Changing our personal habits

1753: 

Anyone who sees the urgent need to do something about the way we treat food-animals is going to have to ignore what they’ve previously been taught about food - they’ll have to go against tastebud-advice, against the advice of corporations, governments and educators, and turn to themselves for advice.

The issue of using animals in the food and clothing industries sits like a lead weight on our collective conscience - what we do to animals makes monsters of us. We should all be ashamed of the way animals are slaughtered, for the way hens are imprisoned in tiny cages and for the way so many animals are routinely mutilated without anaesthetic. The more I learn the more ashamed I become. I discover that newborn calves are snatched away from their mothers (most calves are shot soon after they’re born), sows are kept restrained in stalls, unable to move, cattle are mutilated (for very practical reasons, of course)  - the list of horrors goes on and on. Each one reflects on the farmers and producers, and the consumers who support all this by buying animal produce.

Now all this might be true enough, but so many of us have been or still are involved, simply by buying animal-based foods, that there’s a mass switch-off; we don’t talk about it because it throws up too many problems.

My taste buds are like yours, they respond to the same foods and yet these same foods weigh heavily on my conscience if they're animal-based. There’s a sort of numbness that comes over me when I try to think of how sentient animals are suffering. I'm glad it puts me off all animal stuff, if only to keep me away from the brutality involved in animal farming. The fact that animals (kept alive only to be eaten) are presently living in terror, and dying the most ugly death anyone could imagine says a lot about how brutal humans are. We say, “It’s outrageous”, but we still allow it to happen; by way of some nifty mental gymnastics we can relax at the dinner table and eat what we’re given. The general policy is: minds closed, mouths open, because that's what we're used to doing.

Then the brave speak up, “No longer!” ... but in reality, even if we feel outraged, we don’t think we’d have enough willpower to alter our eating habits so radically, for a principle. Nothing will be powerful enough to convince us to stop. Neither ill health, guilty conscience or issues concerning the environmental impact of animal farming.

If we do make the decision to ‘go-vegan’, we find out eventually that it’s probably the best thing we could have done for ourselves. By withdrawing our support from the Animal Industries and freeing ourselves from the addictive grip of their products, we do a repair job on ourselves and help liberate the animals at the same time. But this habit-switching is no light matter. If we give up eating meat one day, the next day we’ll be questioning the whole ethical basis of animal farming and nutrition! So what starts out as just a change of diet, now opens up significant changes of attitude and lifestyle.