Between a rock and a hard place

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The horror stories about animals in farms and abattoirs horrify and confront all sensitive people, whether vegan or not. But for omnivores it’s a  mixed message. “I love animals but I’m afraid of finding out too much.”          

As soon as we know what’s happening ‘down on the farm’ we realise that it implicates just about everyone, because of what we eat. We’re all connected, some more than others, in something so routine that it seems futile to try to fight it, especially when it seems that most people are far too cold-hearted to care. Most people just don’t want to know, the animal-holocaust being a daily event but out of sight and therefore out of mind. However horrific it is, it doesn’t make most-people step away from their eating habits.

Vegans, perhaps more horrified and better informed, have stepped away. As a vegan I, personally, would like to see people better informed, leading them to re-examine their values and change their priorities. A big task!

To be an animal activist means you probably have to act solo, in defiance of family, friends and social pressure. To act independently takes courage.  Some would say animal-activism is an impossible dream. But so what? What else can you do but try to change things?

Farm animals (‘food animals’) are badly used, and we all know it. But even though every educated adult, in every part of the world, possibly feels some guilt about it, they might not deem it important enough to make changes to the way they live. The reasoning behind inaction, on the part of almost every person, is the never-ending question vegans contemplate. Until we unlock that particular mystery - why some do respond, why some don’t - our way forward won’t be clear.

If you DO act, if you do respond, your life changes quite dramatically. By being an advocate for the ‘abolition-of-animal-slavery’, one is marked-out as an ‘all or nothing abolitionist’. And since you can’t be a little bit abolitionist any more than a woman can be a little bit pregnant, once you’ve said “I’m vegan-on-principle”, in reality there’s no going back. Only when you’ve faced your cravings can you step out of one world and into another. I don’t mean there’s a Vegan Club-of-Paradise, I mean ‘step-out’ mind-wise, with an altered perception of on the shopping list.