The comforts of carnivores

On this matter of using animals, so many people today don’t seem to be able to make that great leap forward, towards herbivorous-ness. Like paedophiles who keep on assaulting children we’re forced to continue assaulting animals. We can’t control it and we can’t reduce it, and so we take risks with our own ethics, health and our relationship with the world. We risk our very conscience for the sake of comfort food. None of it is actually necessary on any level whatsoever and none of it un-replaceable with plant-based alternatives or if clothing synthetic alternatives. And yet it continues because we aren’t in control of our choices.
This is a heavy price to pay, to keep the conscience quiet, to give up the feeling of being okay but still hoping to feel safe. This seems to be a huge risk to take. It makes us have to rely on some very flimsy safety nets. It means relying on mere luck, or hope, or superstition, or even an eventual rescue by some benevolent force from who-knows-where. In other words we give over the very controls of our life because we can’t knock off the pop-foods (the ones the evil empire people are churning out by the bucket-load). On this we spend our ‘hard-earned’.
We eat animal foods and hope to ‘get away with it’, in the comfortable belief that animals can’t hit back. And it’s true, they can’t. Well, not head on anyway. Not in the same way as we attack them … but then, of course, we suspect they all have a sting in their tail. We know they do hit back, by way of the toxicity of their edible body parts, and the god-knows-how-much adrenaline-infused contaminants entering the muscle tissue at the abattoir (their presence down to all the fear and terror going on there). It’s Montezuma’s revenge. If we eat animals and feel good, and we keep on eating them, it’s likely we’ll end up NOT feeling so good. And I suppose you could say, speaking generally of humans, that this would then be a just return for all the appalling treatment the animals have undergone - the penalty people pay for pretending NOT to know about the animals, who then who leave it too late to become aware, and who then realise they’ve been at risk all their life (largely over eating animal products).
Being largely unaware, until recently, of the dangers of eating animal foods (both ethically and health wise), humans have exploited animals, as an available resource, for hundreds of generations, since the beginning of written history. So we have no evidence that people ever related to animals in any other way. Certainly not non-violently.
Since we began recording our existence, the human species has always been very utilitarian, taking advantage of everything that couldn’t fight back. Since animals have always been easy pickings - we have always caught them, kept them captive (and now today almost always cage them), and we use the most scientific methods to efficiently breed them, and then we take what we want from them, And just to prove how much we don’t-give-a-fuck, we then have them killed in specially designed execution chambers so that we can (for chrissakes) EAT them. What sort of relationship between fellow travellers is that, one wonders?

The way animals are treated, their story is so sad that most people refuse to think about it. And thinking is the key here. It’s the lack of it that leads most poor suckers to the doors of the abattoir to buy things. We want: we get. And we ignore how much of our money is extracted from us, by the animal industries. And so every day we go to them until we go somewhere-else … we go, with our baggage of diseases and disappointments, like lambs to the slaughter, to our untimely or ugly death. And so too do may vegans. But the difference is that, to quote Dylan Thomas, they “do not go gentle into that good night”.