Move to activism

LAST BLOG FOR THE YEAR – back 2-1-09
As vegans (who are also animal activists) we’ve made it our business to look, and what we saw turned us vegan. And by going vegan, by protesting, we are hoping to carry with us a large proportion of our community on a wave of fashion, in being green and being ‘vegg’. With a large alteration of attitude in our own society the nature of businesses change to keep in step with the new demand.
Is this a great surge of compassion? Is it an awakening to healthy food? Is it just a fashion statement? Maybe none of these really rock the boat. The upset and consequent root and branch change of attitude may be shock-based. It may come from indignation, that we’ve been eating food from such places and not told the truth. The realisation that we’ve been kept in the dark. The question to parents, politicians, and teachers “Why didn’t you tell us?”. All of this, the energy food, the cruelty-free food, the new awareness, it all makes up a package. It’s wrapped in blame of others for not bringing us up better informed, but in the end, the springboard for us, personally, trying to move over to a vegan consciousness, this is achieved in very ordinary ways. Fashion forces may not be strong enough yet to carry us seamlessly from one world to the other so personal resolve comes into the picture, we have the rationale for change, but the will power?
As we move into adulthood or at least a state of independence where we’re cooking our own meals, we have to focus on the job in hand, we have to move on from blaming those who didn’t tell us. Blame who anyway? Just about every one of us has blood on our hands. We can even blame ourselves more than anyone else for perpetuating our own mistakes even when we knew they were mistakes. So, bugger blame! It’s a waste of space. I reckon we should drop the blame thing and move to pro-active doing. A whole lot of vegans do just that, because for them there’s no time to waste. DO something. LOOK at things … and it will follow that when we see how pigs are forced to live we drop pork, see the battery system operating we drop eggs, see an abattoir and drop everything else. Everything that has a face.
That look! If you’ve seen an animal at the abattoir, as it is led into the execution chamber, its face is unforgettable - looking at you as they face their own violent death … and the noise of her despair alongside the groan of machinery. This is quite the most diabolic scene imaginable. Enough to stop us in our tracks, check habits, boycott and fume silently. For a while this is a huge enough project in itself, but later when the food issues have been resolved and shoes and clothes are sorted then, as a practising vegan, we take time to look further and see something sadder than anything we’ve seen before, a loss within ourselves of our faith in human nature. If we feel only sadness this is more constructive than anger.

This blog is on holiday 22nd Dec - 2nd January

How to hurt animals

An animal is a free creature, predator or predated, self-feeding, a social being, with no interest in concrete structures or helping humans have a more comfortable life. But to many humans, a free animal is an animal wasted, a waste of good money. And it means nothing to them to capture and incarcerate them - they’re just money, a resource, and of course they are supported in what they do by their customers.
Humans hurt animals. We not only use physical force to make them pull a plough or race around a track but we take away their freedom of movement by putting them in pens, cages and behind barbed wire … and we do it to make them manageable, to make profit, to guarantee food supply. It isn’t questioned unless in economic terms. As competition bites, people in the animal business cut corners to stay ahead of the opposition, who could be an overseas producer. And again, the animals bear the brunt.
In a way, what we do to animals we do to ourselves. We act like Barbarians: we’ll stop at nothing. We’ll cut off tails, horns, beaks and testicles, even their very sentience when necessary. We’ll do anything. We put them behind bars, behind glass as exhibits at zoos, we treat them as things, no more. The evidence is everywhere in the countryside, mostly on farms where we can find equipment for mutilating (‘marking’), tools for cutting bits out of their bodies and trucks to cart them off to their deaths. The psychological cruelty alone would be bad enough but the slum conditions on all farms adds up to monumental cruelty. The more one discovers what happens on farms, the more one’s breath is taken away. But people in general know almost nothing about this – they are ignorant or pretend to be. We most of us live in towns and cities. We never go to the country and when we do we see the scenery, a cosy farm nestling in trees and paddocks. We never see behind the scenes nor want to. If we get to know, from pictures or TV footage, that the animals are kept like this and we know our food comes from these places, we still don’t act. We aren’t aroused to the possibility there’s anything wrong. We aren’t allowed to check out conditions on farms, for if we did it would be a case of once seen never forgotten.

