From the age of six to fourteen, I received a thorough conditioning as to the nature of God — a Jewish god, who was jealous, formidable, demanding, capricious and omnipotent. All these years later, having long since given up on organised religion, I still find myself -when cornered and in need of rescue — submitting to this God of my childhood.
I was taught, as a child, to be precocious in the affairs of religion; I led the congregation for part of the Saturday service from the age of 12, and shone in Hebrew lessons in a way I never managed at secular school. Then came the rebellion — against the God of my prayer books, and against the authoritarian, loveless institution in which I was raised with some 200 other children. I gave up all attendance at synagogue after, as a teenager, I heard some members of the congregation exchanging horse race betting odds in the back pews - what was the point of it all, I wondered.
But I didn’t give up the search for material and spiritual meaning. The search took me through longhaired hippiness in California, through a study of texts by great ideologues such as Mao, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Adam Smith and even Gaddafi and his little Green Book. I read the lives of Hitler, Orwell and the Prophet Mohammed. I pondered the mystic teachings of the Kabbalah and, at some point, moved through UFOs, leylines, the New Testament and pyramidology. After working as a rock journalist and critic, I did several years of serious writing for national newspapers and magazines about such things as race, poverty, homelessness, the amorality of drug companies and the catastrophic failures of the prevailing model of what constitutes a sound health policy and productive medical research.
These themes were important to me then and remain so. I alighted upon animal rights from a couple of directions — one was through my interest in the then burgeoning Green movement in Germany; this was 1979. And the other was through coming to understand the depths to which the pharmaceutical industry will stoop in order to turn an indecent profit; and the way that industry uses millions of animals every year in Sof 62 November 2003 laboratory experiments that are morally repugnant and scientifically nonsensical.
All at once it struck me that here was a group — non-human animals — that was essentially defenceless against the rampant appetites of our own species. We mass produce and kill them and eat their dead bodies. We torment and cut them up in research labs. We chase and destroy them for sport. We make them perform tricks and exhibit them in cages and glass cases. These activities are not just permitted, they are rewarded. Or else, we avert our gaze and pretend, either that these things are not happening, or that it matters little because the animal victims are soulless and incapable of suffering, or that the benefits (to us) outweigh the pain.
This is denial of pathological dimensions. It is evidence of a cultural sickness, a sickness of the soul.
I came to understand that, as human beings, we could never be healthy until we cured this sickness. As Tolstoy declared: ‘For as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.’ Now, let there be no misunderstanding about my position! I do not minimise human suffering as a consequence of my animal advocacy. I am not remotely content with the knowledge that street children in Rio are shot dead, with government complicity, because they interfere with the tourist trade; or that a multinational pharmaceutical company arranged for a number of children to stand in a field in Egypt and be sprayed with an experimental pesticide so that it could collect toxicity data. Yet, the notion of rights for human beings does at least exist, thanks to centuries of struggle by oppressed groups.
In law, animals are property, things. There are certain rules about how we may exploit, kill and consume them.
But protection for animals stops at the point where we, as the exploiting species, are seriously inconvenienced or deprived of profit or pleasure. As I have indicated, my own view is that this situation signals a severe deformity of the soul, or whatever else one might want to call it. It follows, therefore, that the route to good health is to reconfigure our dealings with animals. That means, first acknowledging what we do to them, and then changing course.
The modern animal rights movement is concerned with precisely this project. It seeks to demonstrate that, just as commercial, cultural and intellectual life thrived in Britain after we gave up trading in human beings from Africa, so there is a positive future without exploiting animals. The demonstration of this fact is not merely a doctrinal matter — a case of proselytising a set of beliefs. Animal rights as a doctrine translates with remarkable precision into a code of living. That code is embodied in one word: veganism.
University who undertook killing experiments, as well as a reading of scientific papers on the subject.
No doubt the introduction of ‘stunning’ was an attempt to remove some of the horror from the killing business. But whether the frayed sensibilities of the meat-eating public was the prime concern or if it was the suffering of the animals themselves, is difficult to judge. Equally, the introduction of halal and shechita slaughter — both of which call for a sharp knife and a clean cut — were also billed as Being a vegan means nS improvements on the old even embracing ways of eating, of 1| clothing ourselves and engaging in commerce and culture without resorting to killing, consuming or, in other ways, exploiting animals.
