»Play VideoCharlie and Waffles of Snohomish. Photo courtesy YouNews contributor Victoria S.
SEATTLE, Wash. – Fourth of July fireworks routinely make July 5th one of the busiest days of the year for animal shelters across the country.
That’s why Seattle-based Pet Hub is declaring all of July “National Lost Pet Prevention Month.”
Dogs and cats frightened by fireworks often escape yards in the course of the evening. Some even manage to slip out through doors or open windows.
“Make sure your pet has an external I.D. tag,” says Pet Hub’s Lorien Clemens. “It’s the number one way lost pets get home quickly.”
Pet Hub’s mission is to help reunite lost pets with rightful owners. Pet Hub’s digital I.D. tag can store an owner’s name, address, and phone number. It can even include information on the pet’s medications and personality. The tag can be read by a smartphone, putting important information right at the finger tips of those who find a missing pet.
But even a traditional tag with a simple name and current phone number is better than nothing, Clemens says, adding that microchips are also good, as long as contact information is kept current.
Owners can also help pets adjust by planning ahead for the day. Create a safe space in your home, perhaps in an interior room or on a lower floor, that allows your pet to feel sheltered from the loud noises. For crate-trained pets, their kennel may be their safe spot. For others, it may be a closet or on the couch next to their owner.
For families planning to go out for the night, consider asking a friend or relative to pet-sit.
Exercise early in the day can also help by burning off some energy and helping your pet relax.
“Take them to the lake or the park,” Clemens says. “Throw things around. Get them exhausted and they won’t even care it’s the fourth.”
When HBO’s “Luck” was canceled after a third horse died during production, it was natural to ask what was going on. Were animals being abused? Were people being careless?
The truth was nothing was that simple or savage. Apparently the horses were being treated well, with greater care than actual working racehorses. The third horse was reportedly in good health and high spirits the day it died. It was in such spirits that it reared up as horses sometimes do. This time it fell over backward, and landed on its head. Just an accident. All you can blame is the fragile frame of the thoroughbred horse, which was created for racing.
But that didn’t keep the show from being canceled – or critics from speaking out. Even before the third horse death, PETA charged that “two dead horses in a handful of episodes exemplify the dark side of using animals in television, movies, and ads.” Like all filming in the U.S., “Luck” was shot under supervision of the American Humane Association’s Film & TV Unit, the people who certify that “No animal was harmed in the making” of a film or TV show. (That’s a statement about animal welfare, not animal rights. If you don’t think animals should be filmed for entertainment at all, you’re not going to like AHA. Founded in 1877, it also promotes the welfare of children.)
Moreover, this latest incident shows just how much the treatment of animals has changed in Hollywood since the motion picture industry began.
The early days were rough. Take Thomas Edison’s elephant electrocution as a starting point. Topsy, like the producers of “Luck,” was charged with causing three deaths. The third was a cruel trainer who tried to feed her a lighted cigarette. Naturally, she killed him. Edison electrocuted Topsy with alternating current to show how dangerous it was, part of his feud with Nicola Tesla, and released “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903). This seems unfair and crass to most people today, but the idea was to find the most merciful way to kill Topsy.
Beginning in the 1920s the motion-picture industry boomed, developing new genres as it went. In those days you could do almost anything to an animal (or an actor, for that matter). As many as 100 horses died in the making of the 1926 version of “Ben Hur.” Early Hollywood was an anarchic world, with upstart production companies launching grandiose projects on every side. Filmmakers did whatever struck them as a great idea.
With the advent of sound in 1927 profits took off. The studio system arose, concentrating filmmaking in a handful of dictatorially efficient corporations employing thousands and turning out movies at a tremendous rate. Animal actors were part of the process. Dramas, comedies, adventure stories, musicals, biographies – all would use animals, but the genre that used the most was the western.
The popularity of westerns was particularly hard on horses. Westerns were a staple in ’20s and ’30s Hollywood, and then boomed in the 1940s. In the early days, people were more familiar with horses, more attuned to the dangers of a runaway team, or the dangers of a horse and rider falling. Directors showed lots of falls. They used pitfalls, or tripwires to make horses fall, and there were also some stunt horses, who would fall at a signal. Trained horses jumped through windows or through flames. They leapt over wagons. They rampaged through saloons. All this was at the regular cost of injury or death.