Authority

Who authorises what we may do, how to think, what to eat? Kids follow adults, who give advice they followed as youngsters, modified to experience but based on the principle of Mum knows best and doctor knows best.
To question Mum and Teacher and Doctor and Priest leads to not knowing what’s for the best. Who should we listen to? Who is an authority? Should we rely on instinct? But even then we have unreliable instincts. The pleasure instinct is unreliable. Maybe the pain instinct is better, based on “if it doesn’t hurt it’s not doing you good”. Somehow our instinct needs its own reference point.
This is where we need a guiding philosophy, some basis from which we can make decisions and confirm it by instinct. I think veganism is not only an overall panacea for humans but it provides a framework for making most decisions. It simply says – “no animal foods” and it’s this one tiny principle to which all other details can refer. It won’t tell us what to eat or how to think but what NOT to.
From this plant-based platform, underscored by a non-violent approach to everything we do, our daily food choices are more straight forward. What not to eat makes it difficult for vegans to become obese or develop deadly physical conditions from food. Our diet avoids the sort of food that makes people fat or ill and filters out most of the rubbish food and fast food available everywhere. We miss out on so many things to snack on, the cakes and confections of life, but that saves us – our dietary principles filter out most of the fat foods on offer, because they’re usually made with animal by-products. We miss out on fashion too in many ways but that helps our pocket – the same principles filter out expensive items such as leather goods and silks and furs. Is all this a massive inconveniences? Yes, we get wet feet from wearing canvas shoes or or in the cold we have to wear a few more layers of cotton. And that may be inconvenient, but it’s nothing compared to the loss of the sheep’s own woollen coat or the cow’s very own skin. The shorn sheep suffers exposure on a cold night or sunburn on a hot day, the cow suffers death by skinning. It’s all such a messy business, the shame of abattoirs and shearing sheds and eggs from cages … we don’t need authority to tell us this is just plain wrong, and for us not to have any part in the ugly affairs of the animals industry. If we need any authorisation for our choices, we can refer to our own instinctive compassion - if it hurts an animal we mustn’t use it.

Breaking out

Young people have a much cleaner slate than adults. They’ve never had any freedom to choose their food so their conscience is clearer. Parents do everything for them. And when in their twenties they start living independently, the guilt over food may not have bitten too deeply, so they’re freer to try new foods, even to try out a vegan diet. There’s an added advantage. By taking this step they can literally move away from the old fashioned habits of their parent’s generation. Physically less heavy and less narrow of mind. For these reasons alone they may want to experiment to the point where they take on a whole new lifestyle.
Small children, before they’re got at, often express horror at the way animals are treated. They want to say something, do something, insist on something. But at each meal their resistance wears down until they let it drop. But for that short while, when ideals sprang up before being swamped by reality, a remembrance takes place and re-emerges later, when as independent adults the conscience awakens from a long sleep.

If conscience is the most important sense we have, if it is our most delicate sensor of the world outside, then why don’t we refer to it constantly. If we don’t exercise our conscience daily, especially about the animals we eat, we’ll probably sail on forever, consuming what ever we like until our body can stand it no longer, our health goes down the tube, or until we are so ashamed that we can’t get our life back on track. It’s embarrassing to think our food habits can be left unchecked, and we still eat what our mothers fed us. Without question. And we don’t move on. We fail to set our own agenda.

An egg to start the day

So here’s the state of things at present. We have billions of humans wanting foods produced by animals, who are unwilling to reform their diet or consider the feelings of animals. Perhaps, justification wise, there are other concerns pushing animal rights onto the back burner - money worries, family concerns, job insecurity, global warming and ill health … it’s all too much. In fact our worries can be so overwhelming that making our daily life more bearable is ALL we might want to do. So we open the fridge and choose our favourite food, for pleasure and diversion. But if we do escape this way, by eating, we know there’s a negative health pay-back plus a sting in the tail - another tiny death to some part of our conscience.
After sunrise at the abattoir the killing begins. And in a way it begins when we wake, when we’re eating our breakfast, lifting a small spoon to crack the shell of our breakfast egg. This reminds us of the same egg we saw on TV last night – when a group of animal liberators went to rescue some hens at a battery farm, who were living in squalid conditions … and here, as we sit eating an egg we notice it’s the last one in the carton, reminding us to buy some more from the store. And so the cycle continues.
We use products containing eggs (which are always from caged hens). We follow appetite, we don’t follow conscience, and the oftener we do it the less attention we pay to it … and then the conscience ceases to function altogether. So we see the animal cruelty on TV and immediately forget it, because we want eggs and we’ll soon be buying some more eggs. We can always rely on our habits to we get us what we want.

