Move to activism

LAST BLOG FOR THE YEAR – back 2-1-09
As vegans (who are also animal activists) we’ve made it our business to look, and what we saw turned us vegan. And by going vegan, by protesting, we are hoping to carry with us a large proportion of our community on a wave of fashion, in being green and being ‘vegg’. With a large alteration of attitude in our own society the nature of businesses change to keep in step with the new demand.
Is this a great surge of compassion? Is it an awakening to healthy food? Is it just a fashion statement? Maybe none of these really rock the boat. The upset and consequent root and branch change of attitude may be shock-based. It may come from indignation, that we’ve been eating food from such places and not told the truth. The realisation that we’ve been kept in the dark. The question to parents, politicians, and teachers “Why didn’t you tell us?”. All of this, the energy food, the cruelty-free food, the new awareness, it all makes up a package. It’s wrapped in blame of others for not bringing us up better informed, but in the end, the springboard for us, personally, trying to move over to a vegan consciousness, this is achieved in very ordinary ways. Fashion forces may not be strong enough yet to carry us seamlessly from one world to the other so personal resolve comes into the picture, we have the rationale for change, but the will power?
As we move into adulthood or at least a state of independence where we’re cooking our own meals, we have to focus on the job in hand, we have to move on from blaming those who didn’t tell us. Blame who anyway? Just about every one of us has blood on our hands. We can even blame ourselves more than anyone else for perpetuating our own mistakes even when we knew they were mistakes. So, bugger blame! It’s a waste of space. I reckon we should drop the blame thing and move to pro-active doing. A whole lot of vegans do just that, because for them there’s no time to waste. DO something. LOOK at things … and it will follow that when we see how pigs are forced to live we drop pork, see the battery system operating we drop eggs, see an abattoir and drop everything else. Everything that has a face.
That look! If you’ve seen an animal at the abattoir, as it is led into the execution chamber, its face is unforgettable - looking at you as they face their own violent death … and the noise of her despair alongside the groan of machinery. This is quite the most diabolic scene imaginable. Enough to stop us in our tracks, check habits, boycott and fume silently. For a while this is a huge enough project in itself, but later when the food issues have been resolved and shoes and clothes are sorted then, as a practising vegan, we take time to look further and see something sadder than anything we’ve seen before, a loss within ourselves of our faith in human nature. If we feel only sadness this is more constructive than anger.

This blog is on holiday 22nd Dec - 2nd January

How to hurt animals

An animal is a free creature, predator or predated, self-feeding, a social being, with no interest in concrete structures or helping humans have a more comfortable life. But to many humans, a free animal is an animal wasted, a waste of good money. And it means nothing to them to capture and incarcerate them - they’re just money, a resource, and of course they are supported in what they do by their customers.
Humans hurt animals. We not only use physical force to make them pull a plough or race around a track but we take away their freedom of movement by putting them in pens, cages and behind barbed wire … and we do it to make them manageable, to make profit, to guarantee food supply. It isn’t questioned unless in economic terms. As competition bites, people in the animal business cut corners to stay ahead of the opposition, who could be an overseas producer. And again, the animals bear the brunt.
In a way, what we do to animals we do to ourselves. We act like Barbarians: we’ll stop at nothing. We’ll cut off tails, horns, beaks and testicles, even their very sentience when necessary. We’ll do anything. We put them behind bars, behind glass as exhibits at zoos, we treat them as things, no more. The evidence is everywhere in the countryside, mostly on farms where we can find equipment for mutilating (‘marking’), tools for cutting bits out of their bodies and trucks to cart them off to their deaths. The psychological cruelty alone would be bad enough but the slum conditions on all farms adds up to monumental cruelty. The more one discovers what happens on farms, the more one’s breath is taken away. But people in general know almost nothing about this – they are ignorant or pretend to be. We most of us live in towns and cities. We never go to the country and when we do we see the scenery, a cosy farm nestling in trees and paddocks. We never see behind the scenes nor want to. If we get to know, from pictures or TV footage, that the animals are kept like this and we know our food comes from these places, we still don’t act. We aren’t aroused to the possibility there’s anything wrong. We aren’t allowed to check out conditions on farms, for if we did it would be a case of once seen never forgotten.

Authority

Who authorises what we may do, how to think, what to eat? Kids follow adults, who give advice they followed as youngsters, modified to experience but based on the principle of Mum knows best and doctor knows best.
To question Mum and Teacher and Doctor and Priest leads to not knowing what’s for the best. Who should we listen to? Who is an authority? Should we rely on instinct? But even then we have unreliable instincts. The pleasure instinct is unreliable. Maybe the pain instinct is better, based on “if it doesn’t hurt it’s not doing you good”. Somehow our instinct needs its own reference point.
This is where we need a guiding philosophy, some basis from which we can make decisions and confirm it by instinct. I think veganism is not only an overall panacea for humans but it provides a framework for making most decisions. It simply says – “no animal foods” and it’s this one tiny principle to which all other details can refer. It won’t tell us what to eat or how to think but what NOT to.
From this plant-based platform, underscored by a non-violent approach to everything we do, our daily food choices are more straight forward. What not to eat makes it difficult for vegans to become obese or develop deadly physical conditions from food. Our diet avoids the sort of food that makes people fat or ill and filters out most of the rubbish food and fast food available everywhere. We miss out on so many things to snack on, the cakes and confections of life, but that saves us – our dietary principles filter out most of the fat foods on offer, because they’re usually made with animal by-products. We miss out on fashion too in many ways but that helps our pocket – the same principles filter out expensive items such as leather goods and silks and furs. Is all this a massive inconveniences? Yes, we get wet feet from wearing canvas shoes or or in the cold we have to wear a few more layers of cotton. And that may be inconvenient, but it’s nothing compared to the loss of the sheep’s own woollen coat or the cow’s very own skin. The shorn sheep suffers exposure on a cold night or sunburn on a hot day, the cow suffers death by skinning. It’s all such a messy business, the shame of abattoirs and shearing sheds and eggs from cages … we don’t need authority to tell us this is just plain wrong, and for us not to have any part in the ugly affairs of the animals industry. If we need any authorisation for our choices, we can refer to our own instinctive compassion - if it hurts an animal we mustn’t use it.

Breaking out

Young people have a much cleaner slate than adults. They’ve never had any freedom to choose their food so their conscience is clearer. Parents do everything for them. And when in their twenties they start living independently, the guilt over food may not have bitten too deeply, so they’re freer to try new foods, even to try out a vegan diet. There’s an added advantage. By taking this step they can literally move away from the old fashioned habits of their parent’s generation. Physically less heavy and less narrow of mind. For these reasons alone they may want to experiment to the point where they take on a whole new lifestyle.
Small children, before they’re got at, often express horror at the way animals are treated. They want to say something, do something, insist on something. But at each meal their resistance wears down until they let it drop. But for that short while, when ideals sprang up before being swamped by reality, a remembrance takes place and re-emerges later, when as independent adults the conscience awakens from a long sleep.

If conscience is the most important sense we have, if it is our most delicate sensor of the world outside, then why don’t we refer to it constantly. If we don’t exercise our conscience daily, especially about the animals we eat, we’ll probably sail on forever, consuming what ever we like until our body can stand it no longer, our health goes down the tube, or until we are so ashamed that we can’t get our life back on track. It’s embarrassing to think our food habits can be left unchecked, and we still eat what our mothers fed us. Without question. And we don’t move on. We fail to set our own agenda.

An egg to start the day

So here’s the state of things at present. We have billions of humans wanting foods produced by animals, who are unwilling to reform their diet or consider the feelings of animals. Perhaps, justification wise, there are other concerns pushing animal rights onto the back burner - money worries, family concerns, job insecurity, global warming and ill health … it’s all too much. In fact our worries can be so overwhelming that making our daily life more bearable is ALL we might want to do. So we open the fridge and choose our favourite food, for pleasure and diversion. But if we do escape this way, by eating, we know there’s a negative health pay-back plus a sting in the tail - another tiny death to some part of our conscience.
After sunrise at the abattoir the killing begins. And in a way it begins when we wake, when we’re eating our breakfast, lifting a small spoon to crack the shell of our breakfast egg. This reminds us of the same egg we saw on TV last night – when a group of animal liberators went to rescue some hens at a battery farm, who were living in squalid conditions … and here, as we sit eating an egg we notice it’s the last one in the carton, reminding us to buy some more from the store. And so the cycle continues.
We use products containing eggs (which are always from caged hens). We follow appetite, we don’t follow conscience, and the oftener we do it the less attention we pay to it … and then the conscience ceases to function altogether. So we see the animal cruelty on TV and immediately forget it, because we want eggs and we’ll soon be buying some more eggs. We can always rely on our habits to we get us what we want.

Wanting

Because people are focused on wanting they won’t listen to what we have to say. Vegans can scream about it all they like, but we have to deal with things as they are. We are looking at a deep seated fear in people, often unexpressed, that illness is waiting to grab them, and yet they still prefer to live dangerously rather than give up anything. Take a person with heart disease who has to face surgery. They might have avoided the damage by not clogging up their arteries with fat-saturated food, but they didn’t. They continued to clog their arteries, and let the hospitalisation deal with the problems later.
So vegans have two jobs: to make plant foods attractive enough to live on, without needing animal products, and to convince food addicts that prevention is better than cure. We need to be inspiring on the one hand and warning on the other. And we need to be flexible enough to play both cunningly and compassionately, interacting with others on this matter like a proper friend would.

