"People think I am exaggerating when I say this, but I mean it: the greatest moral transgression of the contemporary world is that we have, first, desacralized slaughter and the consumption of animal flesh, and second, moved this slaughter behind the walls of unmarked, remotely located slaughterhouses, rendering it structurally invisible. This is a historically unprecedented development, and if you are not prepared to call it a sin, either because you do not believe in sin or because you do not believe that animals have a moral status that enables them to be sinned against, you still must acknowledge that our treatment of non-human others as a mass-scale commodity comes with 'wages', in the form, namely, of ecological devastation. ... "If the world seems out of harmony right now —and again I am serious about this— it may have something to do with the fact that so many are overly concerned about identifying violence in its attenuated forms within the human social sphere, while conveniently side-stepping the fact that there is unceasing mass-scale violence in the most paradigmatic sense going on all over the world at all times."
Justin E. H. Smith