Daring to go vegan might be a mental health issue

Saturday 22nd January 2011
Let’s say that billions of people know what they do when they eat any animal product - they realise what must go on behind the scenes before the milk or meat can arrive in a shop. They’d be very naive or ill-informed if they didn’t. Let us say that, nonetheless, they continue eating them. Why don’t they stop? The question could be put another way: why would they want to?
Let’s now imagine the one percent are vegan or moving that way. It’s a tiny fraction of the world’s population. But to us, we see the world substantially differently. To us animals aren’t the same as carrots. We have never been either, but we can make a good guess, that unlike carrots, animals have a sens of their own identity and can, on an individual level, feel emotion and will walk away from danger. They know they don’t want to suffer. This much any of us would have to admit, that sentient creatures are unhappy to be slaves of humans. So, why do we treat animals like carrots? How have we come to that? How did we lose our connection with them?
Well that question could set off a whole history book of movements in humankind, moving from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to captive breeding and factory farming, but this book would obscure the ‘wood from the trees’. That it has happened is sad enough but it shines a light on a more general matter - our own dis-connectivity. Our collective decision to separate from the animals makes no more pertinent statement than our saying “animals shall not matter”. When we say what others say, that animals aren’t as ‘individual’ as we are we step onto a dangerous path. If we believe that animals are amorphous and incapable of feeling on an individual basis, then where did that come from? Isn’t this ultimately complacent?
Animal Rights and veganism come down to a mental health issue - a concern in people that although sympathetic, even empathetic, their concern is greater for their own stability than the safety of unknown animals. Vegans have taken the plunge and tested their own mental health, their dependency of animal products to give them the necessary lift. ‘Necessary’? That’s what vegans don’t accept, that it is even necessary to be frightened into staying with one’s addictions for the sake of keeping one’s mental stability. Indeed they argue that it is this very dependency that undermined mental stability ... and of course physical health.
Vegans obviously see animals as too close, sentiently, to us to treat them like pariahs. As if we thought them to be un-person, just as the slave owners did negroes or Nazis Jews.
Vegans and omnivores are on very different platforms, that is if they ever get to being on a debating platforms. We would say this: why are we allowing such a vast assault on animals to take place right under our noses? Isn’t that the most insane thing we could be doing to ourselves. Omnivores do care about their own sanity and general health, to an extent, but probably believe they’ll sort of ‘get away with it’. They’d argue that they really don’t care enough to make such a radical change to their lives. And little benefit or little kudos in going vegan, or even to become vegetarian.
If the omnivore really doesn’t care or is complacent about their own mental health, guilt, conscience etc. then they can never get past where they are now. Their habits, which at worst are barbaric and at best mindless, will always undo them.