Then there is the world of wild animals, those species we don’t exploit because they don’t taste good and won’t entertain us or work for us. Do you have any idea where your local slaughterhouse is? The only tiny bit of fiction at play in this otherwise harshly factual story is this: the pretence that this regime of mass-scale, mechanised brutality inflicted on pacified animals to overfeed our overindulged appetites doesn’t take place. Once, animals were wild prey and they were nimble in their flight, but now they’re produce and we pick them off the shelf of the supermarket at will. Now we’re consumers and our appetites are vast. Once, we were hands-on predators and we hunted and it was a fight and our appetites were smaller. This happens furtively, in industrial slaughterhouses and dairies that don’t advertise themselves, to animals that we keep in scrupulous anonymity. A number of them, livestock, the chickens and cows of the world, we exploit mercilessly in their millions, milking them, killing them, stealing their eggs. We live with animals in many ways, in a blend of fact and fiction. We are a lonely species, dwelling on an isolated ridge aspiring to be with gods, resigned to living with animals.
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