Those people who are most obstinate are the most food-seduced – in their mind they’re unable to be without animal food. It’s not just a matter of nutrition, it’s the problem of getting off the habit … it’s easier said than done. For two whole decades before reaching adulthood, most of us have been powerlessness to change our eating habits, and in this respect most parents are guilty of feeding their children addictive, harmful and unethical foods. When kids grow up and start feeding themselves they soon get hooked on the fast food version of what Mum used to cook them. Weight creeps up and a ‘live-now-pay-later’ mentality prevails. Kids aren’t warned about the dangers of addiction and seduction, so usually Mum and Dad turn out to be the kids’ unwitting supplier.
Like the use of narcotics (or anything stimulating which is difficult to give up), animal foods are there from the word go, in our daily lives. And with such a great variety of mildly addictive products on the market many of them are as difficult to shake as any of the classic abuse-substances. Once we’re in the grip of these products there seems to be no way out.
If animal foods are addictive, not in quite the same way as heroin but addictive all the same, then these foods, the taste of them, the thought of them, the low cost of them, make people determined to get them. It may be the hunger for a burger or chocolate or pizza, but every day that ‘hunger’ arrives and, once satisfied, it leaves its mark, especially since we can repeat the experience whenever we like. For the wealthy Westerner there’s no thought of doing without these foods, unless they’re making us fat. The very idea of giving up a favourite food because of the link with animal suffering is unthinkable. In fact even animal welfare, let alone animal rights, is something most people never give a thought to. It wouldn’t be on their radar.
If it is … they’re probably already on the way to becoming vegan.

Anger

When you tell some people about what’s happening to animals, they have the gall to say they don’t want to know. “Gall”, now that’s a word implying spiteful impudence. Not a trait anyone owns up to but the sort of cop-out vegans are used to. But we are perplexed by it too. Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence or there’s outright avoidance, or denial or ridicule - nothing that makes very much sense. People give off such a powerful signal that they “just aren’t interested” ( as we’d say to those annoying tele-marketers who ring at dinner time). But to us it’s infuriating when people aren’t interested. It often brings out the bulldozer in vegans, and they try to break though with force.
All a complete waste of time, and damaging too, because no one’s listening.
But if we do get listened to, people often think we’re exaggerating, and so they maintain a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them. “Vegans are weird so it’s likely they’ll be lying too”. It’s a real Catch 22 for vegans, this one.
… And yet ‘this one’ is the big challenge: the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.
Shocked by their gall it’s difficult to transmute our anger into something more constructive, like writing or public speaking without showing anger. But how do we deal with our own feelings of frustrations at people’s attitudes? How do we feel when we write to the media and get rejected? How do we react to a speciesist remark, say on talk-back radio? How do we deal with being laughed at?
It’s frustration I feel when every argument I put up slides off the duck’s back. And yet that’s the reality. Public resistance comes from a low awareness mixed with deep fear that vegan food is all they’ll have to look forward to. It scares people into a negative reaction to what vegans are saying. It forces them to turn a deaf ear and continue the way they’ve always been. It’s heartbreaking to see people suffering unnecessary illnesses because they won’t see reason. And I guess it’s both the food poisoning and the animal cruelty thing that makes people feel sick and look silly, by pretending to believe that none of the cruelty to animals actually happens, or worse, that if it does happen that it isn’t cruelty at all.
Animal husbandry sounds benign in an ‘all’s-well, god’s-in-his-heaven’, sort of way. But this thinking is so far below the native intelligence of most people that they’re better off saying nothing … because there’s no other way to wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’. It’s as if people are taking shelter in an absurd flat-earth denial of sentience, holding that the cutting down of an animal is not very different to the cutting down of a tree.

Care

We might say we care, but it has limited meaning because we continue eating the stuff of animals, who themselves could be our most precious objects of care. We eat their by-products, we consume the whole of their bodies, and we know this activity is only possible because we enslave them. Slavery is the only way a farmer can survive, by aiming at the lowest costs, in rearing their animals. The consumer goes hand in hand with the farmer in this, each dependant on maintaining the violence to stay afloat. And for this, at some level, both farmer and consumer will lose self respect. How can anyone approve or enjoy being caught up in routine violence towards animals?
Look at this from the individual animal’s point of view. Take a hen. There’s nothing natural left in her life. She only ever knows loneliness and pain - she’s mutilated, roughly handled, imprisoned, and when very young her pen is a smallish prison cell, into which there comes no sunlight, no fresh air, no soil, no plant life, no natural sounds and no mother, but what comes aplenty is food. Afterwards, for the rest of her assigned life, there is a period of some eighteen months (whilst her body menstruates and she lays) which now becomes that much more painful. There’s an even greater space restriction – she’s caged into a tiny no-room-to-move space, with two or three other hens. Her whole existence is spent standing on a large-mesh wire flooring, breathing ammonia from the excreta of thousands of other birds who also live in the shed. Synthetic lighting, screeching of demented hens, the inability to move within her cage let alone escape from it - this tormented imprisonment is what consumers support every time they eat an egg, or buy a product made with eggs in it. Is it any wonder vegans are so outraged. Not only by the cruelty but by the indifference of their fellows, who have the gall to say, “No thanks - I don’t want to know”.

Squirming

You take any man or woman on the street and ask them if they know what factory farming is. They will squirm and struggle and pretend not to know. But of course we don’t go up to people on the street and ask them this sort of question, so there’s very little squirming going on. But there are a lot of ugly decisions being made that affect others. Most are blocked off from animal information when choosing what to do and then, once made, we effectively back ourselves into a corner, or rather we’re backed up, along with everyone else, in a long traffic jam of habit. To get out of it we need a root and branch choices change.
It sounds a bit like anal retention, all this ‘backing up’ and blocking off. Like an awareness filter, shielding us from memories of things we’ve done and regretted. Feelings associated with those memories we’ve experienced. When we had broken love affairs, when we feasted on ‘thanksgiving turkey’ - a hard lump that won’t settle, linked with unresolved questions. And what’s so galling is that our most damaging mistakes may be down to ‘false intelligence’, mistakes which are costing us although still profitting them. Our health is being damaged by those who add dangerous chemicals into animal feed and tthence into our own systems. Our ethics damaged by what is done to get this food to us. By taking part in it, consuming dubious products we make regrettable mistakes.
As an example, take the egg sitting on the breakfast plate - it’s the first thing we see in the morning, reminding us of where this egg came from so it doesn’t look like food. Instead this is biologically forced from a hen in a cage which is an unattractive thought and a constipating experience anyway. Our blocked up system and the grimness of the egg trade reminds us to examine what we do. And again another grim reminder when we’re eating a steak, to know that this meat is from a castrated bullock, who had the knife taken to his private parts when young and another knife taken to his throat when older and fatter. Our animal food has to involve this murderous process, but because it is done by others, by people down the road who get paid to do it, we reckon not to care about it. It’s not the blade of the slaughterer but our dinner knife that’s the main threat to a hen, cow, pig or sheep.

The animals

What is happening to them? Nothing is happening for them, that’s for sure. To their minders, their health and welfare isn’t a concern unless it affects their economic viability. As soon as Daisy isn’t earning her board and lodging she’s off to the abattoir. What sort of calculated and violent relationship is that?
It is in fact simply slave master and slave, and that practically no relationship at all, leastways not at all a pleasant situation for an animal to find herself in. Perhaps her slavery is even more pernicious than human slavery because, unlike a human, she has no way of dealing with the torment of it. She has no ability to reason or project her future, or plan an escape. Her every ‘now’ moment must be an empty place, especially as her minders are crueller and more indifferent than ever. And ever more desperate to extract all they can from their animals, to keep themselves in business. The difficulty of turning a profit is compounded by the vast numbers of consumers demanding low priced food, which means the very lowest living expenses for animals. Customers want cheap, and they’re likely to buy imported goods if they’re cheaper than home-produced.
The finger of blame certainly points to …? Who? Everyone who spends money on animal food and clothing … but there’s more to it than buying and eating. By wanting to stay uninformed about ‘methods in modern animal husbandry’, the ordinary consumer is not so very different to the shareholder of an arms manufacturer, who only wants to know about dividends not what the weapons do. No one wants to know about the provenance of the goods and services they buy because they’d have to share the responsibility for what goes on behind the scenes.

Obstinacy giving way to change

When it happens, or rather when the majority make it happen by sending animal businesses broke, we’ll probably see changes come about rapidly; changes that seem so clear because there aren’t any exemptions; not so much a legal change as much as a fashion change; The ‘yuck’ factor playing a prominent part; animal foods on the nose; outside the black market animal food is no longer available; plant based foods push ‘the other stuff’ off the shelves. It could all happen this way for us in ‘the West’.
The country we live in, if we’re lucky enough to have some arable land, allows us the choice to be vegetarian, indeed completely herbivore. Obviously there are communities who are solely dependent upon animal foods for their survival, so morally they may have a case to argue. But over 90% of the world’s population are not living as the Inuit do, or the dessert dwellers, or the highlanders or islanders, where plants can’t be grown for food. We in the fertile lands have access to plant foods and can flourish on them (as societies have done, healthily, down through the ages). The relative ‘cleanness’ of plant food over animal food is so evident that why anyone would need to poison their body with sub-standard food is a mystery. Or why anyone would choose to live with so much shame, that’s an even bigger mystery.