Sometimes individual horses became known, and they were protected because of their fame, and because the actors loved them. Western star William S. Hart had a famous pinto, Fritz. Beautifully trained, Fritz would fall on command, lie down to act as a shield in a gunfight, even play scenes with a monkey. “Singer Jim McKee” (1924) had a scene in which Hart rode Fritz off a cliff into a gorge, but the actor didn’t want to risk Fritz, or a stunt horse, so a fake Fritz was constructed. Hart was filmed galloping to the edge on Fritz, at which point, on cue, the horse did a fall to one side. Then he was led away and replaced by the fake Fritz, held up with wire. When the wires were cut, the two toppled into the gorge. Hart was “badly shaken” by the fall, wrote Petrine Day Mitchum in “Hollywood Hoofbeats,” but once edited, the footage of falling man and “horse” was chillingly spectacular – so much so that the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Organization, aka the Hays Office, called Hart in to explain why he had been so cruel to Fritz.
Fritz was one of the exceptions to the rule. Most Hollywood horses were less famous, less recognizable, and often disposable. In 1939 two horses were killed in the filming of “Northwest Mounted Police” and two more in “Jesse James.” The horses in “Jesse James” were wearing movie blinkers with eyes painted on them. Unable to see, the horses had no idea they were running off a 75-foot cliff over white water until it was too late. The footage was impressive, the stuntman was well-paid, and the horses were dead.
This was the single biggest turning point in the history of Hollywood’s treatment of animals. Word about the deaths got out and there was a tremendous furor. In reaction to the outcry, the Hays Office worked with the AHA to write guidelines for animal performances. Starting in 1940, the AHA was granted access to sets. The Hays Office, well known for prissy extremes such as insisting that marital bedrooms feature twin beds and that Betty Boop dress more modestly, also banned apparent animal cruelty. Films were submitted to the office before release to get a certificate of approval and often changes were demanded before a certificate was issued.
In 1968 the Hays Code was dumped, mostly because it was ridiculous. Now you could have actors curse. You could ridicule the clergy. Married couples could be shown in the same bed. It was good news for the movies, but not for animal welfare. The end of the Hays Code contributed to the rise of the New Hollywood, a golden age of moviemaking. Younger filmmakers were creating realistic and daring movies, with more subtlety and less dependence on formula, contributing to a cinematic renaissance and a move toward realism and location shooting — and, sadly, more problems with animals.
Dogs for sale at the Yulin at the dog-meat festival
This week about 10,000 dogs and a number of cats were killed at an annual dog-meat festival in south-western China, to celebrate the longest day of the year. For the BBC’s Juliana Liu it was a reminder of one of the most traumatic days of her childhood, in the Chinese city of Changsha.
When I was three years old, after months of begging, my parents finally gave in to my pleas for a puppy.
The day that my uncle, a lorry driver, brought me a fuzzy yellow mongrel from my grandmother’s mountainous, faraway home was the happiest of my young life.
I named him “Doggie”, and we immediately became inseparable.
As an only child born in 1979 at the beginning of China’s one-child policy, I had always been alone, and Doggie became my best friend. He loved running around outside our one-room flat, gobbling up left-over rice and snuggling near the coal fire.
But these halcyon days did not last. After just one winter, my parents told me Doggie had to go.
In Chinese cities in the early 1980s owning a pet was considered highly undesirable, bourgeois behaviour. None of my neighbours had one. It was also not entirely legal. There was no access to animal vaccines or vets, so pets could pose a public health risk.
One day, my mother announced we were going shopping – and when we returned a few hours later Doggie was no more. He had been strung up by the legs in our communal yard, and was soon turned into a stew, complete with herbs and hard-boiled eggs.
No-one paid any attention to my tears. I heard the neighbours say I would soon forget the whole thing.
They, on the other hand, were in a celebratory mood. In the years before China’s economic boom, when some food was still rationed, it was rare to have the chance to feast on a whole animal.
