Cruel Quotes

“Our culture trains us to consume “happy meat” from the “happy farm.” The meat industry regularly feeds us images of cows in buttercup pastures, lamb frolicking in clover, chickens in straw nests, always blue sky and sunshine. To see anything else, to see the reality of the filthy feed lots and sheds packed with millions of animals living in the near dark, to slip through the blood and entrails in a slaughterhouse full of knives, to hear the sound of their screams and the clanking of chains, the cursing of the workers, and continue to consume animals, would make us complicit. We want to remain innocent and oblivious, shame-free.”
― Sue Coe, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation

“The hope is transparency and daylight. Being aware of parts of the puzzle, sharing our knowledge and culture, as it fits together like a stained glass window that lets in all forms of light. In terms of the industrial herding complex, factory farming is an iron boot, crushing the female, as ninety percent of factory-farmed animals are young females. We cannot turn back time and return to a pastoral, gatherer society, but we can highlight parts of the puzzle to explain how our species got on this road.”
― Sue Coe, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation

“We accept genocide because of the mundane emotion of fear and the instinct of our species to go along with the dominant social order. This, in the past, protected our species but is now creating the opposite result. To ask questions would be risking the same fate of the victim. It's always easier to look away. Out of sight, out of mind… The unwillingness to look over that wall is socially supported and continually reinforced. The majority find this lulling mentality preferable because they are not connected to reality, just an economic machine that prompts the correct responses to survive short term.”
― Sue Coe, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation