As I grew older, I saw example after example of protestors in the United States, armed insurgents and revolutionaries, and anyone who stood in the way of the status quo being labelled terrorists. The word, it seemed, had no actual functional meaning, but certainly did have a political use. Want to delegitimize a movement or its tactics? Call them terrorists. Want to justify a drone strike in a sovereign nation? Say that your targets were terrorists. Want to destroy a hospital in Palestine or a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan? Call it terrorist infrastructure.

Farmers need to see their animals as products before anything else. Often this conditioning started early, when a farmer was raised on a family farm. Even more so than the rest of us, they learn that animals are there for us to use. If you think of someone as a product, many questions around animal welfare are unlikely to ever arise.

Farmers can’t be the experts on what animals need or how they feel, because there is too much working against them being that. The farmer’s stake in the whole story is even bigger than that of the consumer, because animals are their source of income. As Upton Sinclair wrote, it is hard to make a person understand something if their livelihood depends on them not understanding it.