Wanting

Because people are focused on wanting they won’t listen to what we have to say. Vegans can scream about it all they like, but we have to deal with things as they are. We are looking at a deep seated fear in people, often unexpressed, that illness is waiting to grab them, and yet they still prefer to live dangerously rather than give up anything. Take a person with heart disease who has to face surgery. They might have avoided the damage by not clogging up their arteries with fat-saturated food, but they didn’t. They continued to clog their arteries, and let the hospitalisation deal with the problems later.
So vegans have two jobs: to make plant foods attractive enough to live on, without needing animal products, and to convince food addicts that prevention is better than cure. We need to be inspiring on the one hand and warning on the other. And we need to be flexible enough to play both cunningly and compassionately, interacting with others on this matter like a proper friend would.

Those people who are most obstinate are the most food-seduced – in their mind they’re unable to be without animal food. It’s not just a matter of nutrition, it’s the problem of getting off the habit … it’s easier said than done. For two whole decades before reaching adulthood, most of us have been powerlessness to change our eating habits, and in this respect most parents are guilty of feeding their children addictive, harmful and unethical foods. When kids grow up and start feeding themselves they soon get hooked on the fast food version of what Mum used to cook them. Weight creeps up and a ‘live-now-pay-later’ mentality prevails. Kids aren’t warned about the dangers of addiction and seduction, so usually Mum and Dad turn out to be the kids’ unwitting supplier.
Like the use of narcotics (or anything stimulating which is difficult to give up), animal foods are there from the word go, in our daily lives. And with such a great variety of mildly addictive products on the market many of them are as difficult to shake as any of the classic abuse-substances. Once we’re in the grip of these products there seems to be no way out.
If animal foods are addictive, not in quite the same way as heroin but addictive all the same, then these foods, the taste of them, the thought of them, the low cost of them, make people determined to get them. It may be the hunger for a burger or chocolate or pizza, but every day that ‘hunger’ arrives and, once satisfied, it leaves its mark, especially since we can repeat the experience whenever we like. For the wealthy Westerner there’s no thought of doing without these foods, unless they’re making us fat. The very idea of giving up a favourite food because of the link with animal suffering is unthinkable. In fact even animal welfare, let alone animal rights, is something most people never give a thought to. It wouldn’t be on their radar.
If it is … they’re probably already on the way to becoming vegan.

Anger

When you tell some people about what’s happening to animals, they have the gall to say they don’t want to know. “Gall”, now that’s a word implying spiteful impudence. Not a trait anyone owns up to but the sort of cop-out vegans are used to. But we are perplexed by it too. Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence or there’s outright avoidance, or denial or ridicule - nothing that makes very much sense. People give off such a powerful signal that they “just aren’t interested” ( as we’d say to those annoying tele-marketers who ring at dinner time). But to us it’s infuriating when people aren’t interested. It often brings out the bulldozer in vegans, and they try to break though with force.
All a complete waste of time, and damaging too, because no one’s listening.
But if we do get listened to, people often think we’re exaggerating, and so they maintain a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them. “Vegans are weird so it’s likely they’ll be lying too”. It’s a real Catch 22 for vegans, this one.
… And yet ‘this one’ is the big challenge: the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.
Shocked by their gall it’s difficult to transmute our anger into something more constructive, like writing or public speaking without showing anger. But how do we deal with our own feelings of frustrations at people’s attitudes? How do we feel when we write to the media and get rejected? How do we react to a speciesist remark, say on talk-back radio? How do we deal with being laughed at?
It’s frustration I feel when every argument I put up slides off the duck’s back. And yet that’s the reality. Public resistance comes from a low awareness mixed with deep fear that vegan food is all they’ll have to look forward to. It scares people into a negative reaction to what vegans are saying. It forces them to turn a deaf ear and continue the way they’ve always been. It’s heartbreaking to see people suffering unnecessary illnesses because they won’t see reason. And I guess it’s both the food poisoning and the animal cruelty thing that makes people feel sick and look silly, by pretending to believe that none of the cruelty to animals actually happens, or worse, that if it does happen that it isn’t cruelty at all.
Animal husbandry sounds benign in an ‘all’s-well, god’s-in-his-heaven’, sort of way. But this thinking is so far below the native intelligence of most people that they’re better off saying nothing … because there’s no other way to wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’. It’s as if people are taking shelter in an absurd flat-earth denial of sentience, holding that the cutting down of an animal is not very different to the cutting down of a tree.

