Lining Powerful Pockets

1871:

When we get bogged down in discussions about the rights and wrongs of using animals for food and clothing, our best fall-back position is “the cruelty of it all”. This is the ‘yuk’ factor which makes everyone feel uncomfortable. It’s the ugliness of animal farming, the convention of it, that vegans are persuading people to move away from. So, in our defence of animal rights, we can consider ‘no-more-cruelty’ as the core of our argument.

How sad it is that we part so readily with our dollars, and hand them over to those who perform all this cruelty on animals. If we stop making the rich richer by buying none of their unethical products from them, and if enough people do that, the rich will go out of business (or at least, shift into more humane businesses).

         

It’s our finest hour when we convince people to spend their money more wisely, by no longer, ever, buying unethical stuff. But the market place has a powerful influence. They have the big money to promote their goods and make them look good, and in the case of foods, taste good.

In a supermarket survey I did, covering about seven and a half thousand individual item choices of shelf products, three thousand of them were either partly or wholly made from animals.

By breaking the ‘animal cycle’, another much more positive cycle takes over. By ‘going vegan’ we begin both a personal transformation as well as a global recovery.

By not breaking with old habits, by continuing shopping for items with animal derivatives, we ally ourselves with some of the worst destroyers on the planet. By remaining as omnivores, we are forced to believe that veganism will make no appreciable difference. It’s as if the idea is too way-out, and that it’s never going to catch on. It seems too rigid, too isolating, and too bleak. Inevitably that sort of not-worth-doing-belief makes everyone feel powerless, which is just how the powerful want us to feel.