January/February
2004
Imagining:
An Exercise in Interconnectedness
By Carol Moon
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I used to be an animal rights activist. I’ve stood
on street corners in the freezing cold handing out leaflets. I’ve
written, called, faxed, emailed and lobbied my representatives about
animal issues. I’ve gone to jail to stop the sale of fur coats.
I’ve annoyed my friends endlessly and depressed myself into near-catatonia
as the sheer enormity of animal suffering in the world sunk in. But
recently I realized that it wasn’t enough. I came to feel that
no matter how many gains I made for the animals, it would be like putting
a band-aid on a compound fracture if I didn’t also work to protect
the animals’ environment, improve the human conditions that led
to the animals’ exploitation, and explode the media myths that
led to people’s unwillingness to give any consideration to animals’
unnecessary suffering.
For the last several years, I have been plodding along like a stubborn
tortoise toward the prize of a Masters of Education with an emphasis
in humane education. This amazing program, designed by the International
Institute of Humane Education, has forced me to learn more about the
true state of the world today than I ever thought I wanted to know.
That knowledge has affected me so deeply that, while I still consider
myself an animal rights activist, now I feel like I am so much more—environmentalist,
feminist, pacifist, conservationist and humanitarian.
I got this way by doing a lot of reading, by learning how to examine
the culture around me more closely, and finally, by imagining. I have
always had a special affinity for animals, brought on, most likely,
by my tendency to become the trapped fox, the starving dog or the frightened
kitten in my imagination. Once I learned the way modern agri-business
raises and slaughters animals as if they are heads of lettuce, not breathing,
feeling beings, it became impossible not to imagine their loneliness,
boredom, frustration, and terror at the end. As soon as my eyes were
sufficiently opened to their suffering, I stopped eating them and eventually
decided not to support the exploitation of their reproductive systems—otherwise
known as the egg and dairy industries. But the thing which led me to
become an activist was imagining.
Try it yourself. Imagine you’re a female pig (a sow)—pregnant
for the tenth or twelfth time, but never having suckled a piglet for
more than two weeks—standing in a bare metal crate so narrow you
can’t turn around. Your legs hurt and you have sores on your hindquarters
that you can’t reach. You stood here yesterday and the day before
and the year before and for what seems like forever. You’re slowly
going mad.
Now imagine your piglets are born, briefly nursed, and gone. You find
yourself forced out of the crate and jammed in a truck with so many
other pigs that you still can hardly move. The noise is deafening, the
stench is powerful, and the contagious fear causes the pigs to bite
and trample one another. One of your legs no longer works. And then
imagine the final indignity—being herded, beaten up the ramp toward
what you know smells like death, looking frantically around for a way
to escape, struggling to turn back, but being forced on amid the screams
of other pigs.
And then the kill floor. I can’t take you there because my mind
shuts down at this point. I hope the same thing happens for the pig.
But don’t drop your visualization yet. Shift your imagery to the
man standing on the kill floor. Now you’re a short, muscular Hispanic
man, covered in pig’s blood and holding a knife in your hand.
Every few seconds a live pig, shackled to an overhead conveyor belt,
swings toward you, presumably stunned, but not infrequently, conscious.
Your job is to stick the knife in the carotid artery to bleed him out.
Your arm aches and your fingers are nearly numb from five straight hours
of this repetitive motion. One well placed kick of a frantic hog could
land the knife in your own throat or knock you into the clogged-up blood
pit below. You’re working for $6 an hour with no pension, no benefits...and
no visa. So the only thing you can do to support your family is to—literally—stick
with it.
Your mental imagery can explore dozens of different routes from here.
Imagine living down the road from the hog facility and breathing the
horrible stench day after day, not knowing what it may be doing to your
health, but unable to buy your way out of the area because of racially
motivated housing discrimination. Or imagine being a fish in the algae-choked,
nitrogen-heavy waters nearby or the child who gets sick from the contaminated
groundwater. Try being a bird or a tiny mole poisoned by the heavy loads
of pesticides dropped on the fields which grew the grain for the pigs
to eat. Expand your consciousness to become the earth’s atmosphere,
quickly being changed as you absorb the noxious gases expelled from
this factory among many others, and changing the Earth’s climate
in response. And finally, imagine being a starving woman in a country
where the rain has stopped and the land will no longer produce.
In a country like the U.S., which professes to care so much about human
rights, how odd that our government has not completely recognized having
a clean, safe environment as a basic human right. But what are basic
human rights? Is the right to breathe clean air among them? How about
the right to a cooling drink of fresh water? Or the right to plant a
seed and trust that it will produce an untainted, healthful plant? We
recognize the right to human freedom, yet we support industries which
enslave their workers. We profess to value biodiversity and to “love”
some animals, yet we abuse and exploit them in innumerable ways, endangering
our own health and degrading our environment in the process.
What it all comes down to, I believe, is money. As long as the value
of trees, mountains, other species, other humans, air, water, and every
element that makes up our lives is only monetary, we will spend them
with abandon until they are all used up. The real, concrete world does
not work on credit. Once something is gone, it’s gone. But the
real, concrete world could run smoothly for those who have the wisdom
to see the inherent value in and interconnectedness of all things.
There is much to be done. If we are to end cruelty,
exploitation, and degradation in the world, we must avidly seek out
the connections and “work from all angles.” We must all
be activists, each focusing on the areas that touch our hearts, but
never forgetting the vital connections. I propose that we all become
holistic, humane activists, working toward a more peaceful, sustainable,
and compassionate world for all. Imagine what that could mean.
Carol Moon is Humane Educator at Farm Sanctuary (www.farmsanctuary.org;
607-583-2225).
