Consistency

1608: 

I’m aware, and maybe you are too, of the scale of animal exploitation in our society. Commercial interests normalise animal abuse by concealing the truth of it. Apart from vegans, no one suggests that keeping animals captive and killing them for food is wrong. One of the greatest faults in our society is that there is never a strong enough base of compassion from which any of that sort of questioning could arise. And today, there’s still not a sufficiently strong enough ethical basis to stir people. Almost nobody questions ‘the use of animals for human consumption’, so nothing changes, and will never change unless some of us can enlighten others to the truth. That can only come about if we can show others that life is possible without resorting to using animals. 

If we can ever escape a lifetime of normalising animal-eating, then it can only start by re-examining our habits, attitudes and addictions, especially in regard to the food we eat. To re-examine all of this, we need a little altruism, and that means we need to show a level of empathy that's been numbed in us, with which we’ve complied for the sake of accepting meat and dairy and eggs into our diets.

We live in a carnivorous, violent society. The thought of leaving that behind is an attractive idea but there’s a price to pay. If Society remains as it is for any length of time, it means that we, as vegans, will be on the outer for a long time to come, and that’s an uncomfortable thought. If we can face that, it will be because our sense of empathy is strong enough to hold us together for ‘that long time’. If it is difficult for us to live in a society that shows minimal empathy, it will only make us vegans more determined to stand between our fellow humans and the animals they abuse. By considering the true victims of the System, the billions of animals for whom it’s so much worse than anything we can possibly imagine, who are living on death row, in prisons all around the world - for them there is no reason to hope.

However hard life is for any of us, rich or poor, we can be grateful that we don’t have to suffer as much as the poor creatures. We may have been born into a violent and animal-abusing world but we do have some chance, however slender, of escaping it. The animals were born with no chance of escape whatsoever. If we can hold that thought, it may help us withstand being ignored or ridiculed, and lighten the degradation we might feel at being part of this unholy human species.

What better thing can we do than set a new fashion in compassion? It is never about being ‘cool’ or even solely about being ‘vegan’, but about being consistent in our conduct, in all our daily activities. And if we aspire to consistency, we do it to set an example, which others may or may not choose to follow. We aren’t here simply to enjoy the experience of living as free human beings enjoying the advantages of a human-dominated world. We have obligations, chief of which is to show reasons for making radical attitude changes. And these, down the track, will lift humans out of their subservient, violent and weakened state to become the angels of mercy we were meant to be.