This credo, by extension, applies to our relationship with our fellow human beings. Certainly, : dilemmas and ambiguities present | themselves. Nothing is perfectly a clear-cut because the world and all who inhabit it are less than perfect. But a vegan way of living offers a relatively muddle-free way of pursuing a compassionate, generous way of living.
By contrast, when I observe the way Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are acted out, I see much muddle and fog. Do unto others...all men are brothers...a rich man cannot pass through the eye of a needle...love thy neighbour...thou shalt not kill... And yet how badly this translates into daily living for, dare I say it, the great majority who profess to adhere to these creeds. While it is, more often than not, people of religion who operate soup runs for the homeless and do other selfless, loving deeds, religious observance for the majority amounts to a recitation of a set of prescribed incantations.
This discontinuity is clearly evident in the approach by Jews, Christians and Muslims to the slaughter of farmed animals. While the shechita and halal methods are routinely under the cosh for being unspeakably primitive, the so called ‘humane’ - in effect, Christian — method of slaughter, is also repugnant. I have myself visited six ‘humane’ slaughterhouses and seen, for instance, pigs shackled upside down by one leg, their throats slashed and gushing blood. I’ve seen them slip from their shackles and crash head first on to the stone floor, thrashing desperately and with blood pouring from their throat wounds. This is humane’ slaughter. At one slaughterhouse I saw a man with a stick mindlessly beat every animal he unloaded from a transporter. At another, I saw a crippled pig kneed and kicked along an aisle to the place where she was subjected to electrical stunning.
The great conceit of ‘humane’ slaughter is that stunning renders animals immediately ‘insensible’ so that they feel nothing when the knife is drawn across their necks. I am not remotely convinced that the captive bolt (used on cattle) or the electrical 'stun' is effective. The bolt often fails to hit the target square-on. And sending a massive electric shock through an animal's head seems merely to cause another level of trauma that momentarily freezes them physically. Gassing produces its own intractable problems. I base my views on what I have personally seen, on conversations I’ve had with a scientist at Bristol i more nightmarish methods.
I don’t know which of the ‘new improved’ methods is worse — ‘humane’ or religious. But I do know that both are grotesquely cruel and unjustified. We do not need to eat meat. We are better off without it. Nor can I stomach hearing protagonists of religious slaughter claiming their method is swift and painless. The evidence shows that animals can take minutes to die, are often cut about the neck numerous times rather than the prescribed one clean cut; and young calves can actually choke to death on their own blood. In short, while shechita, halal and ‘humane’ slaughter are improvements on earlier methods, these systems of licensed killing have become ossified and ritualised. Worse — their adherents believe that no fundamental ethical problems remain.
This brings us back to the self-harm caused by such denial. And it returns us to my advocacy of animal rights / veganism as a doctrine with both secular and spiritual underpinnings. It is a mature, logical yet revolutionary doctrine that answers my spiritual needs. Am I seif-satisfied?
I hope not. Certainly, I recognise that we all fail and mess up. We all do harm to others — myself included. But, after a lifetime of searching, I have found a code of living that shows me the way to do the least harm possible.
ANDREW TYLER is the DIRECTOR of ANIMAL AID andrew@animalaid.co.uk www.animalaid.org.uk At present the law exempts animals killed to provide Jewish shechita and Moslem halal meat from the requirement to be stunned. However, a recent report by the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) (a governmentappointed advisory body that is funded and supported by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)), entitled Report on the Welfare of Farmed Animals at Slaughter or Killing (DEFRA 2003), dismissed claims that the use of a very sharp knife in the hands of a skilled operator means that halal and shechita killing is humane. They wrote:
When a very large transverse incision is made across the neck a number of vital tissues are transected ... We are persuaded that such a massive injury would result in very significant pain and distress in the period before insensibility supervenes. (Para 195) They concluded:
Council considers that slaughter without stunning is unacceptable and that the Government should repeal the current exemption. (Para 201).