I refused to eat the stew – and I have never eaten dog in my life.
In China, the tradition of dog-eating goes back far beyond written history.
Along with pigs, oxen, goats, horses and fowl, dogs are one of the six animals domesticated during the Stone Age.
On the other hand, it is not the kind of thing that is eaten every day. It is a speciality meat, commonly believed to confer strength, vigour and virility on the eater.
How dog is eaten
Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop writes:
Judging by the sporadic waves of outrage about dog-eating in China, you might think it was one of the pillars of the Chinese diet. Actually, however, the consumption of dog meat is extremely marginal: it’s seldom seen in markets and on restaurant menus, and most Chinese people eat it rarely, if at all.
Dogs, like pigs, have been reared for their meat in China since the Neolithic age, but in modern times their flesh is regarded as a delicacy in just a few areas, such as Hunan and Guizhou. Even in these places, it tends to be eaten only occasionally, and in certain seasons. According to traditional Chinese medicine, dog is a “heating” meat which can offer a useful energy boost in midwinter, but is best avoided after the lunar new year.
In culinary terms, dog meat is normally blanched or soaked before cooking to dispel the earthier, heavier aspects of its flavour. It is then, typically, made into slow-cooked soups and stews seasoned with ginger, spring onion, rice wine and spices, although it may also be roasted, or served cold as an appetiser. The tender meat of puppies is favoured over that of older dogs.
In the course of many years of studying Chinese cuisine, I’ve only eaten dog meat on a handful of occasions. The first time, it reminded me of pork; the second, in a fiendishly spicy Hunanese stew, it recalled the taste of lamb.
About 716 million pigs are slaughtered in the country every year, and 48 million cattle. The number of dogs slaughtered is far lower – one animal rights group puts the figure at about 10 million.
But where do these dogs come from? According to some researchers, many are pets – like Doggie, except they have been stolen from their owners.
As dogs were arriving for the dog-meat festival at Yulin in Guangxi province this week, Peter Li of Humane Society International saw no animals with quarantine inspection certificates to indicate they had been farmed.
“All of them can be suspected to be stolen urban pets, rural guard dogs and stray dogs and cats,” he says.
A four-year inquiry into the dog-meat industry by Animals Asia also concluded that most dogs eaten in China are stolen.
“During the entire investigation, we found no evidence of any large-scale breeding facilities, where 100-plus dogs were bred and raised,” says the report published earlier this month.
“The difficulty of large-scale breeding of dogs for food and the greed for profit give rise to stealing, snatching from the streets and even poisoning of dogs.”
But Li says there is mounting pressure on Chinese authorities to take action against the eating of pets – and that society is turning against the idea of eating dog altogether.
There were far fewer stalls selling dog and cat meat at the Yulin festival this year than in 2014, he says.
“The overall attitude is against dog eating. China has 130 million dogs, of which 27 million are urban pets. That’s a big number of pet owners.
“The younger generation, born in the 1990s, is not tolerant of animal cruelty.”
In 2014, animal rights activists intercepted 18 lorries carrying dogs intended for eating, resulting in the rescue of some 8,000 animals, he says.
The Chinese media often carries stories of such rescues, in which activists force vehicles to stop and pool money to purchase the animals.
He dates the rise of animal protection activism in China to 2011, the same year when, for the first time ever, more people lived in cities than the countryside.
City dwellers, he says, view dogs and cats more as pets, rather than as working animals – guard dogs, for example – or sources of meat.
In May, on a visit to Shanghai, I saw a sight that delighted me.
While strolling on the Bund, I stopped a young tourist named Yang Yang who was carrying her tiny, fox-like dog in a sling on her chest, the way I normally carry my human baby.
“Oh, this way I can take him into restaurants and on airplanes,” she explained. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be allowed in with me. Where I go, he goes.”
All three of us posed for a photo in front of Shanghai’s iconic skyline.
How I wish more people had taken this attitude three decades ago.
My parents, now utterly embarrassed about having allowed my pet to be cooked, generally avoid the topic entirely.
