Individuals, not numbers.

I was reading through my animal management notes as I put them away, when something caught my eye. Previously it had just been another figure, another boring statistic to memorise on the off chance we were asked about it in the exam. It was from my notes on veterinary public health, with intent to emphasise the scale of the operations and how dire the consequences could be if disease ever gained a significant foothold at the slaughterhouse, but that's not why it had suddenly stopped me in my tracks. 800 million chickens slaughtered every year in Britain, averaging out at 10,000 per hour. This may not have seemed so shocking until I remembered something my GCSE history teacher had told me years before when studying the first world war and again when studying the holocaust. "People look at these numbers, and they think of them as numbers. But every single one of these men was an individual. 900,000 men may not seem like such a large number, but you try imagining 900,000 individuals, each with their own separate lives, personalities, and experiences." History is in the lives, deaths, and experiences of those present at the time, not in a bunch of numbers from a textbook. You can't really grasp a situation merely by looking at statistics.

Having just completed my chicken handling practicals, I knew that chickens, whilst perhaps not as self-aware or mentally complex as Tommy Atkins, did have their own personalities and their own feelings. Each chicken was an individual animal with individual experiences. But I couldn't imagine 800 million (800,000,000) anything, let alone 800 million individual beings being enslaved and slaughtered on a yearly basis. It's difficult to see that as anything but 'just a number'. It was somewhat more daunting to imagine ten thousand (10,000) chickens being killed every hour. Ten thousand individuals is somehow more conceivable, somehow more horrific, than a figure so large it has lost all meaning. To put things in perspective; consider that the Nazis exterminated only 11 million Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners and others they deemed undesirable during the existence of the Third Reich, a state which lasted over 11 years. From this it is apparent that, in order to reach the same level of efficiency as the British chicken industries, Hitler would require 800 Third Reichs functioning at the same time.

So yes, I'm angry. More than angry, in fact. If I thought I could make any difference I'd join the bloody ALF. This is one of those incredibly rare moments in which I almost wish there was a Hell, because right now I feel that every one of us deserves to burn for letting such a gargantuan barbaric industry continue its murderous business unnoticed for so long. And, if anyone ever reads this, I can almost guarantee you'll attempt to rationalise your behaviour, find some excuse, and then go get a bucket of KFC for dinner, and that's what pisses me off more than anything else.

The death of one is a tragedy...

I have had it with all these people and groups obsessing over 'Baby P'. Because I'm an evil, sick bastard? No, actually quite the opposite. One baby gets beaten up and killed and the country is in uproar. The politicians are using his death to further their agendas, the online pro-censorship groups are doing the same and there are f*ck knows how many facebook groups dedicated to this one 'little angel'. Before you ask me what the Hell I'm on and call for me to be locked up in a straight-jacket somewhere, I'd like to make my point:

Millions of children younger than 'Baby P' die every day all over the world in much worse conditions. So he was tortured and beaten to death, yeah that's awful enough alright. I'm not going to pretend that his death isn't a tragedy because it obviously is. But why don't you start a facebook group or petition expressing solidarity for the millions of babies who spend months or years in agonising pain slowly shitting themselves to death, when all that is needed to save them is a glass of salt and sugar water? What about all those kids in war-torn countries who can't even get food because it's too dangerous for aid agencies?

Surely the government, who are 'sickened' by the tragic death of one little Aryan baby, would go to any length to prevent the deaths of these millions? Well, no actually. Instead of giving aid to the sick and starving children of the world they decide to spend it fuelling the failed bureaucracy that caused baby P's death in the first place, and to throw it aimlessly at the dole-dossing underclass of this country who waste their lives watching Jeremy Kyle and acting morally superior to everyone else on every subject about which they know nothing. Instead of sending troops to protect aid workers in unsafe territories, they keep them on patrol around middle-eastern countries that do not even admire their presence. And the opposition is no better. Some smug tw*t with more money than sense isn't going to help these children.

Children in Need can kiss my ass. Children in the UK are living in poverty? Compared to whom? You try telling a sick child in Africa that the money needed to buy him basic ORT solution and a packet of rice for a week was spent on some poverty-stricken British kid who only had one pair of trainers and a Playstation one. My heart bleeds for them. Really.

I've had enough of stupid people and their hypocrisy...