Vegan

1401:

‘Vegan’ sounds difficult. Not hard to understand but hard to carry out.  It’s based on a theory that a small child could understand but an adult will inevitably find hard to practice; habits are entrenched, addictions established, and diet-change will always be daunting.  Becoming vegan doesn’t only mean altering attitudes, discarding leather shoes or replacing our woollen jumpers, it mostly comes down to giving-up many of our favourite foods.  And that’s not appealing.

By adjusting our food, clothing, footwear, entertainments and cosmetics because of their animal connections, we feel like we’ve become social misfits.  Our motives will probably be misunderstood, because no one will bother to find out why we are making life so difficult for ourselves.  It’s enough to put anyone off.

         

But to put it all in perspective, this is one mighty principle that vegans are trying to defend.  It’s so mighty that we must be prepared to be misunderstood.  Our own integrity is on the line here, not to mention our carbon footprint, and the chance to solve the world food shortage in ‘hungry’ countries. 

Being a vegan may be difficult, but the clincher is in our disassociation from involvement with animal cruelty.  Whatever hardships we endure as vegans living in a non-vegan society, nothing’s really that hard compared to what animals have to put up with.  The thought of the suffering they go through makes boycotting their ‘products’ a small price to pay.

         

No, going vegan isn’t a breeze.  On a personal level there’s addiction to certain favourite foods to deal with, and then being up against a popular belief that a plant-based diet might be inadequate.  But once all that is ironed out, something else begins to happen.  There’s a wish to bring others across.  There’s a need to start talking to others about it.  And then a new frustration begins, when one realises that the scale of ignorance is far greater than had been realised, and it’s combined with a level of obstinacy, where people don’t know, don’t care or refuse to listen.  Then the big difficulties begin.

         

The hurdles of actually becoming vegan, once overcome, make way for fresh obstacles where the vegan who wants to talk Animal Rights meets a brick wall, and feel so frustrated by this that they have nothing to lose by stirring people up.  A huge divide opens up.  A belief forms that the only way to ‘get people to listen’ is to shock them.  You wear a badge with the slogan “Meat is Murder”, knowing that it’s really saying “You are a murderer”.  Nothing could be more insulting than to call a person a murderer.  So the battle lines are drawn. 

         

From it being a personal project, with difficulties now overcome, we might never have taken into account how important recognition might be.  To be NOT recognised for what we’ve achieved, for our gesture NOT to be taken seriously, that's enough to make the blood boil. It is enough, indeed, to make war on all those who downgrade what we’ve done.

         

And that’s roughly where many of us who are vegan now find ourselves, unsupported and disliked because of the importance we’ve given to our ‘going vegan’.  How vegans deal with this is the great challenge.