But when I was five years old, my father left China to study abroad and the very first gift he sent me was a fuzzy, yellowish stuffed puppy.
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The greedy interests of the very few who enrich themselves ravaging the life seas have turned his main defender, captain Paul Watson, a fugitive from the supposed “justice”. They are using no other than the courts of the country that boasts itself as “environmentalist”, which chase him for nearly thirteen years with a judicial cause invented by illegal shark fishermen and supported by illegal fishing mafias who kill marine wildlife in cold blood and without restrictions. It’s time to say “ENOUGH” to such injustice!
Columbia, SC (WLTX) South Carolina’s laws against animal cruelty rank 45th in the nation, according to the Humane Society of the United States, and state lawmakers who’ve tried to toughen those laws say there’s one main reason for that.
“We have people that are avid hunters and fishermen and they believe that anything to do with animal concerns, animal abuse, is going to take away, infringe on their rights, take away their guns, not let them hunt and that kind of thing. So anytime you bring something up about animals you’re hitting a brick wall,” says Rep. Deborah Long, R-Indian Land, who sponsored a bill two years ago to create an animal abuse registry, similar to the sex offender registry. Now, someone can be convicted of animal abuse in one county and, even if a judge prohibits them from having any more animals, if they move to another county enforcement of that ban is difficult. The bill never made it out of committee.
One of the main opponents of tougher animal cruelty laws has been Rep. Mike Pitts, R-Laurens, who is an avid hunter and fisherman. “I am not against toughening animal cruelty laws,” he says. “What I am against is an intrusion that most people don’t see, don’t understand, that uses animal cruelty laws as a façade for a much bigger agenda.”
He says local Humane Societies are fine and do good work. His concern is with the Humane Society of the United States, or HSUS, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA. “My absolute opposition to animal rights bills is not based on trying to stop something in good direction to protect pets and service animals. It is to keep HSUS and PETA at bay in my state,” he says.
He says HSUS president and CEO Wayne Pacelle wants to ban all sport hunting, so Pitts is worried that any bill that HSUS supports is a foot in the door to move in that direction. Officially, HSUS is working to ban some forms of hunting, like hunting animals that are kept in enclosed areas.
One example he says of a bill that seems good but can go too far is a tethering law. The state has no law against keeping a dog chained to a tree, post, or stake in the ground, but Pitts and others fought against a tethering bill. “In that tethering bill, it also included that I couldn’t put my bird dog or rabbit dog in a box in the back of my truck, a box that’s made for them. I couldn’t put, tie my horse while I was saddling my horse. That would be illegal tethering, because a rope’s not over six foot. So the devil is in the details of what they’re trying to do,” he says.
Wayne Brennessel, executive director of the Humane Society of South Carolina, says there are a couple of laws the state needs, one of them being a tethering law. “We need some laws about puppy mills, about these people who breed and breed and breed animals until, basically, the female animal is just falling apart because she’s been so overbred,” he says.
But Pitts counters with a question. How do you prevent puppy mills without unfairly restricting legitimate dog breeders? A bill just introduced on May 5th tries to answer that. It would put standards in place that would allow commercial dog breeders to operate without overbreeding their dogs.
Lawmakers did pass a tougher law last year that increases penalties for repeat offenders. Sen. Paul Campbell, R-Goose Creek, chaired a subcommittee that traveled around the state and listened to residents’ concerns about animal cruelty and laws to prevent it.
“It’ll be interesting to see how they rate South Carolina after we tightened those, the law up last year on the penalty and made it much more severe on a repeat offense,” he says.
Moose stabbed to death in Alaska park; suspects in custody
By RACHEL D’ORO Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska • Three men are in custody in Alaska’s largest city after a young moose was stabbed to death at a popular local park.
Anchorage police say 25-year-old Johnathan Candelario, 28-year-old James Galloway and 33-year-old Nick Johnston are under arrest in connection with the death of the yearling moose Tuesday night near a bike trail in Russian Jack Springs Park.
The men were arrested on charges of animal cruelty, wanton waste of big game and tampering with evidence. It’s unclear if they have attorneys.