Obstinate to the core

A vegan’s conscience is outraged at the very idea of slavery and particularly the obstinacy of thought that we can’t survive unless we enslave animals. It’s reminiscent of the ending of human slavery in USA when they predicted inevitable collapse of the cotton and sugar industries – but the industries survived and thrived … and soon enough the idea of enslaving humans became repugnant and then illegal. It could be the same for animal slavery. We can survive and thrive without eating animals or using by-products or co-products like leather, and we can more than survive without consuming the body parts of animals themselves. We can also be happy and healthy without being clothed or entertained or medicated at the expense of animals. But that isn’t believed by most people. It isn’t even taken seriously. And that’s our great challenge.
But when it does happen, once it is realised, then it’s business-as-usual for humans, then we can get on with human development, uninterrupted. Once we drop the animal dependency, and not until, we can address the other major problems still facing the world, such as war, disease, pollution and hunger.
The agony of the human race is it’s obstinacy, having solvable problems held back by a collective reluctance to drop animal slavery. Instead of challenging ourselves to work with Nature we attempt to bypass Nature and fail over and over again. Our addiction to animal products compounds our obstinacy, so we stand less chance of surviving because we remain slave masters to animals. And why should we not? We seem to have got away with it so far? … but all that means is the thief hasn’t been caught yet.
A compassionate society can’t grow whilst human slavery exists, and now stepping further - the only chance humanity has of surviving is by giving up bacon at breakfast and leather shoes and aquariums full of sea creatures. The lot must go if we want to move on.

Obstinacy

While we can speak out we should. While there’s no risk of being thrown into jail, animal rights can be promoted as a valid non-violence-based protest movement. And then, once securely established, it will almost certainly be a downhill run, and the authorities will then have something to worry about. And the animal industries might worry too - that that no one wants their stuff any longer. They’ll probably succeed in pushing animal rights underground. So, in the meantime, in these early days of basking in our freedom-of-speech, we should be speaking up for animal rights. We can either quietly encourage or shout our message as loudly as we can – either way if people listen they will because we have strong beliefs and the courage of our convictions. Our outrage is our strength, but we need quietness too because we don’t have all the answers, particularly, we still don’t know why conscience pricks some and not others. So as much as we need to speak out we need to listen and learn, to find out where other peoples’ head are at, thence how to reach them. It isn’t just a case of offering information but identifying what blocks people’s conscience.

Opening our mouths is not yet a crime

The major issues in our world are being trivialised or ignored completely. The issue of animal exploitation is a prime example. We are pressed, as if idiots, to see a benign picture of happy farm animals living in pretty farm yards. We’re soothed by TV chefs doing animal cuisine shows. We’re beguiled by the way supermarkets care for quality. And all the while we know it’s phoney, and one hell of a calculated misleading of the public.
Once we get past this and become vegan, it’s as if we then have to take on the whole world. And that’s too much for anyone so, we need to be practical. Yes, we might want to right the wrong, but actually doing it is tricky. Veganism is hard enough just on a personal level or in terms of surviving within our own community, but to knock away the cornerstone of our society, by questioning the efficacy of its foods and the integrity of our food producers, that’s a bold step to take. And if there is any headway made, towards too many people recognising animal rights, the influential people won’t be happy.
In Australia it might not yet be a crime to ‘disparage food’, but in certain parts of America, disparaging certain foods in public is a crime. And that’s because people with influence want to prevent any profit-destroying truth getting out. If it all became public knowledge, the meat trade could go into meltdown. Not only would it be damaging to the allied industries but the ripple effect could bring the whole economy down.

Our conscience voice

So, here we have it, the battle between body and conscience. The battle goes on every day in our decision making. We project all the factors we can think of and then make our choice, usually in our own interest. Sometimes that choice is at the expense of animals. Could we call them ‘satisfaction decisions’ because they aren’t based on ethics?
In a subsistence environment we’d have hardly any choices to make, but in our world it’s different. We’re offered so many temptations that some things we do, and not done especially consciously, turn out to be mistakes. We follow others, we follow habits and we use autopilot. We prefer minimum thinking tasks. We like to emphasis energy-conservation. We prefer doing things the easiest way possible.
Was it for that we humans were given such good brains? Now, as couch potatoes, it makes no sense to stand for anything very much. Certainly not to get active against the majority viewpoint. Therefore we don’t question normal practice, and we don’t look at the rights and wrongs of things. We are eager followers when food tastes good. We do what we do unquestioningly, just as we’ve done for the whole of our lives. We segue into adulthood on the lubricated wheels of habit. We continue to do what we’ve been taught to do. And when that involves food most of us gladly roll over when it tickles our fancy.
So, by questioning our community on such a grand scale, as vegans do, we marginalise ourselves. We lose about 99% of our support base just by way of the food we eat. But we go further. We seem to alienate our taste-buds and pleasure-zone experiences too. We get off side with people: we seem to get off side, masochistically, with our bodies … for the sake of it?
For the sake of the animals. This is what balances it all. This is the reason for taking such a bold step. And it might be a mixture of animal compassion, the future of our children and grandchildren, or just for cheaper food bills. Whatever the reason, it’s the kick start that counts. It’s the outrage at how things are at present. It’s the cruelty, irresponsibility and waste of money. It’s being misled. Teachers, parents, doctors, VIPs, priests, rock stars, writers, academics – they don’t stand up, so we are misled by each and every leader (with notable exceptions). We’ve been led astray to such an extent that we might want to put that right before we do anything else. And the first step is to step away, to disassociate … which brings us back to the animal question: the excesses of animal abuse and the vested interests, who win at the expense of the gullible consumer. Our conscience is our guide.

The real friction between vegans and non-vegans is that what we avoid they relish. Even though they may be as horror-struck as vegans, they know they are incapable of speaking out about it. Fist in mouth they stand in the Quiet Club. And when things don’t feel right in the stomach and animal products feel as though they are poison, and the animal cruelty thing haunts us into self loathing, we get used to it. It’s just an every day lack of well being we’re feeling.
If we are still ‘using’, although strong genes or insensitivity may help, in terms of self respect we know we’re dead meat. By eating animals we wreck our body and disqualify ourselves as peaceniks. Whether ‘straight’ or hippy, old worlder or new ager, somewhere along the line we give up a dream.
If we’ve given away our chance to be an agent of peace in the world, it seems a sad thing that it’s because of a food attachment or a desire to have a fur wrapped around our shoulders. To a greater or lesser degree we all have blood on our hands and plenty of poison in our bodies, but our souls are bruised by it too, by this daily condoning of violence within our society, to which we all subscribe.
Every time the knife cuts the life out of an animal and we condone it by spending our money, we are also taking some of that cut - the animals’ bodies we buy slowly making us ill. Simply by ingesting animals every day (of our lives), consuming the concentrated toxins from the foods they’ve eaten plus the adrenaline of terror at the point of execution, all this conspires to weaken our immune systems. And after that we don’t stand a chance. This is why vegans simply say “keep off the stuff and keep your health (and conscience).
By not suffering under a tastebud dictatorship, vegans stand a better chance of avoiding getting hooked. But for those who aren’t vegan yet, it isn’t only the food that’s involved, there are shoes and zoos and animal tested shampoos and so much more. By spending money on the goods and services from animal slavery, we build an effective barrier to making any headway towards our own spiritual development.

Quality of life versus a seconds world

If we aren’t ready to move on, towards eating vegan food, then as semi-vegetarians we lump ourselves in with the meat heads. If we use animals we can’t condemn their use. Non-vegans may not like eating meat but because they eat the by-product of animals, they condone the same level of cruelty and still have to belong to the Quiet Club. What can they say? “Yes, I eat ‘it’ but it’s wrong”. We literally have to put our money where our mouth is and buy cruelty-free all the time, or remain voiceless.
Without playing a role in their liberation and being part of a world-wide awakening consciousness, there’s not much meaning left to us, because we’re still part of the system. We’re unable to condemn it so we have to look for ways to divert ourselves … and we usually go for general entertainment and self-satisfying activities.
This could be seen as blocking one main path to satisfaction. By denying ourselves a certain quality of satisfaction we take away the meaning in our lives, If we do miss out on the satisfaction that comes from advocating for animals, we are forced to retreat into the fun world, a poor substitute for the real thing. For each day to be full of meaning, passion and goal oriented activity (in whatever form it takes) brings satisfaction - that whatever we are doing is bringing quality into our life, a feeling at the end of the day that we couldn’t have done anything better. I suspect vegans know about this feeling.
Everyone else is in Seconds World .

The pleasure-heads

As we grow up we split into two camps, those who make a living out of animals and those who don’t. It’s from the second group, obviously, that people move into the Animal Rights Movement. And from there we make certain demands or suggestions to others.
If the hard-hearted or obstinate ones, and those working in the animal business, are hostile (because vegans are a potential threat to their livelihoods) they’re even more so because they don’t like being told what to eat. Those who are committed to a lifetime of meat, especially those who work for the industry, could never contemplate the idea of animals having rights. If they’re protective of their jobs, imagine how much more protective the rich animal profiteers are, with their fortunes in the balance.
So their unapproachableness is understandable. All we can do is show them we love them no less … and then move on. If they are hostile and rigid with fear, and trying not to show it, they seem not to care about justifying what they eat. They belong to a group world where they can continue to eat their favourite foods undisturbed. They may not nail a ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ sign on their gates but they have a protective shield to fend off anyone spouting vegan propaganda. They prefer to maintain a pleasure-head lifestyle. We can’t change that. We might have to move on, not worrying what they think, for it’s the others who are the more interesting ones. They think their food is pleasurable but they’re open to vegan suggestions. Suggestions that there may be other tastes and textures in food to be discovered, and on that basis alone they’re willing to listen. After that, for them, it’s easy to shop and try new things and see how they cook and do an all-vegan food trial. Out of that may come a realisation that non-animal foods are okay to eat. And that could mean it’s okay to go vegan.

