Converting

1438: 

I prefer NOT to try converting friends who’re already aware of my interest in ‘the animal-thing’.  Perhaps they expect me to have a go at them, that I won’t be able to resist a dig.  If I try to persuade, somewhere in my words or tone of voice, there will be a little pressure added, some moral overtone, some value judging, some guilt-inducing or shame-making.  It's almost impossible to avoid this when talking about any form of cruelty.  If I don't choose my words very carefully or if my timing is out or if I don’t round things off properly, it will go down badly, particularly badly with close friends.

Friends - I personally don’t have enough of them to lose any.  Animal Rights is especially dangerous in an ‘if-you’re-not-with-me-you’re-against-me’ sort of way.  If I'm talking 'animals' I prefer to talk in the public arena.  Because I'm not facing-off with anyone in particular, I can speak more freely.  I can accept being knocked down by people who aren’t close friends, who aren't afraid of making me sound like a fool.  This is where true interaction can take place.  It’s good for getting my ego hardened-up.

         

Everything vegans stand for (the principle of plant-based diets, animal rights, non-violence) is purposely down-played by Society.  It is given minimal press coverage.  If we try to bring issues to public attention we’re prevented.  We have to stand by, in silence, allowing blatant misinformation to mould even the minds of our closest friends.  After forty years of substantial exposure to Animal Rights, I can’t see much momentum building.  I don’t see any real sign of people questioning or challenging what they’ve been taught about humans having the right to use animals.  I get nervous about that.  It seems zombie-ish to me.  It makes me especially nervous seeing sadists near an animal whose mind is in a state of terror.  For domesticated animals there’s nothing and no hope, unless from those who want to save them. “Good luck!”, I say, for luck might prove more reliable than good nature.  Good, nature may be in general, but it is asleep on these issues, which is why Animal Rights has to speak up so insistently about slavery, captivity, killing and in some cases animal torture.  We shouldn’t have to.  But it’s all happening so routinely and it's so tacitly condoned by almost everyone, that it has become accepted.  It’s thought to be a matter of pragmatic reality.  The Animal Industries do the deed.  Then, at one stage removed, the compliant consumer supports it.

And if the humans need medicines and demand they're safe for use, then again, animals to the rescue.  At the vivisection laboratories, animal cruelty is even worse than down on the farm, but it affects fewer animals.  Again, a blind-eyed compact exists, where the tick of approval is sure to be given by the consumer, such being the need for safe pharmaceuticals.

         

It makes me wonder why I’m saying such things.  Perhaps it's because I expect more of people than they’re capable of.  I know that people are likely to be so weighed down with junk food, so chronically unwell from eating rubbish over so many years, so groggy with tiredness from eating too much of it, that they can’t any longer face-up to a major shift of consciousness - let alone conversion to veganism, however beneficial they may guess it could be.

Having said that, I realise that beyond the 98% of whacked-out consumers is the big problem posed by the remaining % - the human monsters, the most outrageous of whom profit from harming creatures, as if they don't care and as if the animals themselves don't feel the harm being done to them.  For example, someone who takes an immobilised and terrified rabbit and squirts corrosive chemicals into its eye, to test shampoos for eye safety.  This animal doesn’t stand a chance.  They can’t do anything to protect themselves from this sort of torture.

         

Whether the suffering takes place on a vivisector’s slab or on a farm or in the abattoirs, the coldness with which animals are treated is a frightening reflection on human nature.  What routinely happens to billions of them is something no sentient creature should have to experience, and no human should be capable of doing.  The perpetrator is not only insane to do it but dangerously insane for trying to influence ordinary people to think that what they do is acceptable.