Be normal: eat animals

7.

It is an irrefutable fact, that ‘almost’ every human on the planet eats meat and uses animal products! The idea that animals may be used for food, is universally accepted. This Goliath seems unconquerable … and yet the idea of Animal Rights has reached a considerable number of people. They’ve decided for themselves that they’ll no longer be party to animal exploitation. A recent survey by the Vegetarian Resources Group in USA, shows 1% are practicing vegans and so it seems that, against all odds, the ‘Rights’ movement is gaining ground. But to reach the majority who are less sensitive, less empathetic or more animal-food addicted, we might need to re-examine how we approach the majority of practicing omnivores. They may take a lot of convincing and we, as animal advocates, will have to combine all our talents to make a sufficiently large impact.

Many people are not necessarily in full control of their own actions since their minds have been bent so heavily towards the need to comply with majority behaviour. More than anything, people want to be seen as ‘normal’. They certainly don’t want to stand out as being fussy about food, food-wowsers, or weird in any way. To underline their ‘regular guy’ status, perhaps they must believe that what is normal must be ethically okay, otherwise people would reject it. From that belief stems a blind acceptance of a few dangerous premises: firstly in the belief that animals bred for food are not like dogs and cats, secondly the belief that since unloved pigs and cows and chickens are brought to life solely for the use of humans, it is then (by some contorted logic) okay to enslave them, brutally kill them and quickly forget them. Once this is accepted, the rest can be justified - to believe that it’s okay to deny these animals any sort of life of their own, and from there build a case for accepting any level of atrocity, simply by treating them like inanimate objects.