Disconnection

Because the law allows the exploitation of animals, none of it registers as a crime, whether it be the caging of animals in zoos, the experimenting on them in laboratories, the suffocating of fish on decks or the ultimately disgusting factory farming of pigs and chickens.
For the mass of the population, there has to be a ‘disconnect’ between two great forces – the inner beauty of our own humanity versus inner food craving. Animal food is so endemic in our community that it affects the educated and rich in much the same way as the uneducated and poor. We all fall for it. And whether or not we’re religious we’re seduce-able. Our number one impulse is to find food enjoyment.
No. 2 impulse may be to self-justify what we do. It helps to win social acceptance but it’s not as powerful as No.1 – food and mouth pleasure centre. Rarely if ever do we feel the need to justify ANY of it. The provenance of our food doesn’t interest us, as adults. But it can bother children when they first find out about ‘what happens to animals’ . . . and yet kids aren’t in any position to complain. They do what they’re told. They have to or they’d starve or at least not get lots of yummy things they DO like. They conform. We all did. And the dinner table isn’t usually the conformity we mind. Mum dishes up ready-to-eat food, and some of it is so yummy we craved it. We are programmed to include animal products in that catagory.
When we come to adulthood we have decisions to make, and this provenance thing over food is one of them. Should we or shouldn’t we?

Duped

Even though conspiracy theories abound and we laugh at them and call them preposterous, somewhere in our mind we suspect we are being taken for a ride. To those with vested interests, our money spent on animal industry products is more important to them than considering our welfare. To those who care little about animal cruelty the customers’ conscience is of no concern. The inaction of politicians is suspicious as well - their complicity with scientists and the shareholders of animal industries and the rural lobby, is their guarantee of a support base. Each benefits from the other. They play into each others’ hands to make money out of the consumer and if they do successfully poison the public, or at least peddle unhealthy food, we the consumer are letting them get away with it. If they are complicit in animal cruelty we raise no objection. The consumer may be the victim of an outrage but they too as individuals have a choice, and there’s nothing illegal about either their compliance or the industry’s cruelty to animals. To be an omnivore is safe enough for everyone involved, because it’s legal. It’s legal and therefore acceptable socially. And very acceptable to the chief animal abusers, who are getting richer by the minute.
But the strangest thing about all this is that these same people are falling on their own swords. The profiteers of the animal abuse system are wealthy enough to eat ‘well’ and usually they’re inclined to eat rich food, and, you’ve guessed, that includes a lot of animal product. Ironic! The same animals they use to make their wealth ruin their health. The big question is, why doesn’t it occur to them to avoid these foods? The scientists especially should know the dangers associated with animal foods. And you’d think the spiritual leaders of our communities would respond to the horror stories about animal farms and abattoirs. But no, they say nothing. It seems that social status in our community relies so heavily on conformity that to blow the whistle on any of this would mean social suicide, Whatever group we associate with, it’s our own security we value most. And conformity is integral to that. If anyone from the establishment spoke up there’d be hell to pay. The scientists would lose their grants, the politicians their pre-selections and the priests their parishes. That’s why they wouldn’t ever consider supporting vegan principles. No one would do that to themselves. So, the habit of using animal products continues. And for the consumer to be part of that they must numb their feeling for animals and refuse to look at the uses we put them to.

Between a rock and a hard place

The horror stories about animals on farms and at the abattoir are a cause of grief to vegans but not only vegans. They horrify and confront sensitive non-vegans too, but for them it’s mixed with a fear of finding out too much. Whatever they hear implicates them personally, and more so when they realise that it actually happens routinely and on such a massive scale. If their heart isn’t touched then we can assume we’re dealing with a cold hearted person, or possibly a person trying to bury their head in the sand.
We may feel depressed about it, we may become aware of the animal holocaust going on all about us, but it’s a question of whether or not we are prepared to act to prevent it (or rather act to discontinue our support of it). How horrific do the stories have to be, to make us boldly step away from what others are doing? Even to act solo in defiance of members of our own family and network of friends? People-pressure and social acceptability are so powerful that we can feel unable to act independently, even though we know we should.
Animals, from which our foods come, are badly used and we know it. But even though we feel guilt, even though we know animal foods are nutritionally dangerous, we may yet not act. For if we do decide to change, it’s all or nothing and we must go all the way. There are no in betweens and in reality there’s no going back. It’s as if we step out of one world into another.

Eating out

I go to peoples’ places and I’m offered the usual snacks and drinks. I’m met with utter incomprehension when I decline. If pressed, as soon as I tell them my reason, I’m considered a little weird. Nice people race around and find something I can eat. But nice or otherwise most people are defenders of the faith. They secretly resent my finicky eating habits. For that’s what they turn it into – from what could be a respect for my philosophy of compassion into an irritation at being fussy over food. Not often does anyone ask me to explain why.
If they did they’d get an answer that would make them uncomfortable. They would expect me to say something about the food containing too much fat or sugar and too high in protein. They’d expect me to mention it being harmful to health … plus the bit about the animals themselves, and hens in cages, etc
So as a vegan I’m not usually asked to give reasons for my food choices. I’m regarded as a social pariah.
What is it, apart from the animals, that is so awful about so many of the foods people eat? They make us fat, they encourage heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Any sensible person wouldn’t go there. They’d avoid them. But to talk about all this, to get to a point where we may speak, we need to be ready with a couple of interesting points, facts, something to catch the attention that won’t seem as if we are making sweeping statements. If we try to be too outrageous we can draw too much unnecessary fire, making it easy for them to change the subject or get bogged down in fine details which can be lengthily discussed to avoid dealing with more uncomfortable matters. As animal activists we won’t be able to satisfy every inquirer’s questions about diet and nutrition and health consequences, although we should try. Our best approach is to appeal to the heart, to assure people of the general safety and health of a plant-based diet and then to move on to what we feel they know almost nothing about. How the animals are treated with no more respect than machines!

Popular poisons

Animal foods are popular even though they are harmful to health. Because people like the taste of them and because they are easy to find, people love them. No, they aren’t necessarily cheap but there’s a great variety of them and we’re spoilt for choice. They appeal because these products you can eat straight from the fridge or they don’t need much preparation time. That’s a big selling point. Supply follows demand and demand responds to supply. To clinch the matter, certain ingredients like milk products are subsidised. And these ingredients cream-ify, enrich and bulk out foods making them taste rich and substantial. They’re cheap enough for everyone so they’re mass produced for mass consumption.
What’s so good about animal foods is that, at a primary level, they provide us with an instant sensation. In savoury foods it’s the blood or saltiness that attracts and in non-savoury there’s usually sugar and flavourings added to make them taste delicious. Animal foods are made to be seductive and we can’t get over that. This is food we crave.
Our love affair with animal foods has never really diminished, despite the vegetarian drive in our society, mainly because even with the absence of meat there are still the cheeses, creams and egg additives that keep us hooked. Any number of cheeses, for instance, have been developed over the years to titivate the palate and develop just this one product into a connoisseur’s paradise The food manufacturers have used every device imaginable to lure us and make us buy. And the more sold the easier it is to create the endless variety of foods to maintain people’s interest. Popular products, eaten from early childhood, advertised constantly, with family pressure reinforcing eating habits, become as natural as fresh air. We can’t contemplate life without them. These products are present at just about every meal.
Drip by drip these are the foods that imprint on our minds and slowly poison our bodies.

The consumer trap

We are all consumers and we all need help to make the right decisions. One big help is in clear and full labelling of products. And if it is suitable for vegans then a “this product is suitable for vegans” label makes shopping that much easier. It’s common in other countries but not in Australia. When we’re after a food product with several ingredients, vegans want to be sure it’s free of those dreaded items.
I go into a food store with my reading glasses in hand, ready to examine the microscopic print in the ingredients list, to catch any animal products listed. But I have to know that albumen is from eggs, that whey is from milk and gelatine is from hoofs, and many more sneaky terms they use to hide items that come from the abattoir. If the product contains nothing objectionable, the least they could do is make what’s in it clear, and better still, put a tick next to the word ‘vegan’ on the front of the packaging.
We need good labelling so that we can make informed choices. If we are eating foods from abattoirs or the co-products or by-products of animal farming or the foods whose ingredients contain these products, it should be clearly stated. We have the right to know what we are putting into our bodies.
Vegans, and that includes me who is too lazy to follow my own advice, should write to product manufacturers who make vegan-suitable products. Tell them we appreciate their ingredients and ask them to label their products vegan friendly, or some such. Not only am I lazy but I’m forgetful too. When I’m off food shopping I forget to take my glasses, so of course I can’t read the damned ingredients list anyway. I have to refrain from buying something because I’m not sure what’s in it.