Care

We might say we care, but it has limited meaning because we continue eating the stuff of animals, who themselves could be our most precious objects of care. We eat their by-products, we consume the whole of their bodies, and we know this activity is only possible because we enslave them. Slavery is the only way a farmer can survive, by aiming at the lowest costs, in rearing their animals. The consumer goes hand in hand with the farmer in this, each dependant on maintaining the violence to stay afloat. And for this, at some level, both farmer and consumer will lose self respect. How can anyone approve or enjoy being caught up in routine violence towards animals?
Look at this from the individual animal’s point of view. Take a hen. There’s nothing natural left in her life. She only ever knows loneliness and pain - she’s mutilated, roughly handled, imprisoned, and when very young her pen is a smallish prison cell, into which there comes no sunlight, no fresh air, no soil, no plant life, no natural sounds and no mother, but what comes aplenty is food. Afterwards, for the rest of her assigned life, there is a period of some eighteen months (whilst her body menstruates and she lays) which now becomes that much more painful. There’s an even greater space restriction – she’s caged into a tiny no-room-to-move space, with two or three other hens. Her whole existence is spent standing on a large-mesh wire flooring, breathing ammonia from the excreta of thousands of other birds who also live in the shed. Synthetic lighting, screeching of demented hens, the inability to move within her cage let alone escape from it - this tormented imprisonment is what consumers support every time they eat an egg, or buy a product made with eggs in it. Is it any wonder vegans are so outraged. Not only by the cruelty but by the indifference of their fellows, who have the gall to say, “No thanks - I don’t want to know”.

Squirming

You take any man or woman on the street and ask them if they know what factory farming is. They will squirm and struggle and pretend not to know. But of course we don’t go up to people on the street and ask them this sort of question, so there’s very little squirming going on. But there are a lot of ugly decisions being made that affect others. Most are blocked off from animal information when choosing what to do and then, once made, we effectively back ourselves into a corner, or rather we’re backed up, along with everyone else, in a long traffic jam of habit. To get out of it we need a root and branch choices change.
It sounds a bit like anal retention, all this ‘backing up’ and blocking off. Like an awareness filter, shielding us from memories of things we’ve done and regretted. Feelings associated with those memories we’ve experienced. When we had broken love affairs, when we feasted on ‘thanksgiving turkey’ - a hard lump that won’t settle, linked with unresolved questions. And what’s so galling is that our most damaging mistakes may be down to ‘false intelligence’, mistakes which are costing us although still profitting them. Our health is being damaged by those who add dangerous chemicals into animal feed and tthence into our own systems. Our ethics damaged by what is done to get this food to us. By taking part in it, consuming dubious products we make regrettable mistakes.
As an example, take the egg sitting on the breakfast plate - it’s the first thing we see in the morning, reminding us of where this egg came from so it doesn’t look like food. Instead this is biologically forced from a hen in a cage which is an unattractive thought and a constipating experience anyway. Our blocked up system and the grimness of the egg trade reminds us to examine what we do. And again another grim reminder when we’re eating a steak, to know that this meat is from a castrated bullock, who had the knife taken to his private parts when young and another knife taken to his throat when older and fatter. Our animal food has to involve this murderous process, but because it is done by others, by people down the road who get paid to do it, we reckon not to care about it. It’s not the blade of the slaughterer but our dinner knife that’s the main threat to a hen, cow, pig or sheep.

