Harmlessness isn’t quite enough

How successful are we going to be, as liberators? If things don’t work out well for the animals (and they’ve had no luck with humans so far) things won’t progress for any of us. Humans have a tradition of treating animals barbarically. We now seem like barbarians, but most of us see ourselves, personally, as humanitarians. Until we change our attitude towards animals the ugliness of our eating habits will stick and we won’t be able to move on. Until at least 50% of the human population realises there’s an animal problem, the animal problem will remain, and we won’t have the numbers to even communicate the issues let alone make attitude changes. And with no change we’ll remain as we are. On a personal level we may swing over to becoming vegetarians and collectively we may eventually get the worst abuses fixed, but that won’t be enough to inspire a non-violence-based attitude change. It won’t represent the massive voting support we need for animal liberation to start.
Ultimately, this is what makes us feel so afraid – the no-progress thing. The fear that we are always going to be a cruel, selfish and hard nosed species. Even just on a personal level it doesn’t seem to be dynamic when we just observe the principle of harmlessness. It doesn’t communicate powerfully enough to be noticed. It’s a bit too wussy? Not pro-active enough? On a personal level, most of us would like to save our own souls, and there are many vegans who are vegans primarily for that reason. Others see the bigger picture, the urgency of getting others on side and for animals to be safe - from us! All the time we identify with and excuse other humans, who make up ‘the dangerous species’, the less effective our individual changes will be in persuading a non-violent approach. Vegans need to get across the absurdity and impossibility of humans moving on all the time most of us are still in the habit of exploiting animals.