How to meet

Even though we are up against the very worst attitudes, unbelievable levels of indifference, almost total lack of responsibility towards the weak, acceptance of a value system geared up to damage future prospects, all this shouldn’t make us pessimistic. It’s the ultimate challenge, to face each other and, despite such different viewpoints, resist the temptation to go to war against each other. It’s as if we are the victims of a divide and rule system, designed to keep us at each other’s throats. To keep us bickering and to keep us weak. Our non-acceptance of each other’s views easily turns into a non-acceptance of each other as whole persons. Dislike and disapproval move on to a policy of dismiss and destroy. We bully in order to win, but there’s nothing to win only to spoil the one chance we have of coming together. Pessimism keeps us weak and at war with one another. It’s no different to the dysfunction in homes where the dominant adult goes ‘over the top’ with the submissive child. The adult shows disapproval of a child (for behaving badly), ignoring the fact that this young person is trapped by their own inexperience of life. By giving the child a sense that they are lesser, because of their behaviour, the damaging separation starts. The attempt to exert pressure on them, to bring about better behaviour, strays into non-acceptance of the whole person. It then becomes destructive. Then both parties recognise something is badly failing, that a faith is being broken, that things aren’t progressing positively. And the further we go with it the less chance there is to restore balance. There’s a feeling of pessimism, (between adult and child). Even violence creeps in. There’s a feeling of being overwhelmed, like something is irrevocably failing, that a profound faith is being shattered. And pessimism is all we can hold onto. We abort on each other. Many parents give up on their kids, and vice versa.
If we can be optimists, through thick and thin, we can break the victim mould. We can insist on forging a positive reality. When we see violence, we then also see it giving way to non-violence, setting itself up, as it were, for a break through. The optimist actively avoids the trap of separation by never letting go of the positive.
If I predict that the value of my house will drop because Abdullah has moved in next door, I am a pessimist; the optimist would see things differently – their value system would be based on something more wholesome. So, instead of being resentful they would make friends with Abdullah. And this good neighbour would become their greatest asset. The pessimist sees the gloom. To the optimist, Abdullah might be the one person who can lift the gloom. What better aim could there be than to focus on changing things for the better, moving towards the integration of different cultures, building the global village. If we bring this about it will simply be because we are capable of it.
What could be better than living together like they do in the garden, where cats and cabbages and kids all rub along nicely together. In a future world there won’t be any need to be hurtful and certainly no reason to eat pigs or milk cows or kill chickens. If we are up to date with what’s happening in our world, we would already know that being vegan and having a plant-based food and clothing regime is possible. And then, it’s just a stroll along the garden path to where it all becomes natural and fashionable.

How not to meet our opposites

How to relate to non-idealists, the dry-as-dust pragmatists who only see through dollar eyes. The antediluvians we live with are often oblivious to a certain quality of life which seems so obvious to so many of us. It makes living amongst them uncomfortable and frustrating. When we find resistance to our ideas, even hostility, it’s usually because we are each proposing two opposite life-styles. There’s a great gulf between us and if we work hard enough we may come closer. If we don’t put the work in we move further apart - in our attempt to put space between us, we make value judgements of each other and end up in mutual dislike. The stress of being on unfriendly terms sucks energy out of us and makes it that much more difficult to pursue any worth while goals. It makes life toxic in terms of human relating.
So, if we do separate from others, for whatever reason, and then compound that by making personal value judgements, it comes back to bite us. Fairly or unfairly, we become the subject of criticism and our feelings get bruised and egos hurt. Of course this mightn’t matter if we could accept that: “what others think about us is none of our business”, but we don’t. We can’t. We are involuntarily part of a collective belief system that makes us all react badly to being thought badly of. And that reaction marks the start of things going wrong - we retaliate to criticism with more value judgements; those we judge retaliate back; any communication we may have enjoyed goes sour; we make sweeping generalisations in order to create even more separation, to get a surer sense of being right. And we end up about a million miles from an intelligent exchange of views. How not to meet!

'That' type of energy

Our society admires those who get ahead, but that includes those who squeeze the land, the animals or anything that seems free for the taking.
Kind and loving to their family they may be, but when it comes to their money, or rather to their source of income they can be ruthless. These are the advantage-takers. These are the people who are prepared to numb their feelings if it means enslaving animals to make their income. And that’s a whole attitude which contradicts everything the idealist stands for. The idsealist would rather forgo the chance to make money than get mixed up with anyone in the business of advantage-taking, especially on the scale animal farmers operate. The pastoralist or the factory farmer is usually cheered on by society, which means the idealist is left out in the cold.
Idealists get little encouragement. They’re often called ‘bleeding hearts’. Idealism isn’t easy but there is one advantage. They have a grand goal, an ambition for the greater good, and a principle that pays back in terms of energy, a special kind of energy. By acting as guardians to children, animals, forests, the marginalised, etc., there’s meaning, and when that is combined with harmlessness a special type of energy is tapped into.
Many people aren’t aware of this energy because idealism doesn’t exist in their lives. Perhaps they don’t miss what they’ve never had, and so they miss the point of why the idealist works so hard for what seems like so little reward. But idealism and the wish for better things to come, is to have access to a self-perpetuating energy. It works on the basis that you put it in and you get it out - the more of it you get the more you want to put in. It isn’t really anything to do with making money or the superficial energy that comes from money making.

Our equals, the animals

The withdrawal of care or the lack of any relationship at all with captive animals is perpetuated right through to the killing chambers where the animal has its life terminated. That emotional separation carries through to the packers and sellers and finally to the eaters of the animal.
How do we come to love animals, not just the cute and cuddly ones but all animals – well, obviously not by eating them. That’s the first step in changing the nature of our relationship with them, and of course it presupposes the application of vegan principle. But from there we need to go a step further, to regard animals as our equals. Not to give them voting rights or a comprehensive education or warm clothing (huh, the very idea!) but to live alongside them as partners in sentience.
Egalitarianism is really a gigantic levelling process, where dog, human and tree exist on one level, where (other than areas specific to species or gender) there is effectively no separation. If we can be one way with our beloved dog, then surely we can be that way with any living thing, even the most loveless. If we can love those for whom we feel affection, then shouldn’t we be able to extend that love to the unlovable?

The nature of exploiting

It’s a nasty trait, taking what isn’t ours. But we do love a bargain. And domestic animals seem like a bargain, in terms of producing food for us to eat. They’re easy to handle and easy to keep captive. The animal exploiter can make money out of them by seeing them as a resource and using them like machines, for producing food and clothing for human use. Unlike the animals we have at home, the farmer feels nothing for these animals as individuals.
And who would disagree? These ones are ugly, not cuddly and we can’t feel affection for them. We train ourselves, and our kids, to see them as ‘beasts’ (just the sound of the word is sharp and is used against people who act disgustingly - it therefore denigrates animals and makes them seem disgusting). Indeed these beasts are disgusting, since they usually live in filthy conditions.
If ordinary people have no feelings for them and farmers don’t either, it seems justified to keep them in slum conditions, and when the time comes these animals are transferred like so many shares in a company, to the next owner. They may have been in-care since birth, almost like a child in the family, but at the appointed time they are let go without a second thought. The animal is to be transferred to another person and thence to another place which has been specifically designed to destroy them … money is exchanged, the deal is done, and if there had ever been any care shown towards them it is now forgotten about.

Animal wisdom

If we were all to go mad tomorrow it would probably be because we tried to find out who was to blame for the mess we’re in at the moment. Because we’d have forgotten to share the blame around and in particular forgotten to blame ourselves. But then it’s pointless to judge and blame anyway – what’s done is done. It’s best surely, to move on. Towards repair. It’s that reluctance most of us have to glance in the mirror, to look for a reality that might be different to the one we know, and not to find something that scares us. How much better to see a reflection that confirms the way we are going, that shows how to continue to repair. Not just the crows feet on our face but the newer understandings we’ll need for repair. For a start, an understanding that we aren’t as strong as we appear to be. That, after all, we aren’t ‘the dominant ones’, and that there’s an urgency to earn a new reputation by losing that very sense of dominance.
Our history has been so black because we’ve never had any real interest or concern for other beings. In consequence, we’ve become outcastes in our own world, our superiority leading us to believe we can control all the other animals and life forms. But to those of us who don’t see them as inferior, we’ve come to respect the animal world and see that in many ways it is a wiser world than our own. It would be good to explore the reasons for this … but there’s not enough time. For the present it’s all about repair. We’ve strayed so far from the natural order that we need to get back ‘home’ as soon as possible, to where we can exist together, peaceably. And we can learn to do this from the animals themselves. If we have a lot to make up for then they have a lot to teach us. But nothing is possible on that front unless we are at least following vegan principles.

Meltdown

At present, in the natural world, if animals were capable of judging us morally, we’d be very much ‘on the nose’. We don’t have a good reputation, so we need to earn our way back to re-acceptance. Humans have become so used to regarding our own species as supreme that it’s almost impossible for us to imagine things switching around – the animals thinking of us as the barbarians and soo dumb or worse; that it is we who are left out in the cold.
If, godforbid, there were a major global collapse with destabilisation of social structures and food supply drying up, how would we react? As hunger hit we’d realise to what extent we’d lost touch with Nature. In such a crisis we might find animals better able to survive than us. We humans, especially those in the affluent West, have never learnt to feed ourselves or deal with adversity, having lived on easy street all our lives and having been softened by our dependency on animals for so long.
Before the eleventh hour, to help avert a collapse, we need to get busy repairing. We can’t pretend not to have noticed the need for it. If there were a global collapse, we’d need to draw on our sanity and creativity to pull us out of it. What we wouldn’t need is seven billion deranged humans, gripped with fear, doing even more damage than at present. At such a critical point, we might see the need for repair but might believe we are suffering too much and weighed down with too much fear, to do anything much about it. It’s likely that, once we stopped using meat and broke free of other addictive animal products on the market, we’d develop some self-discipline. By which time a lot of fear and panic would fall away, letting us focus on repair.
Using a shipping analogy: the great ship of society is sailing towards rocks – it hits and begins leaking. It needs running repairs to avoid sinking. Steering away from the rocks is difficult due to the inertia of the ship taking on so much water. The atmosphere on board is panic, with any essential running repairs made harder because of that. Everyone seems transfixed by the rocks ahead. Repairs are slow and the ship is getting heavier and disaster seems inevitable. Rescue is unlikely. Should we jump? (give up?). With animal cruelty so deeply ingrained in human nature and with our deteriorating health, humans are feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the need for repair. The ship of our society is foundering.
Vegans are suggesting a way to avert catastrophe, by offering an idea for steering away from the rocks and for repairing the gash in the side of our ship. To repair the cumulative damage we’ve done to ourselves and our world we need a simple-to-understand safety principle, that suggests how we go about self-repairing and how the environmental damage is mended too. The very beginning of this repair involves boycotting animal farm produce, because it is this, more than anything else, that has caused a near catastrophe on so many levels.

