And once more I passed by a small herd of “happy cattle” — a family of dairy cows who were obviously quite content to “live the good life” in lush & spacious fields — a family of dairy cows who were obviously oblivious to the true intentions of their less-than-kind masters — a family of dairy cows who were all but teenagers at the oldest — a family of dairy cows who had no idea that their babies would be soon taken from them and that they themselves would be strung up and murdered in but a few short years when their milk no longer flowed in financially profitable amounts … And once more I paused and told them all of their imminent and most violent plight — and once more they looked at me with eyes glazed over in abundant comfort and ears closed to that horrible truth — and once more my calls for them to band together and run for the nearby woods went completely unheeded — and once more I walked on deeply saddened by the inexcusably barbaric way we humans still treat the most innocent and the most gentle among us … 🙁 🙁 🙁

“There is no humane way to treat another sentient being as a piece of property, and there is certainly no humane way to kill another sentient being who doesn’t want to die. Indeed, if there is any such thing as the Sanctity of Life, then that principle must apply equally & universally to all conscious beings, and it absolutely must entail that each & every life belongs exclusively to the one in whose body it occurs. If your own life is not a thing to be owned, then whatever aspect of existence conferring that birthright to you confers it equally to all of your sentient cousins. In truth, to (quite correctly) assert that birthright for ourselves while glibly denying it to any other animal is the very worst and most brutal form of hypocrisy.” ~ via Robert Grillo (co-founder of Free from Harm)

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019), Sanctifying Sentience by Scaughdt