Horse racing involves the slaughter of tens of thousands of horses every year, across the globe perhaps hundreds. The fact that people are completely unaware of this, and the other ethical issues surrounding horse racing, prompted me to write this piece for Animal Liberation Queenslands newsletter.
Such a situation, is dreadful. Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity - that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures - and by violating his own feelings, becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life. But by the assertion that God ordained the slaughter of animals, and above all as a result of habit, people entirely lose their natural feeling.
I love how Safran Foer starts this book, talking about his grandmother's table. It gets very much to the heart of how, what seems an obvious improvement in the ethics of humanity, is actually so difficult. Caught up as we are in habit, story, family, friends, to make a change...