against the animals as well. For example, it can offer automated processes that can transform a newly hatched chicken to packaged meat in a few weeks.
The ads show healthy hens and cute chicks, happy piglets and cows on green meadows.
A cheerful melody for a video showing how to kill and dismember. Dead animals have never been as cheap as they are now, but the pricing is deceptive. The costs have not decreased; it is the animals and the environment that pay the major part—the animals with their suffering, the environment with its impoverishment. In the end, we all end up with a giant bill that we will never be able to pay.
The rooms are closed, the doors locked, the curtains drawn. Who needs to accuse themselves of knowing? Like the death camps during the Holocaust. Everything can be justified. Thinking can formulate arguments for anything.
Can a civilization with so much death escape from being affected? In Sweden alone, approximately two and a half million pigs are slaughtered every year.
They are stunned in a gas chamber with corrosive carbon dioxide, then stabbed and drained of blood. At Scan in Kristianstad, roughly seven hundred thousand pigs are slaughtered annually. One pig every ten seconds. It is an extermination camp of a modern and sustainable kind. Outside, new victims await in a never-ending stream. Bespoke, purpose-built production units.
They grow up without parents, in anxiety, frustration and confusion, in an environment of thermostats, conveyor belts, plastic trays, grates, steel pipes and concrete. They are deprived of everything that gives life content. This is their life until one day gas, electricity or sharp knives cut them open and package them for further transport straight into the oral cavity of the individual human.
Many people probably sense this wrongdoing and gratefully accept whatever will dull their conscience. That is why the advertising about happy cows and happy pigs works.
Official Sweden talks about the world's strictest animal welfare laws, but in practice they are put out of action by the Swedish Agricultural Agency (Jordbruksverket) in its dual role, partly as guarantor of the agricultural sector's economic development and partly as guardian of the animal welfare law. The legislation speaks of care; reality shows where the priorities are made. It is not unique to Sweden.
The biological mass of Earth's humans together with the mammals that are kept to be exploited and killed make up 96% of Earth's mammals. The mass of turkeys, hens, chickens and other birds in captivity is estimated to three times greater than all the world's free birds combined.
Felicia's debate article stirred up bad blood. Jordbruksverket (the Swedish Agency for Agriculture) replied, “this subject deserves great objectivity and less drama. /.../ In Sweden, like other countries, we have food production, which means that we raise animals to be food. We also use animals for other purposes such as research, public display or companionship and hobby. You may have different opinions about this, but it is allowed and has been decided by the Swedish Parliament in the Swedish Animal Welfare Act. The Swedish Parliament has also decided in its Food Strategy that the Swedish production of animal food should increase and one of the reasons is that we in Sweden can handle this very well from both animal welfare and an environmental point of view.”7
So callous and cold. The banality of evil?
The Swedish Agency for Agriculture has given the go-ahead for minks to be confined in wire cages, despite the Animal Welfare Act, which clearly states that animals must be kept so that they have the opportunity to perform such behaviours for which they are strongly motivated.
Only if you realize that money comes way before life and rights, is it possible to explain why animal welfare is handled by an authority with main interest in “competitive, resource-efficient and increasing food production” undertakes the protection of animals.
More and more larger fashion houses have stopped using fur from fur animals8. There are countries that have placed such high demands on fur animal breeding that it has become unprofitable and the fur industry died by itself.9 That means hope for the future.
However aware you try to be there are probably times when you are not on your guard: The atmosphere is festive and life affirming. Children, circus, amusement park, holiday, zoo–just be, without a demand to take a stand and be aware all the time. Innocent holiday memories from the bleachers, watching the incredible skills of the killer whales. The animals seemed to enjoy, didn't they?
Such humiliating event! Wild animals kidnapped to live the rest of their lives as circus animals in a small tiled pool, far from family and relatives.
With fast-moving boats, airplanes and fishing lines, the massive hunting party managed to squeeze mothers and children into a bay. Broken and grieving families had to experience helplessly how the fishing boats sailed away with their prey. In the hunters' world there was no place for the sadness and deep trauma they created.10
Tilikum11 who appeared at the end of this clip, died in 2017, aged 35. He was two when he was abducted, and had thus lived 33 years in a small pool, without plants and other creatures. He who had the oceans as his living space was destined to live the rest of his life as a cowed fool. What kind of evil is that?
The people at the zoos say that you can't train animals that don't think it is fun, but there is another alternative: It is no wonder that the animals can be trained; it is the only stimulation they get in a small pool with concrete walls in clear water where algae must not form.
Awareness of the animals' vulnerable position is growing. As a result of public reactions and the work of animal rights organizations, more and more tour operators refrain from including visits to dolphinariums and similar parks in their programs.
There are many traps: elephant riding, donkey rides on Santorini, zoos with caged animals, animals that you can pet for a fee. A major problem is the trade in endangered animals, which has a turnover on the same scale as drug trade.12
There are some interesting comments to this clip. Two are particularly interesting because they show two basic human perspectives, right and left brain if you will:
– “That was the cutest thing I have ever seen! She was soooo intelligent !”
– “For those who don't know, the man is actually giving the orantgutan orders/signals from his right hands and snaps his fingers to tell him to stop.”
Right and left brain, an emotional and a thought-based perspective, no one seeing the orangutan, the vulnerable animal. A third comment is brighter:
– “Keegan now lives at ‘Center for Great Apes’, a sanctuary in Florida, with her brother Archie, her friend Sunshine, and her niece Cahaya. She never has to perform for people ever again! She has her choice of indoor & outdoor enclosures and 1 1/2 miles of an elevated shoot system.”
Märta and Linnea
Photo: Hundar utan hem