Empathy bonding

868:

As soon as you take up a conscience-driven, empathetic way of thinking, you can see why vegan principles make sense. It isn’t just about vegan food or just about animals on farms, it’s closely connected with other issues too, which require empathy. When it involves the environment or health or human hunger most people can feel some sort of empathy, but usually not so much for food-animals, on farms. This is where it’s so badly needed but so lacking.

Empathy is at the heart of vegan philosophy. Our vegan game plan is empathy-inspired. From an empathy-philosophy, the vegan diet has emerged. At first it throws up what seem to be almost insurmountable problems. It’s too idealistic, too unrealistic, a nice idea but it all sounds impossible. It’s too demanding to live as a vegan for the rest of one’s life.

These perceptions stand as a barrier, which most people wouldn’t attempt to overcome. Which is why our job is to help people work through the practicalities of implementing a vegan lifestyle.

            But in these early days of growing awareness of animal abuse, most talk is about animal welfare – that we may use them, but we should improve their conditions. Advocating abolition - no animal use whatever - is incomprehensible or seen as far too inconvenient. You can say that vegan consciousness is barely born.

The vegan who advocates animal rights has a huge task ahead, to radically affect the thinking of whole populations, who’ve eaten and beaten animals for a million years. Perhaps our greatest contribution isn’t to persuade people to ‘go vegan’, but to ‘grow’ empathy.

Empathy has very anthropocentric associations. Now’s the time to apply it to other species, to elevate animals to the status of sovereign, irreplaceable beings, in the same way we do our fellow humans.

Empathy ‘grows’ us. It matures us. It inspires hard work, particularly when it comes to the David and Goliath task of liberating of animals. And yet that next logical step seems so obvious when seen in terms of social justice.

I can’t rid my mind of this one simple fact: that animals are innocent. They’ve done nothing to deserve such awful punishment. They are sensitive and sentient beings. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t think of them as our brothers and sisters. There’s certainly no reason to hurt them.