In this blog post, we examine the rights and dignity of animals—which are often overlooked amid humanity’s selfish sense of privilege—and discuss how we should treat them.
Episode 1
In a cramped, freezing room, the mother stretched her body. But as if they had been waiting for this moment, a group burst in, and the mother, unable to even put up a fight, had her baby snatched away. Left alone in the cold room, the mother carried on with her life, finding solace in the occasional cries of her child coming from the next room. Then one day, the mother noticed that her child’s cries sounded different than usual. It was less a cry and more a scream of agony. Instinctively realizing that they intended to do to her child what they had done to her, the mother smashed through the iron door and rushed in. But the iron chains binding the baby would not break easily, and even at that moment, the young child was writhing in pain, its abdomen pierced and spilling bodily fluids. The mother had no choice left. Believing that death would be a relief, she embraced her child’s neck and suffocated it, then made the extreme choice to end her own life by smashing her head against the wall.
Episode 2
I was born in a crowded farmhouse. Since there were many relatives besides our family, my birth in such a cramped space seemed to be unwelcome to them. Then one day, a friend who looked different from me gave birth to eight babies. I watched for a long time, finding it cute how they wandered around searching for their mother’s milk without even opening their eyes, but then a terrible thing happened. A man who often brought us food grabbed the babies by their legs and threw them to the ground repeatedly. As blood flowed from the babies’ noses and mouths, he placed the limp babies in a bucket and headed off somewhere. That night, I couldn’t sleep. As time passed and I grew as large as my mother, I had to move to another place. While riding the conveyor belt, the moment a cliff appeared, I hung upside down. I screamed for someone to let me down, but no one heard me. Before I knew it, a massive blade appeared before my eyes. As I struggled to survive, my legs were severed. My entire body was hacked to pieces by the blade, and that is how I died.
Animals deserve the right to die with dignity!
The lives depicted in these two stories are not mere cinematic tragedies. They are slices of reality that are happening constantly, even at this very moment. If the protagonists of these stories are all animals, and we are the primary beneficiaries of this tragedy, what should we, as humans, be thinking about?
The first story is about the suicide of a Asiatic black bear that occurred at a farm in China in September 2011. The global media was astonished by the bear’s maternal love, and even more surprised by the fact that bears commit suicide. Currently, only two countries—South Korea and China—raise bears for commercial purposes. Farmed bears are killed before reaching the age of 10 to harvest 19 grams of bear bile, and throughout their lives, bile is forcibly extracted from them via a tube. While the Asiatic black bear is presumed to be naturally extinct in South Korea, the reality that approximately 1,400 are still being farmed on farms is nothing short of bitter. The second story concerns the slaughter process at large-scale livestock farms in the United States. To ensure tender meat, newborn piglets are easily killed by being slammed onto the floor, and live cows are ground up whole in a grinder. Though the agonizing screams never cease, those pursuing maximum efficiency have no intention of changing their slaughter methods. And the products of this process boast the highest sales worldwide, thanks to a ridiculous clown. I’m talking about “McDonald’s.” At this point, sadly, we cannot escape the category of perpetrators.
Although humans cannot survive for even a single moment without nature, we do not fear it at all. For the sake of human survival, natural beings have been reduced to mere tools, and this bizarre sense of entitlement is simply baffling. What good are animal protection or the preservation of natural ecosystems? They did not provide us with food or shelter. It is because we had to move toward a society based solely on pragmatism, prioritizing utility over value. In this context, bears were imported en masse in the early 1980s to boost farm incomes, and fast-food restaurants sprang up like mushrooms to supply humans with fuel more quickly. Having raced forward with our eyes fixed on the future, have we finally found the time to look back? Public opinion filled with regret and reflection has begun to surface, and civic groups advocating for animal rights have started to emerge. But decades have passed since then—what, exactly, has changed? McDonald’s remains the world’s leading fast-food chain, and thanks to advanced science and technology, the pace at which we ravage nature has only accelerated. Humans have been gifted with intellectual ability, yet their attitude toward coexistence is no different from that of a newborn infant—they care only for themselves.
Ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, there was an incident in which an actress affiliated with a French animal protection group sharply criticized Korea’s dog meat culture. “We must never barbarically eat the friend of humans, who possess such high intelligence!” Setting aside common notions of threats from superpowers or cultural relativism, let us consider just how contradictory her argument is. No animal on Earth consumes its own kind without a specific reason. However, preying on species at the lower rungs of the food chain according to the law of the jungle is a rule that has existed since time immemorial. The actions of animal rights groups—which arbitrarily distinguish between what should and should not be eaten based solely on the intelligence of the prey—constitute another form of violence and are nothing more than biased sophistry. Does this mean that a low-intelligence goose feels no pain even if it spends its entire life with a funnel around its neck, living on nothing but oil? The act of cherishing only what one personally likes is ultimately the same as acting solely for one’s own benefit. Thus, the claims of ecologists who ignore the laws of the ecosystem and selectively protect animals cannot truly be considered correct.
Let’s take a moment to cool our heads and think. From a nutritional standpoint, humans must consume meat, and as long as we do not eat our own kind, this can be justified. But is drinking animal blood—a practice with no scientific basis—really necessary? Is it so important to quickly consume food made by grinding up whole animals? Not only is it not good for the body, but it is not worth inflicting suffering on living beings. Nevertheless, we have either gone along with the trend or, at times, tacitly condoned it through our silence.
Having turned a blind eye to this obvious absurdity, we now realize that their suffering has come back to haunt us like a boomerang. Various studies show that eating a lot of meat can lead to various adult diseases. However, this premise omits the crucial word “farming.” Meat from animals raised on pasture is not harmful to the human body, even if consumed three times a day. This is because, even among the same breed, there is nearly a threefold difference in fat composition between pasture-raised and factory-farmed meat. In essence, we have turned a health tonic into poison in our quest to eat more and live better. I wish we had stopped there, but it seems we were even reluctant to spend the money on feed required for factory farming. Once we were able to mass-produce corn through genetic modification, animal feed naturally shifted to corn, and the animals were forced to eat it nonstop in cramped spaces. As feed costs dropped, we could provide more food, leading to an increase in both body size and population numbers. As people’s meat consumption increased significantly, the amount of corn accumulating in our bodies also rose. Corn has an omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio of 66:1, which is abnormal compared to the normal range of 4:1 in the human body. Naturally, as corn accumulates, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in our bodies becomes increasingly imbalanced. In fact, studies of modern people show that the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio in heavy meat eaters exceeds 100:1. This is a major problem because an excess of omega-6 in the body promotes the proliferation of fat cells and triggers inflammatory responses, leading to various diseases. Patties made from animals whose bodies have been ground up whole contain parts that should not be eaten, making them unsuitable as human food. If the animals we consume do not live happy lives, our own bodies cannot help but suffer as well.
What do we gain by treating living beings so cruelly, forcing them to scream in agony? It is sad that a solution which should be common sense remains a future we have yet to reach. Let them live their lives as living beings and die with dignity. We have no right to ruthlessly take their lives away.
