Hear no evil, see no evil

1216: 

Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence or there’s some cheap joke made, or a pretence of outright denial - nothing that makes very much sense.  People give off such a powerful signal, that they “just aren’t interested” - a sort of warning that we won’t get very far if we pursue the matter.  Their stonewalling is infuriating.  And it’s anger-making.  And it often brings out the bulldozer in vegans, when we try to break though with force.  But, it’s a waste of time, and it’s damaging too, because we deliver a handle for people to hold onto, who want a reason (any reason will do) not to listen.

But if we do get listened to, people often think we’re exaggerating, and so they maintain a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them.  “Vegans are so weird, it’s likely they’ll be exaggerating to get their point across.  Maybe lying too”.  It’s a real Catch 22 for vegans, this one.  And yet ‘this one’ is the big challenge: if we have any hope of breaking through, we have to face up to and learn the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.

This brings us back to how we deal with our own feelings of frustration at people’s attitudes.  How do we feel when we write a piece for the media and get rejected?  How do we react to a speciesist remark, say on talk-back radio?  How do we deal with being laughed at?

Public resistance comes from a low awareness of what’s happening, mixed with a deep fear that without meat life would become dull.  If they imagine that dull vegan food is all they’ll have to look forward to, it will scare them into not-wanting-to-know.  Their first reaction (the one that counts) is going to be a negative reaction to what we’re saying.  It forces them to turn a deaf ear in order to continue their more comfortable way - the way it’s always been for them.

It’s heartbreaking to see people suffering unnecessary illnesses because they eat so much animal-based foods, over such a long period of time.  I guess it’s both the food poisoning and the animal cruelty thing that makes people worry so much about their own diet-generated illnesses and disabilities. I suppose there’s sometimes a superstition element here, being punished for not responding to the injustice of harming innocent animals, but mostly it’s fear for their own health.  They know they often feel sick, but perhaps worse, they know they look silly, by protesting (pretending to believe) that none of the cruelty to animals actually exists, or worse, that if it does happen that it isn’t cruelty at all.

         

Animal husbandry sounds benign, but maintaining this sort of thinking is so far below the native intelligence of most people that they’d be better off saying nothing, because there’s no other way to wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’.  It’s as if people are taking shelter in an absurd flat-earth denial of sentience itself, judging that the cutting down of an animal is not very different to the cutting down of a tree.