Barbarism begins at home
Last year the artist Banksy burst into the Glastonbury Festival with his very clever moving art-piece called Sirens of the Lambs, which shows the screaming faces of lambs crying out from a truck bound for slaughter of the most unimaginably corrupt and vicious savagery.
Michael Eavis, the gentlemanly God of Glastonbury, was not impressed.
“Is it some kind of animal rights thing?” he asked, pretending not to understand what the rest of us saw so clearly. No, Michael, it was a preview of the UK entry for the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest…
“Our cows are actually very happy,” Michael Eavis, now suddenly Dr. Dolittle, assured reporters, “they have the highest milk yield in the county.”
What Michael Eavis meant by this statement was: WE are economically very happy because our cows have the highest milk yield in the county. No Glastonbury cow was available for comment, and no cows were heard laughing. Dr. Eavis equates milk yield as a sign of happiness, we note.
In order to ‘have the highest milk yield in the county’, a cow must be persistently ‘raped’ against its will (a logical assumption), or it must be artificially inseminated from the age of 13 months onwards, or injected with bovine growth hormone. The latter is banned (that is, frowned upon) in the UK, but since farmers pay no heed to the law when it comes to gassing badgers, shooting foxes or hunting, then we’re safe to assume that the bovine growth hormone practice continues. In the UK, the farmers’ financial gluttony is unassailably up there with the holy scriptures.
Dairy cows are not allowed to not be in lactation because then their milk production decreases and they do not produce enough milk to justify the cost of their board and lodgings. Therefore, cows are repeatedly raped and raped and raped … which Michael Eavis presumably thinks is a great way to make sentient beings happy. Dairy cows are only allowed to live for as long as they are useful to the farmer, which is about 4 years. If left alone, the cow could live for 20 years.
I assume that the dairy cows at Glastonbury who no longer yield milk are brought into the home of Michael Eavis and allowed to sit down and watch Emmerdale until they gently pass away in their later years, because, after all, Michael insists that Glastonbury cows are “very happy.”
In truth, of course, as soon as a cow is a substandard producer of milk, she and her friends are sent off to have their throats slit.
We can easily imagine Michael Eavis waving the cattle truck off, and we can see his cows being “very happy” about that, and waving back to Michael.
A male calf produced by a dairy cow is immediately shot, or raised to be murdered for beef, or allowed no daylight during its entire short lifespan where it is trapped in a crate, unable to move, and thus the creation of veal. After calving, newborns are hit on the head with a hammer or pulled away from their mothers after just one day together, which causes explosive stress to both mother and baby. Does Michael Eavis approve of this? It appears so. Milk is worse than “meat” because on dairy farms the cows are tortured for YEARS before they are killed. Calves are pulled away from their mothers by dragging the calf with one leg, both mother and calf in a state of chaotic distress.
Does Michael Eavis at his Glastonbury Farm accommodate any cows at all that do not yield money his way? I doubt it. Off with their heads!
Does Michael Eavis care about the insane environmental damage caused by dairy farming? I doubt it. To hell with the environment! People who do not care about animal rights usually do not care about human rights. It naturally follows.
Should you actually agree to play at the Glastonbury Festival you might find visual arts expert Michael Eavis meddling with your presentations. In 2011 I played Glastonbury and attempted to sing the song Meat is murder. Behind me, a screen that usually shows the many evils of factory farming remained blank. I was told that Michael Eavis had stopped the screening of the film because it wasn’t indicative of how his dairy farm operated. He didn’t quite understand that the poor souls in the actual film did not want to be there in the first place. Michael Eavis also went on to justify banning the film by saying it would “upset” younger people. What Michael Eavis was saying, in effect, was:
it’s OK for our belly, but not for our eyes … and at all costs don’t educate anyone on animal cruelty because it might damage the financial profits of our happy Glastonbury Farm.
If he had thought the film gave an incorrect view of dairy farming, he wouldn’t have cared if the film had been shown, but he banned the film because he knew the film was truth.
Like most animal haters, Michael appears to be one of those people who love dead animals, yet hate live ones. How is this sane, or logical, or possible?
If dogs and cats aren’t ‘food’, then why are cows and sheep? The BBC recently made a terrible fuss when some unfortunate dogs were allegedly poisoned at Crufts – which, yes, was abysmal. But the BBC had no concern or report on the 40,000 piglets whose throats were slit in the UK in that very same week.
Why is the latter not a BBC story? Why is a poisoned dog at Crufts a story for national lamentation, yet the slaughter of 40,000 screaming piglets is not mentioned anywhere on any known news program?
If a dog is not food, then why is a pig?
Well, you might argue that ‘oooh I love bacon’, but if you love the pig dead, why do you not love the pig while it is alive, and why do you not protect it from slaughter … if you “love” “bacon” so much? Surely if you eat animals it’s because you hate rather than love them?
Is a cat ‘food’? No. So why is a lamb?
We have been trained and brainwashed to believe that some animals deserve to be killed and some don’t, and much advertising effort is put into the hope that we do not ever decide for ourselves. No celebrity vegetarian chefs on the BBC! There is also heavy reliance on the hope that humans never quite become intelligent enough to understand that both humans and animals have natural rights. After all, as Gary Yourofsky brilliantly observed: if you remove bees or ants from the planet the entire cycle of life is damaged, but if you remove human beings from the planet then the entire planet will prosper and be saved.
Should we care that factory farming (which isn’t farming at all – it’s an industry very much like any other) is irrefutably linked to cancer in humans? Are you aware that the “country smell” so powerful in idyllic areas is actually the smell of mass slaughter of animals? Does anyone actually believe that the badger kill (not ‘cull’) is a move to protect cows, or to protect godly farmers’ income? Are you aware that the virus of factory farming causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all combined forms of motorized transport? Of course you’re not, for if you knew how much the “meat” industry is destroying the planet, well, you might grow wise to the biggest threat to your own life.
Like many animal haters, Michael Eavis was awarded a CBE by Elizabeth Battenberg (you have been ordered to address her as The Queen) in 2007. In 2005 he expressed how it was “outrageous to ban hunting”. For such as Michael Eavis, there just cannot be enough bloodshed. More! More! More! Kill! Kill! Kill! Would he object if the hunters were also hunted?
Animal rights is now the leading social justice issue on the planet. Your decision is whether you support either the butcher or the butchered. It cannot be both.
