Arnon Grunberg

Consumers

Blame

Peter Singer on animal rights and capitalism:

‘Is he right? On the side of those who see capitalism as the problem, it has to be granted that in the United States the pressures of unrestrained competition drove traditional small farmers out of business. Those who knew their animals as individuals and didn’t want to move them indoors and confine them in crates or cages found they could no longer make a living from farming. For every egg producer there is today, forty years ago there were twenty. Over the same period the numbers of pig and dairy farmers have declined by 91 and 88 percent, respectively. Meanwhile the farms—or as the industry now calls them, “concentrated animal feeding operations”—have grown so much that the number of animals produced has soared from about 1.5 billion animals in 1960 to 9 billion today.
All the same, capitalism is not to blame. These changes have occurred because consumers buy factory-farmed animal products, either despite knowing what factory farming is like for the animals they eat, or without even asking what it is like. Speciesism, which leaves so many of us indifferent to the interests of animals, predates capitalism. It survives revolutions that lead to alternative economic systems, whether they be the state communism of the former Soviet Union or the more idealistic socialism of the Israeli kibbutzim.’

Read the article here.

Well, capitalism is not to blame, that’s something. We all know: if everything else fails blame capitalism.
But still, regulation and morally sensitive venture capitalists are needed. Singer again: ‘Can the humane economy, driven by morally informed consumers, take this next step, and make food derived from whole animals as obsolete as a horse-drawn buggy is today?’

I would not bet on morally informed consumers, first I would bet on a few morally informed venture capitalists.

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