Happiness

We can see what is happening out there - billions of domesticated farm animals, who are alive today, are all on death row. They have no quality of life, no purpose for living and no contact with the natural world. We have ignored their sentience and reduced each one to the status of a machine. And we’ve done this to them (each of us to a greater or lesser degree) because we want to take something that’s theirs from them. Shopping for animal foods must therefore be considered an act of violence.
Now if we profess to "believe in non-violence", we have to put our money where our mouth is . . . and it isn’t only by making a moral statement, because it has to be kept up, every day.
We won’t be able to sustain this behaviour just because it’s ‘right’. There must be some other force keeping us on track. It isn’t so much about what we should do, but about what we should want to do. And so we should first want to be altruistic. The intelligent altruist isn’t a do-gooder but an explorer, practising altruism just as one would pursue any other enjoyable activity. Whatever we want to establish by way of altruism, we have to let it filter into our lives, so that we can feel comfortable with any project we take on, which uses it. And in order to be useful and effective and not get depleted by what we’re trying to do, we have to practise on each other … by developing an interest in one another … by serving each other. Wanting to be useful is the same thing as wanting to be happy: our own happiness is linked by wanting others to be happy too. Great for human relations, but imagine the implications on our attitude towards making animals happy!