In time

When we see what we’ve done and people open their hearts to the animals they’ve been exploiting and killing, we’ll start to feel concern. We will concern ourselves with these animals’ comfort and well being, and treat them with as much dignity as we do our own children and companion animals.
Just as environmental consciousness has come about, by way of mass concern for the planet, it follows that we must eventually show the same level of concern for animals. We’ll drop our animal eating habits. Then it will be normal to eat exclusively from plants. To only wear clothing that hasn’t been made with animal parts. As time goes on we will forget why we kept and ate animals in the first place. Veganism will be so normal that we won’t even have a name for it. By then we’ll acknowledge animals and be at their service, to atone for what we’ve done to them. We’ll rehabilitate them and provide refuge for them in safe sanctuaries. And we certainly won’t be breeding them!! The very idea of interfering with another species’ breeding cycles let alone keeping them in captivity will not only be scorned but will win mention in the history books, in much the same way as Dr. Mengler’s experiments on humans in Nazi Germany.
When humans realise their mistake, make amends and become their guardians, animals will regain their lives, and their individual, irreplaceable souls will find peace. When we eventually come to rescue these animals, from farms and research labs, we won’t be able to simply turn them loose to lead a ‘natural’ life. They’ve been so completely altered from their wild state that they wouldn’t survive for long on their own. We can only retire them and intervene to stop their breeding. And hope to hell they can forgive us.

Farm animals

Farm animals, and this peaceful cow in particular, are all victims of abuse. This is matter of great concern, but only for those who’ve made it their business to look behind the scenes. Those of us who see what they are doing to animals know we have to try to stop it. Our concern is for them – but ‘concern’ is usually reserved for our own children and other humans, and sometimes for the environment, but it isn’t usually extended to these animals, because that would show up all the terrible things we’ve done to them. So we collectively put our heads in the sand. We’re unwilling to fess up, it’s just too messy to think about.
The bottom line is that all animals face execution. Their destiny is so preordained by ‘this other species’ and their fate so inevitable, that all we can hope is their innocence protects them; that they don’t see what’s coming when their last day comes.
Humans who eat animals think they can get away with all this, but it’s likely that the adrenalin rush produced by the animal’s terror at the point of slaughter, saturates the body tissue and makes their flesh toxic. Those who eat it are poisoned by it. It’s not unlikely that some of the terrible diseases afflicting humans (and their companion animals) are linked to these toxins. Truth is: if we kill them, they kill us.

Farms

We’ve been trained to see animal farms as benign places. And, heaven-forbid, animal research labs too. We value the work farmers and scientists do, even the ones who ‘work with animals’. Consumers along with factory farmers and vivisectors are becoming increasingly desensitised. For instance, consumers let themselves be persuaded that an animal lab is a benign place, and consequently pharmaceuticals, developed using the animal model, are also benign. Consumers say they know nothing about what goes on in labs. They’d rather not know because it’s difficult enough to object to food from farmed animals let alone drugs tested on lab animals, and so this whole subject is ignored as somehow irrelevant. We make the whole thing seem benign. But benign it is not! Well, not to animals it isn’t. For surely every captive creature experiences not only confinement but the denial of any affection. One can only hope they don’t foresee the terrible deaths awaiting them.
If we humans can’t see the wrongness in this, there’s probably a reason - it’s likely that we bypass the guilt about it and make laws to okay it because we need to feel safe from being punished for what we do to them. We all do it by spending money of animal industry products, but there’s safety in numbers. Animals can never pose any direct threat to us, and if they can’t show any retaliation there’s no reason why we can’t go for broke. And we do “go for broke” since we cling to the absurd belief that animals were ‘put here’ for us to use as we please. The represent profit to the farmer or the vivisector and they benefit humans in general (or so we believe), indeed we do it because there’s something in it for us. We turn off the protective gene and turn on the gene of indifference, justifying it by believing animals don’t have feelings (in the sense that we humans do).
And hey presto, we’ve turned them into a machine. As machines we needn’t feel anything for them … as distinct from the very opposite feelings we have for companion animals. If it were a cat or dog being treated badly we’d have the TV cameras down there, recording everything….but not with these creatures.
What is the difference between a mistreated dog and a mistreated cow? Why is it that we aren’t interested in the cow’s emotional wellbeing and why do we not give a stuff about a hen’s health unless it’s going to affect her ‘egg production’? And more to the point, why aren’t we concerned for ourselves and our fall from grace, over this? Over such a pathetic, spoilt-brat attitude as - “I must have milk on my corn flakes or my day just won’t start out right”?

Cow prisons

Why should we care about cows living on prison farms? This question is at the nub of things. Surely cows are the living example of how we’ve made a machine out of Mother Nature. We’ve harnessed Nature to supply our own vast needs, and insured our future survival by having so many animals ‘on tap’. This is victory achieved! We can guarantee our major food supply. We’ve done it by using our brains.
Again, illustrated best by the cow, with our useful knowledge of the biology of this animal we have taken control of her, body and soul. Keeping a cow as a milk-producing machine involves forcibly impregnating her, letting her carry a calf to term, letting that biological process take its course, to stimulate her mammary glands to produce maximum milk. We also very cleverly manipulate her genes too.
By disposing of the newly birthed calf, in order to draw off milk for us, we arrive at a perfect example of slavery. Certainly in Nature ants enslave aphids and terrible predatory things happen between creatures, but everything, predator or predated, is always allowed its sense of being part of the natural world. But not cows nor any other farmed animal. They are enslaved, shut up in cages or enclosed by concrete, and in constant contact with cold hard steel. They’re attended by cold hearted humans who, at their convenience have the animal executed.
Something in our instinct should tell us this is profoundly wrong. But for most of us it doesn’t say anything. Our instincts, in this regard, have been cauterised, so we see no wrong in it.

Milk

So, many people today are realising that cow’s milk is not nutritionally essential, and even that it is unhealthy. Because there are thousands of different products made with it, almost all people still continue to buy milk or foods that contain it.
There’s a tendency for we humans to insist on getting what we want … perhaps it’s a Dominant Species thing - we want it and prefer to get it without struggle. Milk is legal and it’s cheap, it’s subsidised and plentiful. It is therefore the favourite ingredient by many food manufacturers. It is a truly struggle-free product. Fresh supplies are available everywhere. We often need go no further than a few meters down the road, to the nearest corner shop, to get our milk … at which shop they sell many other products, also made with milk (as a chief ingredient). As consumers we almost fall over ourselves to get milk, because we can only contemplate our tea and coffee with it (and therefore unable to imagine life without it!). Everyone has a carton in their fridge (except vegans and lactose intolerants). There is no more prevalent consumer item on the market, and therefore milk is a guaranteed money spinner for the industry. They’ve turned it into something as natural as fresh air. They say it’s essential to human life. So, buying milk is an entrenched consumer habit.
We forget that whenever we buy it, milk, we help to finance cow prisons.

Economics of farms

Perhaps humans have no sadistic need to harm animals for the sake of it. It’s just that economics dictates how we keep them whilst alive and how we bring them to their deaths. We do what we have to do, to get what we want from them, without spending too much money on them. Since the world is a very competitive place, it all has to be low cost. Those with the least morals set the standards. For example, eggs. Cage-eggs are cheap, so every egg farmer in the world must cage their hens or go out of business. It’s the same with all commodities. If milk is cheaper to ship in from Singapore, then will come from there … and Australian dairy farmers eat your heart out!
To get milk (her milk) and sell it for a profit (our profit) a cow must be cheap to produce and cheap to keep. Oceans of milk are made at minimum cost. Rivers of milk supply maximum numbers of consumers.
If this is how milk works then it’s the same for all farmed-animal produce. We want it so they must die for it.
It’s unusual, the idea of being compassionate enough to not want it. It’s impossible to imagine, this idea of refusing to be the cause of harm to these animals. In our culture we are so used to animal products that to voluntarily deny ourselves of them seems absurd. In our culture, the enjoyment of food is everything, especially if we think animal cuisine is an art form. The enjoyment of animal food is greater still if we think it makes us strong. It’s unimaginable to see the need to reverse all this (on the basis that these products are unhealthy represent human cruelty).
And likewise, omnivores can’t imagine animal products being satisfactorily replaced by plant-based products. They just don’t believe it’s possible. And because they can’t imagine it (whereas of course vegans can) they continue to demand these products. They consequently deprive animals of their lives.

