People love things that allow them to feel good while not doing anything or changing on a personal level. That is why people love to consume news about "poor Cecil" because they can feel good and superior. Yet they still pay the most marginalized in their societies to conduct factory scale, shrink-wrapped animal slaughter. The dentist is bad, and they are good for siding with the vanquished lion.
I just watched a documentary
They Killed Sister Dorothy about a nun who was involved in trying to preserve the rainforest in Brazil by allowing landless peasants to settle under the condition that out they only utilize like 20% and preserve the other 80%, protecting it from loggers and ranchers. But in the Brazlian Amazon most the land is disputed and illegally claimed so plot 55 that was being used for her pilot project was also claimed by ranchers and loggers who are known to hire pistoleros and thugs. Ranchers paid to have murdered for
50,000 Brazilian real. It is worse than the Wild West there, as people who openly walk around with impunity since you can easily buy justice in the states of the Brazilian Amazon.
The documentary didn't cover meat eating, and the nun wasn't even vegetarian, but that is the violence it takes to consume to Western levels. We ignore it because it was so far in the past that where I lived in the Northeastern USA that we destroyed our forests and the native Indian tribes, and because Brazil is so foreign. We also ignore it because of the spatial distance involved:
Timothy Pachirat wrote:Medium: Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy PachiratI recommend Zygmunt Bauman’s superb book Modernity and the Holocaust for those interested in how parallel mechanisms of distance, concealment, and surveillance worked to neutralize the killing work taking place in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The lesson here, of course, is not that slaughterhouses and genocides are morally or functionally equivalent, but rather that large-scale, routinized, and systematic violence is entirely consistent with the kinds of bureaucratic structures and mechanisms we typically associate with modern civilization.
The French sociologist Norbert Elias argues—convincingly, in my view—that it is the “concealment” and “displacement” of violence, rather than its elimination or reduction, that is the hallmark of civilization. In my view, the contemporary industrialized slaughterhouse provides an exemplary case that highlights some of the most salient features of this phenomenon.
To have the house in suburbia, the white picket fence, the numerous cars for each adult family member, the animal product for every meal of every day takes a constant stream of blood, local and foreign. To feel good about this we need the media to constantly feed us stories of the Cecil's of the world.