Police say several witnesses called shortly before 7:30 p.m. reporting that the three men were jumping on the animal, kicking it and stabbing it with a large knife.
Police officers quickly located the three suspects nearby. The animal was found dead.
How did it happen? How did I go from being a high school student who played in a rock band to a mad scientist conducting cruel animal experiments?
To this day, I’m not sure. As a child, I liked animals. Growing up, I loved playing with our family dog. I wasn’t particularly interested in science and didn’t even want to go to college. I was planning on making it big as a rock musician, but in 1966, when my band broke up and a college offered me a generous financial aid package, I found myself a depressed, bewildered freshman at a university. I wanted to study music, but without classical training, that door was closed.
At the end of freshman year, my roommate told me about a great psychology course he was taking where he studied B. F. Skinner’s experiments with rats and pigeons. I was amazed that someone was actually able to predict and control behavior. Why people behaved as they did had always been a mystery to me. So I decided to take the course.
I was fascinated by one class lab where we taught pigeons to peck at a colored disc for food. In my junior year, I attended a class in which the professor made a compelling argument for conducting animal research related to punishment. He promoted it as having the noble goal of finding ways to minimize the use of punishment in humans while maximizing its effect. When he announced he was looking for a student to work in his lab for class credit, I took the job.
First, I had to learn how to shock a pigeon. A graduate student demonstrated how one person held the pigeon upside down while the other plucked out the feathers in back of its legs, cut two lengths of stiff stainless steel wire from a spool and pushed them through the skin and under the pelvic bones. The wires were then soldered to a harness placed on the pigeon’s back. The harness contained a plug that would be connected to a source of electric shock during experiments. No anesthetic or sedative was used.
One day, while programming an experiment, I accidentally touched the electrodes and got a jolting shock that numbed my entire arm. I was amazed that, according to my professor, the shock level was the correct one to use for pigeons. I told myself that pigeons must not feel pain as much as I did.
The pigeons lived in individual wire cages about a cubic foot in volume, in a bleak, windowless cinder-block room. I was told that everyone had to take a turn killing the pigeons after the experiments were finished. A graduate student showed me how to dump a couple of dozen birds into a clear plastic garbage bag, then pour a splash of chloroform on them and tie the bag shut. I remember the first and only time I did the killing; I thought the birds on the bottom were already suffocating because they were completely buried in other birds.
In graduate school, and later as a research technician, I also conducted punishment experiments on rats. The rats were deprived of food or water for 23 hours each day so they would be motivated to press a lever or lick a tube to receive a small reward of food or water. After learning that behavior, they would be shocked through metal rods on the floor for pressing the lever or licking the tube. We were recording how much the pressing or licking was suppressed by the shock.
Each year dozens of animals would be brought into the lab to live their brief lives suffering deprivation and shocks before being killed. At least in graduate school and as a research technician I did not have to kill the animals. There was a full-time lab custodian who took care of that.
Media is extremely important in spreading all sorts of news to a broad, and often unknowing public. Recently, an investigative essay by Michael Moss in the New York Times told the story of the ways in which nonhuman animals (animals) called “food animals” are brutalized at a Nebraska research facility, all in the name of profit (please see “‘Food Animals'” Brutalized at Federally Funded “‘Meat Lab'” for details). What I found interesting about Mr. Moss’s essay is that it generated bipartisan support in the U. S. Congress to stop the torture of these “research animals.” As a researcher I was astounded that it took an essay in the New York Times, not scientific essays about animal sentience nor popular reports about these essays, to motivate politicians to get involved in protecting these animals. We don’t need more science, we need more action that can easily and solidly be based on what we already know about how these animals deeply suffer.
Another essay in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof called “To Kill a Chicken (link is external)” also caught my eye. It begins: “IF you torture a single chicken and are caught, you’re likely to be arrested. If you scald thousands of chickens alive, you’re an industrialist who will be lauded for your acumen. That’s my conclusion after reviewing video footage taken by an undercover investigator for Mercy for Animals (link is external), an animal rights group. The investigator said he worked for two months in a North Carolina poultry slaughterhouse and routinely saw chickens have their legs or wings broken, sometimes repeatedly — or, worse, be scalded to death.”
