Staticfree Blog

Ryan posted an article written by a representative of the HFA. Scary stuff. It rather amazes me how cruel the entire system must be: not just for the animals involved, but the humans who have to work in the system. If you take a random person in the world and told them do the things that the workers of these companies do, I bet over 99% of them would not comply.

The workers have been desensitized to a level that I've seen in video game players: you don't want to just kill the bad guys (or animals, as the case might be) you want to destroy them. You want to see how far you can go, how much damage you can do, and most importantly: show your superiority to them. After all, they're just dumb animals right? Who cares if you take some pleasure or fun in beating them instead of just going through with the standard routine; they end up dead no matter what you do.

The problem I see is that you can't solve this with regulation. You can try, but it'd take an enormous amount of effort to impose the level of regulation that would actually be effective — obviously not something that couldn't be done without a great deal of federal funding.

The other option is to change the people or more specificly: the way that people interact with the system. If you can somehow take those workers and let them be more sensitive, then you should end up with workers more like the rest of the population: where you treat the animals with more respect and not something that you must destroy. This could be done by means of having them do less within the system (or at least the parts that breed desensitization). Hopefully, automation will get to the point where this is feasible and where the automation can be designed to deal humanely. Of course, as we all know "mechanically-separated chicken" is something to be avoided and thus, technology isn't there just yet.

When it is, though: that's when the regulation is useful: regulating the technology. Technology is dumb and will never get pleasure from killing animals in ways that amuse it. Technology can't be desensitized: it already is.