It's normal to be vegan

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Watching cruelty being inflicted on farm animals, as painful as that is, it’s something we need to keep looking at. The mind wants to close down, to see it as fiction rather than truth. But the mind can’t be fooled that easily, nor ignored; there’s a noble part of the mind, and it’s these scenes which stop us running away. It nudges us, even cajoles us to look at difficult problems. In this case the mind argues that until the abuse of animals stops, humans can’t move on. And most of us don’t want to be part of the rut mentality.

Apart from food and leading a healthy vegan lifestyle, this is also about breaking away from the conventional mind-set. It’s rebellion, where some of us are making a stand against the arrogance of human domination over every other being on Earth. It’s obvious to all of us, from childhood onwards, that we ‘mighty humans’ have a disproportionate advantage over all other beings. As it turns out, we’ve assumed the role of slave-masters. As human dominators, living in the rich Western world, we are trained to disregard both animals and less-advantaged humans. If we can step onto the more egalitarian road, we’ll see people as equals and never regard animals as inferiors.

If any of us find equality attractive, perhaps it’s because we are grateful for the things we have, not greedy for what we haven’t got enough of. Egalitarianism shows a regard for the disadvantaged, especially if they’re enslaved or exploited. They are something worth fighting for, for the sake of social justice.

The offshoot of this is to make us less pessimistic about the destiny of the planet. Imagine humans being as concerned about the fate of exploited animals as they are about climate change. It might not be so immediately threatening to us, the way animals are being treated, but the biggest danger is in the scale of the problem with animals; it’s threefold. There are so many billions of them in gulags all over the world. Their plight is deliberately hidden. There are seven billion humans committing slow suicide by eating them.

Even if it were only about human health it would be a tragedy, since we are dying at an alarming rate from unnecessary illnesses associated with ingesting animal protein and fat. We are consuming dangerous levels of chemicals fed to the animals that we end up eating. But the greater danger is likely to be self-generated, from the shame of stealing what rightly belongs to the animals.

Why wouldn’t we be ringing alarm bells, and why wouldn’t vegans want to brighten up the lives of their omnivorous friends? All you have to do these days is act normally - be vegan.