Conscience

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By staying well away from animal products, vegans stay in touch with their conscience. Growing up as omnivores, to some extent we actively suppress the conscience, so that we can eat the same foods as others do, so we can fit into adult society. But once we ‘go vegan’, we regain the fighting spirit we might have had as kids. We can rebel against the status quo and use conscience to guide us.

            Conscience is there to stop us acting recklessly. While vegans aren’t necessarily nicer people than carnivores, veganism does give us the opportunity to be so. We travel lighter on our feet: we don’t wear leaden boots: we don’t trample the roses. We treat animals as ‘people’, respect their sovereignty.

Most people don’t give much thought to enslaved animals. They might want to but they know, if they did, a thousand products would fall off the edge of their shopping list. Which is what makes veganism so difficult to consider.

            They might have enough sensitivity to appreciate the sentience of animals but don’t think they’d have enough discipline to overthrow a whole lifestyle system, on their behalf. Or keep it up permanently. Probably, most omnivores think it best NOT to go down that road in the first place. They think it’s best not to know, not to notice the ingredients list on products, not to know about husbandry methods on farms, and not to know about the idea of ‘vegan principle’.

            What then must happen? A number one aim might be to avoid contact with vegans and animal rights advocates altogether, to keep shut the flood gates of ‘knowing’. But that is increasingly difficult today, since to NOT hear about what is going on in the animal farming business is almost impossible.

            The more we hear horrible stories of caging and confining animals, and their routine brutalising and killing, the harder it is to ignore. We have to become serial forgetters or doubters or ‘not-knowers’, which in turn saps one’s confidence to determine the sort of life we lead.