Children provide the brightest hope against Factory Farming – Ex-patriot South African author, JM Coetzee

Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee (pictured) says children provide the “brightest hope” against the torment and torture of animals in factory farms. Coetzee, now an Australian citizen, said this in a speech to mark the opening of an exhibition entitled Voiceless: I feel therefore I am on in Sydney, Australia, on February 22 this year.

   “To any thinking person,” he said, “it must be obvious there is something terribly wrong with relations between human beings and the animals they rely on for food. It must also be obvious that in the past 100 or 150 years, whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production.

   “There are many other ways in which our relationship with animals is wrong… but the food industry, which turns living animals into what it euphemistically calls animal products and by-products, dwarfs all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects.

   “The vast majority of the public has an equivocal attitude to the industrial use of animals: they make use of the products of that industry, but are nevertheless a little sickened, a little queasy, when they think of what happens on factory farms and abattoirs. Therefore they arrange their lives in such a way that they need be reminded of farms and abattoirs as little as possible, and they do their best to ensure their children are kept in the dark too, because children have tender hearts and are easily moved.” But, said Coetzee, “given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them… It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.”

   Coetzee said the efforts of the animal rights movement were rightly directed at “decent people who both know and don’t know that there is something going on that stinks to high heaven.”

   The good news, he said, was that the industry had been forced onto the defensive to try and justify indefensible practices.