The animals

What is happening to them? Nothing is happening for them, that’s for sure. To their minders, their health and welfare isn’t a concern unless it affects their economic viability. As soon as Daisy isn’t earning her board and lodging she’s off to the abattoir. What sort of calculated and violent relationship is that?
It is in fact simply slave master and slave, and that practically no relationship at all, leastways not at all a pleasant situation for an animal to find herself in. Perhaps her slavery is even more pernicious than human slavery because, unlike a human, she has no way of dealing with the torment of it. She has no ability to reason or project her future, or plan an escape. Her every ‘now’ moment must be an empty place, especially as her minders are crueller and more indifferent than ever. And ever more desperate to extract all they can from their animals, to keep themselves in business. The difficulty of turning a profit is compounded by the vast numbers of consumers demanding low priced food, which means the very lowest living expenses for animals. Customers want cheap, and they’re likely to buy imported goods if they’re cheaper than home-produced.
The finger of blame certainly points to …? Who? Everyone who spends money on animal food and clothing … but there’s more to it than buying and eating. By wanting to stay uninformed about ‘methods in modern animal husbandry’, the ordinary consumer is not so very different to the shareholder of an arms manufacturer, who only wants to know about dividends not what the weapons do. No one wants to know about the provenance of the goods and services they buy because they’d have to share the responsibility for what goes on behind the scenes.

Obstinacy giving way to change

When it happens, or rather when the majority make it happen by sending animal businesses broke, we’ll probably see changes come about rapidly; changes that seem so clear because there aren’t any exemptions; not so much a legal change as much as a fashion change; The ‘yuck’ factor playing a prominent part; animal foods on the nose; outside the black market animal food is no longer available; plant based foods push ‘the other stuff’ off the shelves. It could all happen this way for us in ‘the West’.
The country we live in, if we’re lucky enough to have some arable land, allows us the choice to be vegetarian, indeed completely herbivore. Obviously there are communities who are solely dependent upon animal foods for their survival, so morally they may have a case to argue. But over 90% of the world’s population are not living as the Inuit do, or the dessert dwellers, or the highlanders or islanders, where plants can’t be grown for food. We in the fertile lands have access to plant foods and can flourish on them (as societies have done, healthily, down through the ages). The relative ‘cleanness’ of plant food over animal food is so evident that why anyone would need to poison their body with sub-standard food is a mystery. Or why anyone would choose to live with so much shame, that’s an even bigger mystery.

Obstinate to the core

A vegan’s conscience is outraged at the very idea of slavery and particularly the obstinacy of thought that we can’t survive unless we enslave animals. It’s reminiscent of the ending of human slavery in USA when they predicted inevitable collapse of the cotton and sugar industries – but the industries survived and thrived … and soon enough the idea of enslaving humans became repugnant and then illegal. It could be the same for animal slavery. We can survive and thrive without eating animals or using by-products or co-products like leather, and we can more than survive without consuming the body parts of animals themselves. We can also be happy and healthy without being clothed or entertained or medicated at the expense of animals. But that isn’t believed by most people. It isn’t even taken seriously. And that’s our great challenge.
But when it does happen, once it is realised, then it’s business-as-usual for humans, then we can get on with human development, uninterrupted. Once we drop the animal dependency, and not until, we can address the other major problems still facing the world, such as war, disease, pollution and hunger.
The agony of the human race is it’s obstinacy, having solvable problems held back by a collective reluctance to drop animal slavery. Instead of challenging ourselves to work with Nature we attempt to bypass Nature and fail over and over again. Our addiction to animal products compounds our obstinacy, so we stand less chance of surviving because we remain slave masters to animals. And why should we not? We seem to have got away with it so far? … but all that means is the thief hasn’t been caught yet.
A compassionate society can’t grow whilst human slavery exists, and now stepping further - the only chance humanity has of surviving is by giving up bacon at breakfast and leather shoes and aquariums full of sea creatures. The lot must go if we want to move on.