Animals wild and enslaved

If an animal is wild (and not regarded as a pest to humans) we study them, marvel at them, protect them . . . although sometimes we hunt them. But if an animal is docile and edible or can make useful products for us, then we put them into the domesticated animal category. Put into service and their freedom to escape is out of the question. Usually their bodily movements are restricted. We take these animals very seriously indeed because they aren’t meant for entertainment or for studying but are essential elements in human lifestyle. It follows then that if an animal is not for cuddling or admiring it must be there to be enslaved. It’s best, emotionally, if humans try not to get too close to these particular animals, since they are going to murdered when they’re either big enough or exhausted enough. We can’t get too friendly if we are going to make them so unhappy. Their happiness is that last thing we are concerned with when holding them in prison conditions (in their pre-abattoir days). When the time is ripe and they do arrive at their last day, it is their unhappiest day. (Or perhaps their happiest, since it brings to the animals a blessėd relief from suffering).

Companion animals and the fate of others.

Our attitude to animals in general is a paradox. It’s curious how we humans can be close to our cats and dogs, even sometimes closer to them than our own species. We might do everything for them to make their lives happy, despite the fact that they only offer companionship, (“only”!), and produce no useful products for us to use. We call them pets or companion animals and put great value on them. Mind you, when they can no longer fulfil their role as companions, we might have them shot, well, ‘shot’ full of lethal chemicals to ‘put them to sleep’. But when they are alive, living with us as working companions, we often try to give them the very best. We give them love, food, shelter and provide them with expensive medical care. But not so other animals, who are valued not as companions but as property and edible property at that. These animals enjoy no quality of life whatsoever, a life of perpetual torture in fact.

The cow

Humans will manipulate anything to gain personal advantage. We exploit resources to strengthen and protect ourselves, and especially when there’s no danger in it for us (like using animals in captivity). Our advantage-taking pragmatism lets us dream up systems, which we then put into practice. Animal farming is the classic example, where we subject animals to slavery, so that our food and clothing supplies are available on tap. And whole livelihoods can be provided for, by putting animals to work for us. And we do it to them because we can, because there are no negative repercussions. (Or so we think!)
Take the cow for instance. She is the victim of theft and assault on a daily basis. Her fate is in the hands of humans who want her milk and who use force to get it, to get 20-40 litres a day from her. The new born is pushed aside so that we can get the milk intended for the calf. We steal it for ourselves and we’ve always done it and now we hardly notice it, and we certainly don’t feel any compunction to stop it.
On the farm, the calf is got rid of as quickly as possible, having served its chief purpose in embryo. As a foetus, having stimulated its mother’s mammary glands, it’s no longer useful to keep it alive. Often calves are shot on day one. One or two calves (of the five or six born to a cow) are sent to ‘calf prison’ until they’re ready for dairy duties or for fattening purposes.
It’s a sad thought that we abuse such a peaceful creature. Anthropomorphically, we can guess that both cow and calf are unhappy about all this. But the whole thing is still legal, so there’s not much anyone can do about it. The milk is drunk, the profits made and the cow enslaved. Are we unhappy about this? Ashamed? Not exactly, because most people have never even thought about it, or if they have they’ve chosen to ignore it. Humans have been nicely brainwashed, our desensitisation reaching the point where considering the rights and wrongs of dairy farming has never entered our heads.

The cow

Humans will manipulate anything to gain personal advantage. We exploit resources to strengthen and protect ourselves, and especially when there’s no danger in it for us (like using animals in captivity). Our advantage-taking pragmatism lets us dream up systems, which we then put into practice. Animal farming is the classic example, where we subject animals to slavery, so that our food and clothing supplies are available on tap. And whole livelihoods can be provided for, by putting animals to work for us. And we do it to them because we can, because there are no negative repercussions. (Or so we think!)
Take the cow for instance. She is the victim of theft and assault on a daily basis. Her fate is in the hands of humans who want her milk and who use force to get it, to get 20-40 litres a day from her. The new born is pushed aside so that we can get the milk intended for the calf. We steal it for ourselves and we’ve always done it and now we hardly notice it, and we certainly don’t feel any compunction to stop it.
On the farm, the calf is got rid of as quickly as possible, having served its chief purpose in embryo. As a foetus, having stimulated its mother’s mammary glands, it’s no longer useful to keep it alive. Often calves are shot on day one. One or two calves (of the five or six born to a cow) are sent to ‘calf prison’ until they’re ready for dairy duties or for fattening purposes.
It’s a sad thought that we abuse such a peaceful creature. Anthropomorphically, we can guess that both cow and calf are unhappy about all this. But the whole thing is still legal, so there’s not much anyone can do about it. The milk is drunk, the profits made and the cow enslaved. Are we unhappy about this? Ashamed? Not exactly, because most people have never even thought about it, or if they have they’ve chosen to ignore it. Humans have been nicely brainwashed, our desensitisation reaching the point where considering the rights and wrongs of dairy farming has never entered our heads.

Instinct instead of understanding

When we have to make up our minds about big issues we’re likely to consult our instincts, especially if the best choices seem obvious. We guess things are so because they are apparently so. For instance, do we need to understand the psyche of a cow, to guess how she feels when her calf is taken away? (Cows are allowed to spend very little time with their calves these days before they are removed). It’s impossible to know how an animal thinks let alone feels. It’s impossible to know for sure. But with imagination and instinct we can guess. Anthropomorphically speaking we rely on our instincts to tell us what we can’t provably ‘know’ … like knowing how this cow feels. We can safely say she feels badly, because she is captive and powerless and she’s forced to lose her offspring.
If we take away an animal’s freedom we take away her very soul; loss of freedom is inimical to all wild creatures and humans too. Once we allow animals their freedom and liberate the captive ones into sanctuaries, we can restore relations with them. And however we are with them, as long as we aren’t violating them or disregarding them or treating them as if they were inferior, then repair is already happening and we are truly living with them, and therefore we can enjoy being close to them.
It’s this wanting-to-be-close that we do best and like most. The buzz from animals is not so different from the buzz we get from kids. For many people, that sort of closeness is unfamiliar. For them animals mean little. They see them as objects, certainly not as equals. Animals are there to be exploited.
With attitude like this animals all over the world are in a parlous situation. That’s why, to us, it is of such great concern.

Doing what we’re good at

Humans are a paradox when dealing with ‘underlings’. We can be pragmatically pushing them down at one moment and loving them the next. We look after their usefulness rather than their individual selves. To make them useful and essential to our survival we kill them - an ultimately violent act. At heart humans would rather be non-violent and to be doing what we do best. We’re not natural tormentors, we’re much better at alleviating pain. We like making life smoother for others. We can be very good to our neighbours. We can be especially good to The Vulnerable, not just out of kindness but because we are fascinated by them and at the same time want to be useful to them. Humans can be very caring for ‘the other’, whether an ecosystem, a needy person or an animal. We get involved in ‘foreign causes’ and we do it, to some extent, out of kindness but mainly we do it because it’s interesting, it’s challenging and it’s about solving a problem somewhere. This is the allure. Here we have the chance to observe something that’s not immediately understandable. To feel close to it. When we’re not engaged with killing or lending our financial support to the animal industry, then caring is the sort of activity that is hobby-number-one for humans. We love spending time with these ‘other fascinating consciousnesses’, like our companion animals at home. Since we like having company and we’re good at being companions ourselves, closeness give us satisfaction. We’re great lookers-afters. It’s one of our greatest skills, but we should also know it’s our greatest privilege, and that should be enough for us. We shouldn’t want anything else for ourselves.
But many do … let’s face it, we ALL do! We are so needy. The animals are our most reliable resource. They are there, vulnerable and available, for satisfying so many of our needs. This means we have to turn away from a loving relationship and enter into a contempt-type relationship. We attack them. And some gather great numbers of them and build whole industries out of them, reducing animals to mere ‘foodstuffs’ and commodities.
For most of us animals aren’t part of making our lilihood, that we eat them as food seems to be a bit of an anomaly, because we have no reason to. We kill them as food but not out of hatred. It’s not really out of anything and most often the whole abattoir-butcher-meat-eating thing is a not-thought-out activity at all. If it were most of us would probably opt for a benign relationship with the animal kingdom and move towards becoming vegetarian … because then we’d have a clear run towards many things getting better … which might mean becoming happy. Most of us associate our happier times having been spent in the company of an animal. Just being with them and letting them be with us can be exquisitely satisfying, whether companions, wild or farmed. We don’t necessarily need to be intrusive or to become indispensable to them or be in control of them. Better only to be relevant to them or be needed by them or useful to them. And while we’re on the subject, I should mention the bleedin’ obvious, that we can’t expect thanks from them for anything we do on their behalf. In fact a friendly nuzzle from our dog is about the most tangible sign of thanks we can expect of them (for being loving as opposed to being exploiting). Animals are silent appreciators but transmit something not easy to describe. But whatever it is, it’s in us too.
If we do something fine, we can feel appreciation for it but it’s not always tangible and, for the most part, were okay about that because we don’t want a song and dance made about it. The altruist and the ‘altruee’ are together, unseparated at that time. It’s good to know that we can have that with others, to know that we have the sensitivity to see a need and respond to it with no strings attached. Our reward is simply to be close to another living entity, and one who we don’t have to understand, who might be unpredictable and fascinating because of that … but do we have the right to understand them (or each other?). Do we need to?

Not essential to understand others?

