Doing the Dirty Work
It is not only animals who suffer in factory farms and slaughter houses. The people who must do the awful work of confining, mutilating, and killing farmed animals also suffer, as do their families. When we buy or order animal foods we directly instigate human violence, though it may be shielded from our physical view. The mind-bending and heart-hardening actions that these brothers and sisters must do so that we can satisfy our desire for animal foods are excruciating to contemplate. With our dollars we communicate our desires to a vast and impersonal system that will fulfill those desires as cheaply as possible. This means high-speed production and a perverse philosophy of mechanization toward the animals who are imprisoned, “harvested,” and disassembled. They are no longer sentient creatures but are categorized with fruits, machines, and other nonsentient things as unfeeling commodities.
What is the effect of all this upon the health and sensibilities of these workers? And upon their wives, husbands, and children? Violence, cruelty, and insensitivity breed more of the same; they are vibrations that affect consciousness, and it is not just the workers, but their families, friends, and ultimately all of us who are affected by what we force them to do by our market demand.
We should never imagine that animals go peacefully to their deaths. They know what is coming, and can smell, hear, and often even see others being killed before them. They are filled with terror, and very often with intense and overwhelming pain as they are boiled, skinned, or dismembered while still conscious.
The workers and management at these operations, who have always known—that animal suffering is vast, intense, and systematically ignored for the benefit of profits and efficiency.
The vast majority of us who eat animal foods have never lifted the curtain and taken a good, deep look at the horrendous brutality that animals must endure for our tables, nor do we wish to do so. We are rightly afraid that if we do, we won’t be able to eat our usual meals with a clear conscience, and knowing that, the industry keeps the conditions on slaughterhouses, factory farms, and fishing operations well hidden, lobbying for laws to make it a crime for anyone to take pictures or video footage of the conditions in these places. Seeing the ugly truth behind the curtain helps to rid us of the illusion that our culture is based on kindness or caring.
Most people do not realize that, as discussed earlier, the animals are not actually killed before their throats are cut. Their hearts must be pumping when the large arteries in their necks are cut, so that the blood is actively pumped out of their bodies; otherwise the flesh is soggy with too much blood. Therefore, they are simply stunned, not killed, prior to being bled.
This is a terrible load for workers to bear emotionally, on top of the already grisly work they do. It’s a load not just for the workers, however. We are all responsible. (In fact, in courts of law, the one who wills the death of another and pays an assassin is more heavily accountable than the assassin.)
When we put animals in this position by purchasing their flesh, fluids and eggs, we must bear responsibility not only for their suffering but for the hardening of the human hands and hearts that inflict this suffering.
Factory farms, like slaughterhouses, are brutal places, concentration camps for animals, in which all manner of atrocities are inflicted on the defenseless inmates. The conditions in these places bring out the worst in people.
People who are not naturally sadistic may become that way, and people who have been abused as children and perversely enjoy causing pain to others may well be attracted to working in slaughterhouses and factory farms, where there is an unending flow of defenseless victims they can torture, beat, and abuse.
The Living Roots of Our Work
The herding culture into which we’ve all been born forces boys to learn to be tough and to disconnect from their natural feelings of gentleness and compassion. The work of herding that evolved between four thousand and ten thousand years ago is the work of harsh and relentless domination of powerful animals. It requires men capable of performing cruel mutilation, confinement, manipulation, and killing.
The old emergent herding cultures, which form the historic foundation and the living core of our culture today, distanced themselves from the natural world and entered into an adversarial relationship with it. These ancient cultures have so much power over us today because we engage in the same core behavior: confining animals and eating foods sourced from these animals.
Although we have perhaps made some progress in our treatment of each other over the centuries, our continuing practice of enslaving, torturing, and killing animals has always worked against our being able to make substantial progress. Though we decry the enslaving, exploiting, torturing, and killing of other people in certain circumstances, on a larger scale we still rationalize and justify it, and it remains undeniably widespread today.
The same underlying dynamic is still in place today. We universally condemn supremacism, elitism, and exclusivism for destroying peace and social justice, yet we unquestioningly and even proudly adopt precisely these attitudes when it comes to animals. The lesson is plain: when we harden ourselves to the suffering we inflict on animals in our own interest, and justify it by proclaiming our superiority or specialness, it is but a short and unavoidable step to justifying and inflicting the same kind of suffering on other humans in our own interest while likewise proclaiming our supremacy or specialness.
Work as Joy, Work as Burden
Work is fundamentally spiritual. If we look around us, to the cosmos, to our earth, and to nature and animals, we find an infinity of action unfolding continually, with every part playing its assigned and vital role. Every part, every cell, plant, animal, planet, and star, has a function to fulfill in the larger unfolding, and this is its work.
To do this work is to participate in the becoming of the infinite universe, and that this is thus both sacred and ecstatic. …The work of creation was a work of joy whose whole purpose was to bring more joy into existence. This not only gives us permission to find joy in work but charges us with a responsibility to do so. Joy is an essential source of motivation in our work.”
If we look about us in nature, we see that every being is working and fulfilling its purpose, and it is only humans who are unemployed, underemployed, overworked, or unable or unwilling to work. We are the only species to enslave other species for food, to drink milk as adults, and to view work as disagreeable and try to avoid it.
Work is transformed from killing animals for food to protecting and caring for life, we will never “reinvent” work in our culture. We will only make technological progress that gives us the means to exploit animals, nature, and each other more efficiently and cruelly, and to eat more animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products than ever in recorded history.
World peace and harmony require those of us in positions of power and affluence in the global village to stop dominating people, animals, and nature through our craving for animal foods.
Resurrecting Work
We all hear that working less is better than working more, and not working at all is best of all. The story we all learned in Genesis, of being cast out of the garden, is significant, for it was then that God punished us with enforced hard labor while we live on this earth.
We lived in harmony with animals, the earth, and each other, not killing them for food or competing with each other. Our work was our life, and it was joy, and all was “very good.” There was no work as separate activity, nor any concept of being saved, for we had not committed the original sin of seeing others as objects to be manipulated, used, and killed.
The fall from grace, innocence, freedom, and mercy began when we ate of the fruit of the illusion of dualistic separatism and stopped showing mercy to those at our mercy. The fall came when we began commodifying animals. We can resurrect our work from defiling slavery to joyous participation. The path simply requires that we give the same opportunities to the animals who are at our mercy: release them from slavery and grant them freedom to once again fully participate in the unfolding of their unique purpose and consciousness. What we would wish for ourselves we must first give to others: this is, it seems, an everlasting spiritual principle.
When we work primarily for money, we transgress against our spiritual purpose, and sell our life energy and time, which is unfathomably precious. Spiritual traditions and teachings have all emphasized that each one of us has a unique purpose and mission in this life to unfold and fulfill, and that this is our work.
Our work has to do with purifying and awakening our consciousness, contributing creatively to our community, and being the voice and hands that confer blessings on others. As we discover our calling, and live it as fully as we can, we discover joy and meaning, and our life becomes precious and filled with blessings. Evolving and growing as individuals, we can authentically contribute to the evolution of our species, and there is enormous satisfaction in these efforts.
If we fail to spend our time and energy in this activity, we become deeply frustrated and dissatisfied, no matter how wealthy or powerful we may be, and this frustration, pooling, collecting, and fermenting, becomes bombs and bullets, toxic dumps and cancers, roving gangs and terrorists. Work, like birth and meals, is sacred, a sacrament, and by desecrating work with competitiveness, killing, cruelty, and exploitation, our herding culture has sown seeds that can only bear misery for everyone.
