Meet your meat

Chapter 11: What Goes Around Comes Around - from Animals like us by Mark Rowland (p.195 Rowland, M., Animals like us - Versobooks, 2002, London)

In The Lives of Animals J.M. Coetzee skilfully expresses the sense of disorientation that accompanies the realization that our treatment of animals is very, very wrong:

I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Fragment of corpses they have bought for money.

Can it really be true? Are we all co-conspirators in a crime of monstrous proportions? Such a suspicion is likely to engender a sense of bewilderment. Our family, our friends; they have their faults, we all do; but, by and large, they are kind people, good people. Are they not? Yes, they are. As far as they can be. But you can be kind and good only within the framework of possibilities laid down to you by your intellectual and cultural inheritance. We have, all of us, inherited a world-view that makes us twisted, selfish, spiteful parodies of what we might have been, and what we might become. And, ultimately, we are the victims of this, as much as anything else.