Obstinacy

While we can speak out we should. While there’s no risk of being thrown into jail, animal rights can be promoted as a valid non-violence-based protest movement. And then, once securely established, it will almost certainly be a downhill run, and the authorities will then have something to worry about. And the animal industries might worry too - that that no one wants their stuff any longer. They’ll probably succeed in pushing animal rights underground. So, in the meantime, in these early days of basking in our freedom-of-speech, we should be speaking up for animal rights. We can either quietly encourage or shout our message as loudly as we can – either way if people listen they will because we have strong beliefs and the courage of our convictions. Our outrage is our strength, but we need quietness too because we don’t have all the answers, particularly, we still don’t know why conscience pricks some and not others. So as much as we need to speak out we need to listen and learn, to find out where other peoples’ head are at, thence how to reach them. It isn’t just a case of offering information but identifying what blocks people’s conscience.

Opening our mouths is not yet a crime

The major issues in our world are being trivialised or ignored completely. The issue of animal exploitation is a prime example. We are pressed, as if idiots, to see a benign picture of happy farm animals living in pretty farm yards. We’re soothed by TV chefs doing animal cuisine shows. We’re beguiled by the way supermarkets care for quality. And all the while we know it’s phoney, and one hell of a calculated misleading of the public.
Once we get past this and become vegan, it’s as if we then have to take on the whole world. And that’s too much for anyone so, we need to be practical. Yes, we might want to right the wrong, but actually doing it is tricky. Veganism is hard enough just on a personal level or in terms of surviving within our own community, but to knock away the cornerstone of our society, by questioning the efficacy of its foods and the integrity of our food producers, that’s a bold step to take. And if there is any headway made, towards too many people recognising animal rights, the influential people won’t be happy.
In Australia it might not yet be a crime to ‘disparage food’, but in certain parts of America, disparaging certain foods in public is a crime. And that’s because people with influence want to prevent any profit-destroying truth getting out. If it all became public knowledge, the meat trade could go into meltdown. Not only would it be damaging to the allied industries but the ripple effect could bring the whole economy down.

Our conscience voice

So, here we have it, the battle between body and conscience. The battle goes on every day in our decision making. We project all the factors we can think of and then make our choice, usually in our own interest. Sometimes that choice is at the expense of animals. Could we call them ‘satisfaction decisions’ because they aren’t based on ethics?
In a subsistence environment we’d have hardly any choices to make, but in our world it’s different. We’re offered so many temptations that some things we do, and not done especially consciously, turn out to be mistakes. We follow others, we follow habits and we use autopilot. We prefer minimum thinking tasks. We like to emphasis energy-conservation. We prefer doing things the easiest way possible.
Was it for that we humans were given such good brains? Now, as couch potatoes, it makes no sense to stand for anything very much. Certainly not to get active against the majority viewpoint. Therefore we don’t question normal practice, and we don’t look at the rights and wrongs of things. We are eager followers when food tastes good. We do what we do unquestioningly, just as we’ve done for the whole of our lives. We segue into adulthood on the lubricated wheels of habit. We continue to do what we’ve been taught to do. And when that involves food most of us gladly roll over when it tickles our fancy.
So, by questioning our community on such a grand scale, as vegans do, we marginalise ourselves. We lose about 99% of our support base just by way of the food we eat. But we go further. We seem to alienate our taste-buds and pleasure-zone experiences too. We get off side with people: we seem to get off side, masochistically, with our bodies … for the sake of it?
For the sake of the animals. This is what balances it all. This is the reason for taking such a bold step. And it might be a mixture of animal compassion, the future of our children and grandchildren, or just for cheaper food bills. Whatever the reason, it’s the kick start that counts. It’s the outrage at how things are at present. It’s the cruelty, irresponsibility and waste of money. It’s being misled. Teachers, parents, doctors, VIPs, priests, rock stars, writers, academics – they don’t stand up, so we are misled by each and every leader (with notable exceptions). We’ve been led astray to such an extent that we might want to put that right before we do anything else. And the first step is to step away, to disassociate … which brings us back to the animal question: the excesses of animal abuse and the vested interests, who win at the expense of the gullible consumer. Our conscience is our guide.

