Up against a wall

The reason a vegan might feel angry with the world is because people are so reluctant to change. But there is also a sense of futility in this - we expect fellow humans to be more than they actually are. The constant disappointment over others can make us want to withdraw, to fall out of love with people, not just because they seem oblivious to the suffering of animals but because they continually miss the opportunity to change. They continue to eat rubbish foods, continue to get ill, continue to hold violent attitudes. It seems such a waste of personal potential and so, for many vegans, it is more like exasperation than anger - a general inability to understand the workings of the mind of their fellow human beings, at how much of the present m.o. they accept and how slowly they seem to want to grasp the need for change.
Vegans who are active in the animal rights movement invest their free time in a great cause and just when they think they are getting somewhere they find no one is taking a blind bit of notice of what they are saying, even close friends. And then when the braver activists try to go into the public arena and speak up, they get knocked down, or worse, they’re made to look like fools.
Everything we stand for - the principle of plant-based diets and animal rights and non-violence - is given minimal press coverage and if we try to bring it to public attention we’re prevented. We have to stand by and see misinformation moulding the minds of people. It’s difficult to see momentum building or any real sign of people questioning what they’re told. Not surprisingly we get nervous for the animals who can only rely on the good nature of humans to save them. The hope that there is in people a good nature struggling to get out wears thin when we see slavery, captivity and killing as practiced by the animal industries and consumers supporting it. And then it wears thinner still when we realise how many animals are suffering at the hands of sadists or scientists, who use animals for experimentation.
Are vegans being unrealistic to expect more of people than they are capable of? Are we unrealistic to think that humans can’t also be monsters? For example, the vivisector?
Perhaps it’s easy to see them this way when you think of vivisection and the live cutting of an animal. White coated creatures of one species objectify a living, breathing, feeling creature of another species. They experiment on them as if they had no feelings. It does seem to be monstrous. When you think of a rabbit, for example, being used to test a shampoo for eye safety, by restraining its body, taping open its eye lids and then squirting corrosive chemicals into its eye. This action must be just about the most terrifying experience any sentient being could undergo, unable to defend itself or escape. It has been made to experience torture.
Whether the suffering takes place on a vivisector’s slab or in the killing shed at an abattoir, the coldness with which it is inflicted by the human isn’t merely frightening, it is so much worse in that it’s a terror no sentient creature should ever have to know. No human should be capable of devising or carrying out such acts. Nothing can justify it. The perpetrator is not only insane to do it but dangerously insane by influencing others to think it acceptable.