A time for change

1614: 

There could be many reasons for eating meat, caging animals and experimenting on them. An exploitative approach to animals is certainly advantageous to humans – it’s cheaper and easier all round when you’re a member of the dominant species. Using animals is especially attractive to the urban consumer who doesn’t need to have any close connection with the living variety of animals, only dead ones.

Over the past thirty years (a mere pinprick of time) we city dwellers have come to know much more about cruelty involving ‘food’ animals. But down through the centuries there’s always been some sort of ‘knowing’. It’s a bit like pollution, it’s always been with us but never more apparent than now. It’s been the same with starvation and slavery - these problems are as old as the hills, as has been our guilt about them.

Humans have dominated the environment, including the most useful animals, for perhaps two million years. Now we can see what that has led to. Following our awareness of human ability to dominate has come the long term effects of that – namely a whole variety of unforeseen dangers. But another strand of a growing awareness has given us the chance to repair what we’ve done. And although the repaired state may take some time to take effect, it might be just enough for us to realise the full extent of the damage we’ve done to the planet and its inhabitants. In the meantime, for us to survive long enough to bring about repair, we’d do well to realise the extent of the dangers facing us from the deadly illnesses that plague us today, which have a strong association with the eating of animals.

Eventually we’ll say, “This has gone far enough!!” and we’ll all become seriously herbivorous and non-exploitative. But for the present, the vast majority of omnivores aren’t quite ill enough or guilt-ridden enough to see the need for personal change. And that must happen before a collective change can take place.

Our collective consciousness is still too rigid to brook any real movement. We are collective enough in habit but still so individually driven that we have no faith that there could be a collective call for change. On an individual basis, we don’t really believe we’re safe enough to explore new possibilities on our own. We want others to come with us. And this is the problem facing vegans at present – we have a convincing recipe for permanent repair and change, but we don’t have the means to implement it. We still don’t know how to convince people to give up what they’re used to for what they don’t yet know exists.