Planning for the far future

1350: 

Needless to say, animals are different to us.  They possess no hubris, no superiority and they know (mainly wild animals) how dangerous humans can be (domesticated animals being too punch-drunk to know anything).  Their senses are impeccable, but they can’t judge everything about us because we are so very different from them.  However, they do realise we have power over them.

Unlike animals, we try to improve things and with that comes the violence of maintaining our position-of-dominance, over Nature and especially over animals. The damage we’ve done has come from trying to improve things by wit, strength and ruthlessness. We’ve never learnt to ‘be content with our lot’. And now, at the eleventh hour, our manipulation and bullying have brought us to the brink of catastrophe. The animals we've become dependant upon are the subject of whole economies.  They are raised in ghetto conditions, pumped with chemicals and medications to prevent disease outbreaks in the huge flocks and herds. They then provide humans with toxic food products that are nevertheless still attractive enough for humans to use to excess and be poisoned by. We are caught in the grip of cheap and harmful products which we can no longer do without.

         

Now, some of us want to turn in a completely different direction.  We want to move away from animal products because the industry which makes use of animals is no longer regarded as even remotely ethical.  But it’s like steering an ocean liner 180 degrees.  It has so much momentum that to swing it around is a slow process.  So we look beyond our own lifetime, to future generations of responsibility-takers and life-enjoyers, who we hope will, by that time, be unselfconsciously non-violent.  And let us hope that it will come naturally to them to never even contemplate taking advantage of animals for food, any more than it would occur to them to take advantage of a woman or a child for dominant sexual gratification.