We project altruism and we think about possibilities and opportunities, and sometimes we pour our altruism into great causes. Which brings us back to Animal Rights. When we’re aware of our own altruism, (like parents can be with their kids) we go on to apply it beyond the home and beyond the personal, elsewhere, for other people, other species, other ideas. Animal Rights is just one of the great causes, another is planet care, another is social justice and the human ‘right to a life’. Many people divide up their stocks of altruism between personal matters and world matters. Energy for this comes from our empathetic enthusiasms.
For us, as humans, empathy is our forté. We can feel almost as much for the loss of a life in others as we can for the loss of our own life. Humans are often drawn to compassion when we see death amongst starving children. Kids dying of it is heartbreaking. But we see it in exploited animals too, and all these animals have their lives prematurely ended too, not by starving but by execution. As with starving kids, all farm animals are also dying young. And for kids so it is for animals it can be much the same sort of empathy we feel, not only for the dying but for the suffering whilst alive.
The ability to cause this level of suffering purposely and carelessly, denying kids food, caging and killing animals, this is the opposite of empathy. It’s full-on separation, where we see ourselves so far removed from the ‘other’ that we alienate them, exploit them or kill them. When we humans turn against each other, there’s a feeling of warlike spearation but when we turn against animals it’s worse than separation, it’s enslavement. Maintaining this sort of relationship with animals couldn’t be worse - we exercise power over them unashamedly, we grant them no rights, only the ‘privilege’ of staying alive for long enough to be productive. To us. And that’s about the most cynical foundation for a relationship one could imagine.

We don’t need to understand animals

When we come across people who are different, we either alienate them because we fear them or we make an effort to get close to them and make them feel at home. They remain a mystery for some time but their differences, aren’t they usually more interesting than threatening? Maybe don’t understand them, but do we need to? The more differences others have, the more they bring us out of our shell and the more we can learn from them - how they operate, how they see us and how they respond to us. The more we watch them the more we learn about ourselves. And that valuable form of learning isn’t confined to humans. Who hasn’t felt close to a creature, found them fascinating, learnt from them and tried to understand them? But surely the question is, why should we want to understand them when all we really want is to be close to them?
Most humans are fascinated by any kind of connection with an animal. Surely what we like most is them liking us. But more importantly, it’s that protective feeling we have towards them, and us ready to act as a friend or guardian to them, if they need help. And many do.
Because we see so much need for help, we’re vegan. But even for those who aren’t ‘animal people’, even if they eat them, for all of us guardianship comes quite naturally. It’s an integral part of human nature. We know animals are less powerful than us, and hopefully we look out for them, especially if they’re in trouble.
Humans are good at this. We do it well: coming close + getting involved. Dogs, with thousands of years being close to the human being, are also good at it. In fact they’re renowned for it - being protective of us and being loyal and friendly. We know less about other animals but probably they’re all like this, especially amongst their own kind, being protective of their young and acting for their wellbeing, guarding the vulnerable, creating safety and encouraging growth. In other words, this altruistic trait is characteristic of both animals and humans. In humans, altruism springs out of us naturally, instinctively, as it does animals. But there’s another element in humans that animals don’t have; we ‘do’ altruism. They don’t ‘do’ it, not intellectually or by design or to be correct. Altruism in humans is (not always) a response plus a reflection on that response - “oh, wouldn’t it be great if I were altruistic, not just for my kids and family but out of charity, beyond home”. That’s how, I think, animal rights advocates feel; they step beyond self interest to attend to the urgent interests of a repressed slave population. We certainly don’t need to understand animals to do that.

Different from me

If we care about the differences in others, which might put them at a disadvantage (whether it be racial, species difference), our caring may not stem from kindness but from interest. It’s usually interesting to observe the differences in others. In whatever form, it’s deeply satisfying to experience the diversity of life.
The difference may not be in person-form but in the form of an idea. An idea might not be familiar, it may scare us, but it may show us new possibilities and opportunities. Different people, different life forms, different ideas – they can help us move on and grow. Perhaps great ideas like non-separation and non-violence suggest a new approach, in how we treat each other and, in tandem, these two ideas can smooth the way to an acceptance of animals, as being of equal importance to humans. On some levels we might be superior to them, on some levels they might be superior to us. But however we see them, if we look closely, we can learn a lot from them, to our benefit. We don’t need to hurt them for us to benefit from them! By realising some of the superior qualities they have, we’re more likely to re-think how we treat them.
Animals may be superior to us, by having better survival skills. They may do better with their relationships, because they aren’t gratuitously violent with each other (sure, there are exceptions!). They lack revenge. They aren’t judgemental. They don’t bear a grudge. To accept animals as equals we need to use our imagination. If animals are worthy of equal respect, it means the same as respecting people from different cultural backgrounds – who show us things about ourselves we didn’t know, some wonderful qualities we don’t have.
Our reactions to ‘different-ones’, whether species or racially different, might at first spark hostility in us, from feeling threatened by the unfamiliar. But once we get to know them a little better, we might switch over from dislike to admiration. We can learn a lot from foreigners … whether they’re human or non-human.

Pay-back time

For those who refuse to accept the dietary changes suggested by vegans, there’s a hard lesson to be learned. There are the health dangers of meat eating, with heart disease, cancer and diabetes each being associated with eating animal protein and fats. But it’s not just about health, it goes deeper, to the danger of developing a weak conscience. It leads us into advantage taking and not feeling the wrongness of it. It’s about abusing the vulnerable to benefit ourselves, and that could include the abuse of women and children, or spoiling the countryside, or fishing-out the oceans or the caging of hens.
All exploitation comes at a price even though it might not be immediately obvious. And because it isn’t immediately obvious we continue to exploit and think nothing of it. But eventually the damage shows up on our own doorstep, if not in the nightmare part we play in animal cruelty, then in the ill effects of eating animals. In terms of ill health (as well as shame) we are discovering how deep is the hole we’ve fallen into. It can be so deep and our hands so tied, that even if we wanted to we’re too far gone to make amends. Unless we try to repair some of the damage we’ve done, we may lose everything that we have gained.
If we do care about the animals’ plight we’ll probably appreciate the great advantages we humans have been enjoying, up to now, and not begrudge giving away some of those advantages for the sake of the greater good. Sure, we’ll have to deal with some inconvenience, and yet in the long run our decisions will be justified by enjoying good health and a lighter conscience.
It’s a straight forward move, from being an abuser to becoming a repairer. We all have to move that way sooner or later. And as soon as we do, as soon as we start to respect the natural order, we can develop, evolve and expand our consciousness. But not until!

Boycotts and information

The job of convincing animal product customers not to buy is the job of those animal rights advocates who know how to communicate, (something any impassioned, vegan advocate can do credibly, if they feel strongly enough about the issues). Communicators have to show the need for product-boycott, even though it’s inconvenient. We must talk about spending habits and the chance for change coming when billions of boycotters divert their dollars to non-animal products. Only then will the billions of animals be released from slavery.
The impact on the general community, of rescuing animals from factory farms and getting media coverage, is in the initial shock effect of seeing the conditions they live in, but to further influence people we need to get into their minds. Minds that fear life without animal products. We lessen this fear by witnessing the conditions animals live in and resolving to help them in the only way we can – namely by way of boycott. The rescuers video footage is usually powerful stuff, but after that we must rely on words, to get across details, to explain why these things happen to animals and how the customer helps to perpetuate it all. And getting all this across is essential for people to learn the essentials … but the information easily becomes too heavy to digest. So, for communicators, we need to avoid the temptation to say too much, too soon or with too much emotional punch. We mustn’t lose our reputation as information givers. If we preach it’s a big turn-off.
We don’t want people to simply agree with us anyway. We want to stimulate enquiry. As speakers we don’t want passive acceptance nor does the Animal Rights movement want followers. The need is for people to find out what they need to know, to step away, take a deep breath, and then make a leap of faith. The need is for them to imagine how-things-could-be, and then how we could have a freer world where all things are freer, including animals, environment and impoverished people.
The world will find great benefit in a change in human eating habits. The main reason a vegan diet is still regarded as a threat is because it touches on so many interrelating attitudes, and for many people that is just a bit too overwhelming. We need to be able to show how each connection can be contained in a normal daily life and how putting an effort in will reap rich rewards for all concerned … not for the animal industries though!

Direct action or direct communication

If we want habits and mindsets to change it means learning how to communicate. And that rules out using disapproval, guilt, shaming tactics and any other of our favourite ‘frighteners’. We should only make suggestions and promote the ‘coming attractions’ (of which, as we know, there are many!)
Many of the most sincere animal activists may disagree with this approach.. They only know how to be effective by confronting and forcing animal rights issues into public attention. And that might be valid – for example, the activities of the Animal Liberation Front, who are willing to destroy property to save animals on fur farms and intensive farming operations. They risk their own liberty to make their point. They save many tortured animals in the process. They promise their direct action will be carried out without causing any injury to people. They deserve our respect. And there are those who break into vivisection laboratories and rescue the animals there. They also perform a great service for those animals. And it takes guts. And surely, at the cost of a few broken doors and locks it’s a small price to pay. Surely, in these cases, some collateral property damage is justified, especially since there’s no physical harm to any person. If their actions are non-violent and they go on to provide sanctuary for the animals they’ve rescued, the only real damage is to animal industry profits.
But these rescuing activities aren’t going to impact on the egg breakfasters and milk drinkers and ham sandwich eaters, who refuse to change their eating habits. If we want to approach the massed throng of people who are the customers of these ugly animal industries, I think our only valid approach has to be educative. Bucket loads of embarrassing facts and big doses of logical argument to attempt to persuade the customer. But this is the mighty, free-willed human being we’re referring to here. They are habitual spenders whose money is all powerful, who are part of a vast, vast majority. There’s a wall of obstinacy, arrogance, selfishness and thoughtlessness built against our arguments. These consumers aren’t necessarily hard hearted or implacably anti-vegan, it’s just that they are addicted to animal products and don’t want to relinquish them, and that’s their reason to buy them. We have our work cut out to convince them of good reasons to spend their money more humanely.