What if on the Christmas table your loved ones are butchered on the plate? – Insurance for Pets

Feedback 20 december 2021

All that suffering that your congeners inflict on the other animals every day, hurts a lot.

Christmas is the worst time of the year for real animal lovers. While a lot of meat is eaten from murdered creatures all year round, at Christmas people are even more greedy for this. Yes, murder, that’s what I call it. After all, rabbits, cows, pigs, turkeys or chickens cannot be slaughtered voluntarily. The Christmas commercials on TV show conviviality and attention for the other. Even the naturally solitary hamster gets a companion in the AH Christmas commercial. After all, at Christmas you should not be alone, but cozy up to the richly filled Christmas table with a Christmas tree, family and friends.

But what if on that Christmas table your loved ones are butchered on the plate? Then you better skip it once. It’s too hard to see all those loved ones who have suffered so much disappear into the mouths of people you like. That creates a distance that can no longer be bridged at such a moment. At the same time, an internal conflict arises about how to deal with your fellow man. Can you really like that person if all the suffering leaves him so indifferent?

Being alone at Christmas is not a bad thing for that reason. But it hurts a lot to know of all the suffering that your species inflict on the other animals every day. If you really think about it, it is pure horror. Animals, packed in their thousands, are locked together in closed stables that are not even fireproof and where usually no daylight even comes in. Body parts are chopped off or clipped. If they don’t grow fast enough or stop producing, they will be beaten to death. In order to produce, the female animals are raped. Their daily life is hell, but it can still get worse and ends in the hell of the slaughterhouse. Anxiety, screaming and pain. That this happens and is considered normal makes him powerless. You want to do something, help them, but it’s never enough. It is impossible to save them all. I too close my eyes. Otherwise I’ll go crazy. Because reality is unbearable.

How many more undercover movies are there to show the cruelty behind those closed doors to the other animals in stables, transport and slaughterhouses before this abuse, mistreatment and mass murder stops? With other animals yes, because we as homo sapiens are also just an animal species, no more and no less. Chickens, cows, pigs, turkeys, rabbits and fish have consciousness and a language of their own, just like dogs and cats and just like us humans. They want to live and be happy just like us. But instead we take everything from them. Their dignity, their behavior that they are not allowed to express, their children, their parents, their partner and their happiness. Only suffering is what remains for them. And all that for a tasty appetite, while there have been so many healthy and delicious alternatives for so long.

Why are so few people taking responsibility? I can’t reach that and I’m ashamed of my humanity and of the government. A government that hypocritically assigns intrinsic value to other animals in a law, but treats them as worth even less than a toilet roll. A government that wants all people to be vaccinated against corona, but would rather ‘clean up’ than vaccinate hundreds of thousands of chickens, turkeys and ducks because of bird flu.

Turkeys, rabbits, cows, pigs, chickens and fish are oppressed, exploited and treated in our country as in the worst war. Also the animals that live freely in the wild and thank God can express their behavior do not last long. Fishermen in their greed roughly scrape the bottom of the sea and all the fish they catch face a long and arduous journey before they are finally suffocated. Fire-hungry hunters are ready to injure or shoot other animals, brutally severing family ties with the only excuse that they think are too many…

17 million people taking up almost all the space in a small country, that’s a lot! And even if our own living environment is ruined by how we treat other animals and the earth, nothing changes. The government did not even want to include ‘Reducing meat’ in the climate campaign. And humanity has learned nothing from corona either: the masses want to return to the old normal that should never have been normal. I don’t celebrate at Christmas. I commemorate all those animals that I could have had a strong bond with had I known them individually. Animals that have suffered and been killed for no good reason.

Sandra van de Werd works at the Animal Emergency Aid Committee and is co-initiator of the Peace Service for Animals, which will take place for the 8th time on 23 December at 7.30 pm and will be broadcast as a live stream.