The real friction between vegans and non-vegans is that what we avoid they relish. Even though they may be as horror-struck as vegans, they know they are incapable of speaking out about it. Fist in mouth they stand in the Quiet Club. And when things don’t feel right in the stomach and animal products feel as though they are poison, and the animal cruelty thing haunts us into self loathing, we get used to it. It’s just an every day lack of well being we’re feeling.
If we are still ‘using’, although strong genes or insensitivity may help, in terms of self respect we know we’re dead meat. By eating animals we wreck our body and disqualify ourselves as peaceniks. Whether ‘straight’ or hippy, old worlder or new ager, somewhere along the line we give up a dream.
If we’ve given away our chance to be an agent of peace in the world, it seems a sad thing that it’s because of a food attachment or a desire to have a fur wrapped around our shoulders. To a greater or lesser degree we all have blood on our hands and plenty of poison in our bodies, but our souls are bruised by it too, by this daily condoning of violence within our society, to which we all subscribe.
Every time the knife cuts the life out of an animal and we condone it by spending our money, we are also taking some of that cut - the animals’ bodies we buy slowly making us ill. Simply by ingesting animals every day (of our lives), consuming the concentrated toxins from the foods they’ve eaten plus the adrenaline of terror at the point of execution, all this conspires to weaken our immune systems. And after that we don’t stand a chance. This is why vegans simply say “keep off the stuff and keep your health (and conscience).
By not suffering under a tastebud dictatorship, vegans stand a better chance of avoiding getting hooked. But for those who aren’t vegan yet, it isn’t only the food that’s involved, there are shoes and zoos and animal tested shampoos and so much more. By spending money on the goods and services from animal slavery, we build an effective barrier to making any headway towards our own spiritual development.

Quality of life versus a seconds world

If we aren’t ready to move on, towards eating vegan food, then as semi-vegetarians we lump ourselves in with the meat heads. If we use animals we can’t condemn their use. Non-vegans may not like eating meat but because they eat the by-product of animals, they condone the same level of cruelty and still have to belong to the Quiet Club. What can they say? “Yes, I eat ‘it’ but it’s wrong”. We literally have to put our money where our mouth is and buy cruelty-free all the time, or remain voiceless.
Without playing a role in their liberation and being part of a world-wide awakening consciousness, there’s not much meaning left to us, because we’re still part of the system. We’re unable to condemn it so we have to look for ways to divert ourselves … and we usually go for general entertainment and self-satisfying activities.
This could be seen as blocking one main path to satisfaction. By denying ourselves a certain quality of satisfaction we take away the meaning in our lives, If we do miss out on the satisfaction that comes from advocating for animals, we are forced to retreat into the fun world, a poor substitute for the real thing. For each day to be full of meaning, passion and goal oriented activity (in whatever form it takes) brings satisfaction - that whatever we are doing is bringing quality into our life, a feeling at the end of the day that we couldn’t have done anything better. I suspect vegans know about this feeling.
Everyone else is in Seconds World .

The pleasure-heads

As we grow up we split into two camps, those who make a living out of animals and those who don’t. It’s from the second group, obviously, that people move into the Animal Rights Movement. And from there we make certain demands or suggestions to others.
If the hard-hearted or obstinate ones, and those working in the animal business, are hostile (because vegans are a potential threat to their livelihoods) they’re even more so because they don’t like being told what to eat. Those who are committed to a lifetime of meat, especially those who work for the industry, could never contemplate the idea of animals having rights. If they’re protective of their jobs, imagine how much more protective the rich animal profiteers are, with their fortunes in the balance.
So their unapproachableness is understandable. All we can do is show them we love them no less … and then move on. If they are hostile and rigid with fear, and trying not to show it, they seem not to care about justifying what they eat. They belong to a group world where they can continue to eat their favourite foods undisturbed. They may not nail a ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ sign on their gates but they have a protective shield to fend off anyone spouting vegan propaganda. They prefer to maintain a pleasure-head lifestyle. We can’t change that. We might have to move on, not worrying what they think, for it’s the others who are the more interesting ones. They think their food is pleasurable but they’re open to vegan suggestions. Suggestions that there may be other tastes and textures in food to be discovered, and on that basis alone they’re willing to listen. After that, for them, it’s easy to shop and try new things and see how they cook and do an all-vegan food trial. Out of that may come a realisation that non-animal foods are okay to eat. And that could mean it’s okay to go vegan.

