Hand in hand

1283: 

The Animal Rights movement doesn’t have a lot of funding or help from top-level professionals.  So we don’t seem to have a very strong voice.  We can’t compete with the exploiters’ wealth.

They have all the material advantages.  They own the media and advertising industries.  They can buy whoever they please.  They legally sell addictive food substances to the public.  Their researchers tell them how far they can push the customer.  On this level, veganism can’t win people over.  We have to go the longer way around, at least at this stage.

All omnivorous humans in the rich Western world are having such a good time indulging in animal stuff that you can hardly expect  they’d be wanting to spoil their own fun.  They don’t want to think about food, they just want to eat it and enjoy it.  They’d rather not know about animal exploitation.  And they’re grateful that the worst of it is done behind closed doors.

In this respect, our whole society is like a mutual encouragement club – the customer goes along with what the exploiters do, just so long as their favourite animal products are available for purchase.  It’s similar to a classic drug dealing system - there’s a co-dependency between dealer and client.  We all get what we want and it’s in everyone’s interest not to welsh on the other.

But if our providers give us satisfaction, they also own us.  If we continue buying their products we’ll have less and less chance of weaning ourselves off them.  How seductive their product is.  But when you look at it more closely, it’s just smoke and mirrors, it’s as unattractive as it is attractive.  One’s attachment crumbles as soon as we puff some resistance towards it.  And that resistance comes from a deeper, more passionate, compassionate, inner self.  It’s something we can be proud of, but something we often find too many reasons for keeping locked away from ourselves.

If we do decide to rouse this sleeping giant of compassion within, it’s obvious what we have to do.  We have to drop the lot, drop everything connected with animals.  Once we become vegan, a whole new opportunity to educate others arises.  Suddenly we find ourselves in a strong position to speak up about something we’ve perhaps suppressed for a long time - the ‘animal problem’.  Up to this point we’ve been unable to defend animals because we’ve still been eating them.

By boycotting animal produce, we can reduce the impact of the exploiters and effectively help to put them out of business.  Surely that’s a noble enough cause.  But food addiction is like a lump of concrete in our gut.  The food binds both body and mind, more than we realise.  All of our life we’ve been ‘doing it’ - we salivate at the very thought of something delicious to eat (activating the reward system of the brain, rather like a ‘dopamine reaction’).  Food-shopping isn’t just a chore, it’s something else - it becomes part of our day-out, going in to the malls, supermarkets and even the corner shops, to get our fix.  They provide us with our treats and little food luxuries.  It’s here we plan our meals and even keep up our spirits by eating snacks along the way.  Our providers display, at eye level, the most popular products they know we want.  Especially regarding animal foods, the customer knows that what they are buying will soon enough be the main ingredient of a meal, which will soon enough be enjoyed by others too.  The foods on display, that we drool over, are guaranteed to bring us communal pleasure and social acceptance; by ‘eating together we stay together’.  It’s a powerful reason to forget about the animals and emphasise the need to feed ourselves and others with what pleases us most.