Doing something about it

1621: 

Perhaps as consumers we are not only brainwashed by misinformation but dazzled by the abundance of commodities in our shops. Steaks, rich dairy foods, soft woollen jumpers, elegant leather jackets, complex seafood dishes, simple cream buns, plus many other affordable items, too numerous to mention. Everything is shown to look attractive. It’s like an Aladdin’s cave which we can’t walk by without going in, unable to pass up the chance to buy and consume. None of us wants to miss out on what is so readily and inexpensively available. There is no reason to look too closely at the detail. Everything possible is done to allow us to let the horror story of animal cruelty go unremarked.

But, what goes on in the privacy of the human mind? What does our conscience tell us, regarding the wrongness of it all? Perhaps we can get away with telling ourselves that we simply don’t want to look - what the eye doesn’t see the heart can’t grieve over.  And if we do take notice and even admit that something should change, we follow that up with, “But let it not start with me. I am no leader. I’ll join you once you’re up and running. I don’t want to start the ball rolling”.

But it all came out in the 1930s, every nasty detail of animal farming was being publicised and, with each subsequent year, more was exposed. The ball has been rolling since the advent of the idea of vegan-principle gave rise to an animal rights movement. But still not many are ‘joining’.

As an example: my ‘vehicle’ is lying in a ditch. It has broken down and obviously it isn’t going to repair itself. It will lie there until I do something about it. If something needs to be done in this world of ours, surely I need to start doing what needs to be done.

What you choose to do won’t get my car out of the ditch. What you choose to eat does not affect my own responsibility towards all those enslaved animals. It is my responsibility to do what I must do. It’s a matter between me and my conscience. And I know that the less I take notice of my conscience, the weaker my central safety mechanism is. If I do nothing, I will soon enough reach the point where I’m no longer effectively in control, where I hand the controls to those who are only too eager to take them up.

         

As I might mindlessly wander into a shop and spend my money on questionable products, so then I am doing something I will regret later. If I keep on doing it there’ll come a time when I’m helpless to put any of it right again.

Recently, when the full impact of killing cattle was shown on one of our most popular TV current affairs investigation programmes, it didn’t require much of a leap of imagination to see how all beef-eaters are implicated. We were shown ugly scenes of how cattle were being killed. I heard a lot of talk about that programme, from meat-eaters, who were perhaps trying in vain to absolve themselves from what they were witnessing. But they knew they were part of it and regretted being part of it. And not long afterwards, the beef-eaters were once again eating their beef.