I recent­ly watched a few episodes of a Dutch tele­vi­sion pro­gram called The Hok­jes­man, trans­lat­ing to the Box­es Man. Dif­fer­ent groups of Dutch peo­ple are mild­ly iron­i­cal­ly scru­ti­nized in the pro­gram, and it always turns out that the box is much more colour­ful than you’d expect. In the episode about ‘Ani­mal Friends’ the Hok­jes­man vis­it­ed a pet fair, where peo­ple cel­e­brate their love of ani­mals while enjoy­ing a ham­burg­er. A woman was sell­ing a cocoon that can be used to bury a small pet: “A wor­thy farewell”.

Some­thing that the chick­ens (and ducks in the UK) who are slaugh­tered en masse because of bird flu can only dream of. Farm clear­ings are the inevitable result of a crazed bio-indus­try. Virus­es spread and devel­op in great pace and hurt huge num­bers of ani­mals. Live­stock farm­ing in Europe hasn’t had any­thing to do with romance for a long time. When I was in Corn­wall, the wife of the con­sul­tant said she was plan­ning to buy new chick­ens. The cou­ple that they had before had stopped lay­ing eggs because of old age, and after that lived anoth­er six months. She was hap­py to give them their retire­ment, but you obvi­ous­ly don’t find that on a large farm. Choic­es are made based on eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions and the vast major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion is not will­ing to pay more for their meat. In the fifties it was nor­mal or eat meat one or two times a week, what’s the prob­lem with going back to that?

In my opin­ion, meat eaters should at least be real­is­tic and famil­iar­ize them­selves with the way the cows, chick­ens and pigs spend their lives. That is not dif­fi­cult because the hor­rors of fac­to­ry farm­ing are wide­ly cap­tured on film. The web­site of 269life has some video clips from the Nether­lands. I do not want to look at that myself. The images that the Hok­jes­man made are heart­break­ing enough. He went to a rab­bit barn with Rem­co Stun­nen­berg. Dead rab­bits lay decay­ing between their (more or less) live com­pan­ions. At the end of the episode it appears that Rem­co has tak­en a dead rab­bit with him. The cocoon from the pet fair comes in handy now, because a sym­bol is raised. This rab­bit gets a funer­al and a cross on his grave:

It has been seen … it has not gone unnoticed.