Mr. Kristof’s essay is not for the weak at heart so here are a few tidbits.
What’s striking about the undercover video, which Mercy for Animals plans to release on its website this weekend, is the speed of the assembly line, leading workers to fall behind in ways that inflict agony on the chickens. It’s a process that maximizes productivity and profits, and also pain.
Workers grab the birds and shove their legs upside down into metal shackles on a conveyor belt. The chickens are then carried upside down to an electrified bath that is meant to knock them unconscious. The conveyor belt then carries them — at a pace of more than two chickens per second — to a circular saw that cuts open their necks so that they bleed to death before they are scalded in hot water and their feathers plucked.
The Agriculture Department calculates that about 700,000 chickens a year in the United States are “not slaughtered correctly” — often a euphemism for being scalded to death.
The company that operates the slaughterhouse, Wayne Farms, said it had reviewed the video and found no evidence of abuse. A spokesman, Frank Singleton, said that the company uses “industry-standard methods of humane slaughter.”
Think about that. If a naughty boy pulls feathers out of a single chicken, he’s punished. But scald hundreds of thousands of chickens alive each year? That’s a business model.
Supposedly “dumb” animals don’t suffer less than “smarter” animals
Mr. Kristof also writes, “I raised chickens as a farmboy. They’re not as smart as pigs or as loyal as dogs, but they make great moms, can count (link is external) and have distinct personalities. They are not widgets.” I just want to point out, as have many others, that there is no relationship between intelligence and loyalty and suffering. Supposedly “dumber” animals do not suffer less than “smarter” animals (please see “Do ‘Smarter’ Dogs Really Suffer More than ‘Dumber’ Mice?” and “Are Pigs as Smart as Dogs and Does It Really Matter?“). Cross-species comparisons are fraught with error and each individual’s pain is her or his own pain.
I also like to ask the generic questions, “Would you do it to your dog?” or “Would you allow a dog to be treated like other mammals or food animals who are brutally tortured on the way to our mouth?” When I ask these questions some people are incredulous and ask me why I do so. For one, they point out the inconsistency with which we treat other animals and these questions have always yielded very valuable discussions and the emotional lives of the sentient beings with whom we interact in a wide variety of venues.
Pardon our obliviousness to the pain and suffering of other animals
Who (not what) we eat is on the minds of many people and the conclusion of a another essay in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof called “Can We See Our Hypocrisy to Animals? (link is external)” is a good way to end this essay. Mr. Kristof writes, “May our descendants, when, in the future, they reflect uncomprehendingly on our abuse of hens and orcas, appreciate that we are good and decent people moving in the right direction, and show some compassion for our obliviousness.”
I’m thrilled to see these essays appearing in the New York Times and hope they really serve to make a change in how food animals are treated. I leave it to you to decide whether to read them, but be assured that when you eat chicken and other “food animals” you’re eating pain.Of course, the bottom line is that billions of food animals suffer the most enduring and deep pain as they’re brutalized to become meals, and we must stop this heinous treatment right now. We don’t need to wait for “the science” nor for politicians to get involved. Everyone can do this right now — today — simply by choosing other meal plans.
Marc Bekoff’s latest books are Jasper’s story: Saving moon bears (with Jill Robinson), Ignoring nature no more: The case for compassionate conservation, Why dogs hump and bees get depressed, and Rewilding our hearts: Building pathways of compassion and coexistence. The Jane effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall (edited with Dale Peterson) has recently been published. (marcbekoff.com; @MarcBekoff)
This article brings up a lot of great points, but I would argue that it isn’t just the vegans, it’s the animals themselves, who are the last fair game for socially-acceptable persecution…
Hey, you know how you can tell someone is a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll let you know.
People hate vegans. It’s weird. You wouldn’t think that avoiding chicken nuggets would warrant the abuse.
Vegans are one of the last remaining minorities that can be made fun of, marginalized and ridiculed publicly and have it be socially acceptable. Obviously vegans do not have it as bad as truly persecuted people like minorities, homosexuals and women, but the world is not vegan friendly. Freud pioneered the concept of defense mechanisms, and I think they explain some of the irrational hate vegans receive.
