Turning-On

2067:

We are taught to believe that being omnivore is the only way humans can live. Very few people have said how dangerous this ‘common perception’ is. The 250 executions, per year, per person isn’t a well known fact (its being little-known is significant in itself) but would it touch people if it were known?   Enough to change them?

Maybe not, because ‘universal acceptance’ says that animals fall into a special category. That category isn’t contemptuous of animals as such because we know we do love animals, but there’s a cut off point about certain specific animals. (As there used to be about racial inferiority). That ‘cut-off’ point is central to omnivore-thinking. People use an elaborate trick of the mind to stay within the safe confines of the Normal Club. Their willingness to consume animals is a requirement for living the good-life, with good-food being very much part of it. Animal-eating is everywhere, including restaurants, dinning on home-cooked dinners, those walk-down-the-street snacks. We never stop not doing it. Even the cashmere sweaters and silk fabrics – it’s all the result of many deaths of totally innocent creatures. The products are a ‘turn-on’. The pain and the fear behind these products doesn’t enter our heads. Without animal suffering these products could never reach us.