Experiments in imagination

Imagine what it would be like to ‘go vegan’, trying to give things up but always finding it to be an effort. If it is like that, surely, we’ll eventually give up and go back to being omnivore. Better to look at this project in a different way, by making this an interest in experimenting and for us not to be giving up too quickly? Going vegan is not easy for everyone. As with any new skill or ‘discipline’, it needs energy and effort. But is it worth so much effort? Worth so much fear of failing? Success in this sort of experimenting starts by doing-without, that’s the first hurdle, but after that, with food-replacements, everything changes and it all becomes more interesting. 

However it's not necessarily easy; from suffering a few chemical withdrawals (as with dropping any substance we're addicted to) we come to another hurdle for vegans - the huge weight of public opinion against us. Shopping is sometimes hard. It’s easy to think it's a conspiracy! Vegan products come, and then vanish from the supermarket shelves, as if some dark force is dragging us back to more conventional behaviour. Vegans struggle from this sort of frustration as well as from general lack of support. We suffer, not so much from apathy as hindrance.

In an ideal world, there’d be some lightening of the load, a romantic notion of pioneering, a noble setting for performing acts of 'good example', and you'd think that would be enough to earn some respect, “These vegans are doing the right thing. Let’s join them”. But that certainly isn’t the case right now! In what has to be an experimental world, we are still looking for the key, to unravel the worst in human nature. And in Animal Rights, it isn’t anything so grandiose as a consciousness of great spiritual significance, it's more like an introduction to the world of testing things out for oneself. It’s what I think Animal Rights will become – a platform from which we can dialogue this and other difficult issues of the day. It's where we can exchange views without rancour and with much more constructivity, etc.

Then, we’re breaking the cycle, turning things around. Then, we’re experimenting and not just accepting-what-is.