If you are vegan, you probably avoid mentioning your dietary habits at all costs. The truth always gets out, and when it does get ready for an onslaught of sensitive meat eaters. There’s the mocking, having your masculinity, sanity and/or intelligence questioned, the annoying jokes and even more annoying questions. There’s the smug superiority you’ll encounter. Oh, and bacon will be brought up, lest you forget that it is literally the greatest thing that a human can experience.
There’s this silly stereotype of the hostile, preachy vegan. I have never met one in my life. Only 2% of people in the USA claim to be vegan. Vegans are a minority, and people hate vegans. This leads many, myself included, to try to keep it mum mum as much as possible. The V word stirs up a lot of emotion in people.
Why though?
I think there is an explanation, let’s start with the a relevant definition:
From Wikipedia:
Defense mechanisms are psychological strategies brought into play by the unconscious mind[4] to manipulate, deny, or distort reality in order to defend against feelings of anxiety and unacceptable impulses to maintain one’s self schema.
People are fundamentally good, or they want to be. They don’t want to hurt other people, animals or the planet. So, to do terrible things, people must be divorced from reality in some way. Defense mechanisms are the morning train to delusionville.
Think about how awful an average factory farm is. EVERYONE has to have some idea of how bad it is. Imagine the thought of killing an animal and it’s screams of agony. Just think of how damaging factory farms are to the planet. Imagine the nightmare that awaits us as our natural world’s systems collapse. This stuff is HORRIFYING.
What you are saying is scary, therefor it is not true.
See how easy that was. Now we can watch a vapid reality TV show and sleep easy at night. That’s how defense mechanisms work. Let us break down a few defense mechanisms and how they are responsible for a lot of the vegan hate, ridicule and general opposition.
Reaction Formation
The basic definition of this defense mechanism is as follows: Anxiety producing emotions and thoughts are mastered by exaggerating the opposing tendency.
Meat is murder, tasty, tasty murder
I’ll eat all the animals you don’t
Mmmm, let me fetishize bacon to prove how anti vegan I am
I hate vegans, meat is soooooooooooo good
People don’t want to contribute to the horrors of animal factory farming. That terrifies them. People don’t want to think that they are immoral. That they are harming sentient beings and distroying the planet. This gives them so much anxiety that their egos swoop in to protect their notion of self. Well, the one they find acceptable. Their ego doesn’t want them to believe they are a bad person for participating in these terrible things. It does what it can to avoid the thoughts. It hides the anxiety producing truth and then exaggerates the opposite. That’s why vegans often hear the over the top, omni stupid, pro-meat comments. Suddenly meat is the greatest fucking thing on earth. They have to mention dead animals or make a joke, every goddamn meal, as though vegans never ate meat in their lives. (And people hate vegans… )
That’s why bacon is the sensitive meat eater’s banner. It is their call to arms. It symbolizes the decadence, the gluttony, and selfishness. It directly opposes the selflessness, impulse control and sacrifice that vegan’s strive for. Bacon is gross. No really, it is. It’s a slab of fat that’s either drier than a college student’s bank account or all chewy and miserable. It’s sliced of off filthy animals that wallow in their shit all day. Those animals are also as smart as a three year old. Think of what bacon represents though, there is subconscious symbolism at work; Bacon represents the id.
People are selfish to the core and don’t like change. This is especially true when it means making a sacrifice or delaying instant gratification. We humans are essentially selfish cowards. We all hide, some just do it behind burnt pig flesh. The social confirmation behind bacon fetishizing helps people’s guilty consciences stay quelled. It’s proof that they aren’t in the wrong. This is at the root of why some people hate vegans. Salmon or chicken isn’t used as their war cry. Veal could be, but the symbolism isn’t hidden as well as the actual baby calfs are, and it’s a tad bit too real.
Remember this defense mechanism the next time someone tells you that they wish they could wear a meat hat and eat it all day and move to a state where they can marry a bacon bride; as they laugh about how much they hate vegans.
»Play Video 
Exposing the Big Game 