Disconnection

Because the law allows the exploitation of animals, none of it registers as a crime, whether it be the caging of animals in zoos, the experimenting on them in laboratories, the suffocating of fish on decks or the ultimately disgusting factory farming of pigs and chickens.
For the mass of the population, there has to be a ‘disconnect’ between two great forces – the inner beauty of our own humanity versus inner food craving. Animal food is so endemic in our community that it affects the educated and rich in much the same way as the uneducated and poor. We all fall for it. And whether or not we’re religious we’re seduce-able. Our number one impulse is to find food enjoyment.
No. 2 impulse may be to self-justify what we do. It helps to win social acceptance but it’s not as powerful as No.1 – food and mouth pleasure centre. Rarely if ever do we feel the need to justify ANY of it. The provenance of our food doesn’t interest us, as adults. But it can bother children when they first find out about ‘what happens to animals’ . . . and yet kids aren’t in any position to complain. They do what they’re told. They have to or they’d starve or at least not get lots of yummy things they DO like. They conform. We all did. And the dinner table isn’t usually the conformity we mind. Mum dishes up ready-to-eat food, and some of it is so yummy we craved it. We are programmed to include animal products in that catagory.
When we come to adulthood we have decisions to make, and this provenance thing over food is one of them. Should we or shouldn’t we?

Duped

Even though conspiracy theories abound and we laugh at them and call them preposterous, somewhere in our mind we suspect we are being taken for a ride. To those with vested interests, our money spent on animal industry products is more important to them than considering our welfare. To those who care little about animal cruelty the customers’ conscience is of no concern. The inaction of politicians is suspicious as well - their complicity with scientists and the shareholders of animal industries and the rural lobby, is their guarantee of a support base. Each benefits from the other. They play into each others’ hands to make money out of the consumer and if they do successfully poison the public, or at least peddle unhealthy food, we the consumer are letting them get away with it. If they are complicit in animal cruelty we raise no objection. The consumer may be the victim of an outrage but they too as individuals have a choice, and there’s nothing illegal about either their compliance or the industry’s cruelty to animals. To be an omnivore is safe enough for everyone involved, because it’s legal. It’s legal and therefore acceptable socially. And very acceptable to the chief animal abusers, who are getting richer by the minute.
But the strangest thing about all this is that these same people are falling on their own swords. The profiteers of the animal abuse system are wealthy enough to eat ‘well’ and usually they’re inclined to eat rich food, and, you’ve guessed, that includes a lot of animal product. Ironic! The same animals they use to make their wealth ruin their health. The big question is, why doesn’t it occur to them to avoid these foods? The scientists especially should know the dangers associated with animal foods. And you’d think the spiritual leaders of our communities would respond to the horror stories about animal farms and abattoirs. But no, they say nothing. It seems that social status in our community relies so heavily on conformity that to blow the whistle on any of this would mean social suicide, Whatever group we associate with, it’s our own security we value most. And conformity is integral to that. If anyone from the establishment spoke up there’d be hell to pay. The scientists would lose their grants, the politicians their pre-selections and the priests their parishes. That’s why they wouldn’t ever consider supporting vegan principles. No one would do that to themselves. So, the habit of using animal products continues. And for the consumer to be part of that they must numb their feeling for animals and refuse to look at the uses we put them to.

Between a rock and a hard place

The horror stories about animals on farms and at the abattoir are a cause of grief to vegans but not only vegans. They horrify and confront sensitive non-vegans too, but for them it’s mixed with a fear of finding out too much. Whatever they hear implicates them personally, and more so when they realise that it actually happens routinely and on such a massive scale. If their heart isn’t touched then we can assume we’re dealing with a cold hearted person, or possibly a person trying to bury their head in the sand.
We may feel depressed about it, we may become aware of the animal holocaust going on all about us, but it’s a question of whether or not we are prepared to act to prevent it (or rather act to discontinue our support of it). How horrific do the stories have to be, to make us boldly step away from what others are doing? Even to act solo in defiance of members of our own family and network of friends? People-pressure and social acceptability are so powerful that we can feel unable to act independently, even though we know we should.
Animals, from which our foods come, are badly used and we know it. But even though we feel guilt, even though we know animal foods are nutritionally dangerous, we may yet not act. For if we do decide to change, it’s all or nothing and we must go all the way. There are no in betweens and in reality there’s no going back. It’s as if we step out of one world into another.