Changing: In fact, they were seen as quite valuable because they had important jobs.
Of course, a cruel person has more opportunity to be cruel to animals in a farm setting, but a decent person would not be gratuitously cruel on a farm or in the city.
I would not say that being raised on a farm guarantees that someone will be cruel to animals. I will say that being raised on a farm, slaughtering animals for meat, takes a mindset of either not believing that animals have feelings or of divorcing oneself from those feelings in order to be able to kill those animals. How could a person kill any living creature without crying their eyes out, unless they somehow shut down the idea of that animal having feelings physically or emotionally?
My husband's father was raised in an orphanage where apparently he was treated cruelly. He then raised my husband to see animals as worthy of being tortured before slaughter. I won't even talk about some of the things that he taught my husband were part of the slaughtering process. I will say that one of the things NH's father thought was perfectly ok, was to step on an animal's neck and watch their eyes bulge out, while laughing histerically at the site and suffering of that animal, and then killing it. I don't find animals that are about to die, a funny thing. Maybe this is why I stopped eating red meat recently.
I also know from NH's own admission, that, when kittens were born, if not wanted, his father chopped their heads off and buried them. Tell me THAT would not teach a child a lack of empathy??? Years ago, they put kittens in a bag of stones and drowned them. JUST SICKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK and cRUEL!
NH's sister has told me stories about being FORCED to pluck chickens and see animals killed. I can tell you that, even from watching documentaries of it, I don't even like the thought of it entering my brain cells. Killing animals is cruel, period, unless it is done humanely...but torturing them and laughing is totally WRONG!
That's my stance on farms and cruelty. It's not the farm living that did it with NH...it was the insane "father" Still, i'm glad I did not have slaughterhouses as part of my life as a child. I learned that it's kind to even avoid killing insects as much as possible. I like it that way.
~Laura