The Images and Truths We Cannot Hide From

Julie, rescued resident of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Photo credit: WFAS.

Any punk or ska fans out there? This music video from John Feldmann of Goldfinger, with a personal, informal, unedited introduction (~1 min.) from lead singer Feldmann, features the song "Free Me," which Feldmann wrote after encountering a truck of chickens headed for slaughter while on tour.

The music video, after you get through the introduction, includes brief but very real glimpses into the experiences of animals in the various situations in which we exploit and, yes, even torture them. The "spent" dairy cow and veal calf at the livestock auction; the fox at the fur farm; the thrashing hooked fish; the monkeys, dogs, and cats in the lab; the elephant at the circus; the pigs and turkeys at the farms; the crated veal calf; the egg-laying hens and chickens raised for flesh; the tied-up dog outside; the chickens, pigs and cows at the slaughterhouse. If you still participate in or support any of the represented industries or practices through your diet, lifestyle, purchases, or donations, you must watch videos such as this. Refusing to watch when, through the decisions you make every day, you're supporting and even demanding the practices shown, is--and I'm sorry, but it's true--cowardly and irresponsible. Once upon a time, I didn't want to know either; I get that. I get that it takes courage to face the truths that it would be easier to ignore. But please find that courage. Please watch.

And if after watching this, you seek comfort in, for example, the fact that you are eating or now will eat animals from so-called humane farms and not animals such as the hens you saw in the battery cages, please pause and remember the slaughterhouse scenes. Please pause and remember the calf (byproduct of the dairy industry) at the livestock auction. Please pause and remember how clearly the animals shown wanted to live. None of this is different for the "free-range" animals. There is such a thing as compassionate living. But there is not such a thing as humane animal research or humane animal entertainment. And there is most certainly no such thing as humane animal agriculture or humane killing.

The vast majority of us have choices about what we eat, and we make a conscious decision every time we sit down to a meal--do we choose compassion, or do we decide that our simply liking something is worth the massive number of deaths and myriad unavoidable forms of suffering required for us to continue eating in the ways we think of as convenient?