Stick your fingers in your ears, squeeze shut your eyes and sing "la la la"........

Compassionate, educated, caring, intelligent human animals want to know about the world they live in and about what they are doing. Right?

Back when I was a young and unseasoned beginning psychotherapist, one of my wiser professors told me that facts do not change attitudes.....he could have added that facts do not necessarily change behaviors either. At the time, I did not quite understand what he was talking about. I now know he was quite correct in his observation......I am still uncertain about the mechanism(s) that makes this true.

One thing that likely contributes is that change takes more energy and effort than inertia. It is work to explore, test and decide on new ways of doing something rather than continuing on some previously established path or routine. Most organisms are inherently conservative in this respect....youth notwithstanding. The principal reason youngsters are willing to try new things is that they have no history with enough longevity to have established any well-routinized patterns. This is not always the case however, as any parent knows, sometimes getting a child to try something new or different can be incredibly difficult. It just depends....on the child, on the situation.......on what I am not sure.

Of this I am sure, many otherwise kind, caring, intelligent, compassionate human animals absolutely do not want to know about the suffering and abuse and terror and death that their routine, everyday, usual food and clothing choices - and other choices and actions causes to be inflicted on rabbits, cows, chickens, pigs and sheep - and other animals.

They would much rather, as the title of this post indicates.....stop up their ears, shut their eyes and sing "la la la" to avoid the facts (and sights and screams of terror and pain) that might cause them to have to reconsider how they go about choosing their food or what to wear.

I have had people say quite clearly that they "did not want to know" when presented with evidence of the horrors of animal use. Compassionate people, caring people, intelligent people.

Except their compassion and caring seems to evaporate when it comes to animals that are not human animals or dog animals or cat animals or rabbit animals or perhaps parakeet animals or maybe hamster animals.

Somewhere in that list of kinds of animals, all that caring and compassion disappears and it seems to turn into "anything goes as long as I don't have to directly know about it".

I am puzzled by this, and unsettled and not at all comfortable with it, I do not understand. It bothers me a lot.

I do not know how to view those that seem to presume that deliberate ignorance precludes responsibility for the consequences of ones behavior. Or maybe ignorance and/or inertia does obviate responsibility and culpability and I am too dense to get it.

I am bothered by all this.....a lot.