The World Needs to Hear This

King Lear, late at night on the cliffs asks the blind Earl of Gloucester, “How do you see the world?”. And the blind man Gloucester replies, “I see it feelingly.” And shouldn’t we all? Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouses, in crates and in cages. Vile ignoble gulags of despair. You see, I heard the screams of my dying father as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him. And I realised I’d heard those screams before. In the slaughterhouse, their eyes stabbed out and their tendons slashed on the cattle ships to the middle east and the dying mother whale as a harpoon explodes in her brain as she calls out to her calf. Their cries were the cries of my father. And I discovered that when we suffer, we suffer as equals. And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig, is a bear, is a boy. Meat today is the new asbestos more murderous than tobacco. CO2, methane and nitrous oxide from the livestock industry are killing our oceans with acidic, hypoxic dead zones. 90% of small fish are ground up into pellets to feed livestock. Vegetarian cows today are the world’s largest ocean predators. The oceans are dying in our time. By 2048 all our fisheries will be dead, the lungs and the arteries of the earth. Billions of bouncy little chicks are ground up alive simply because they are male. Only 100 billion people have ever lived. 7 billion people live today. And yet we torture and kill 2 billion sentient living beings every week…