Promotion of veganism

At first, when we’re going vegan, there’s a mixture of concerns that we have about ourselves. And that’s just in our private lives. Alongside personal worries, there grows a concern for others, the animals and for people, especially people we know who are bogged down in speciesist thinking. That concern leads on to our wanting to promote veganism and non-speciesism, but it isn’t easy. There’s not much out there to help us. Promotion is tough because veganism still has so little social momentum of its own. All we can do, if we have the energy, is to keep the issues alive. And along the way, deal quietly with any personal problems (about our own vegan lifestyle), at least until the ‘good idea’ is established in our own lives. It all takes time, developing it and then practising it, but that’s relatively simple compared to the complexities of promoting it. Many live private vegan lives, they keep quiet and so no one is affected. Others are out there under the noses of everyone, advocating veganism to anyone they meet. But neither really promote veganism.
There are those others of us who like to see ourselves as dynamic activists and who dream of living in a vegan world, but we aren’t necessarily very effective at communication. We question the old methods and find them wanting, so why do we fail? Perhaps because the changes we want to see are so fundamental and seem to most people so radical. We almost have to expect NOT to be stunningly successful. There’s so much to deal with on so many different levels. We have to look after our own image as well as the image of the idea itself. We have to make our ‘good idea’ attractive enough to be habit forming if taken up – quite a task! If that seems unlikely then the even greater hurdle is to get other vegans to discuss promotional ideas. And it’s here where the big problem may be. Success may only be possible if we can be as equals amongst ourselves. We need to own our difficulties, stresses, failures because we all experience them. The more we can show what each of us is going through, for better or for worse, the better we can understand each other, and then the better we can solve the promotion problem.
And while some might have been at veganism longer than others, no one knows the definitive way to sell this idea, because everyone thinks differently. The closer we are when talking, the clearer the communication is going to get. The more at ease we are with our subject and the people we are with, the more effectively we can get something across that is dear to our heart. Apart from all the information we’d like to impart, we should spare a moment to explain the most central truth. That we, as vegans, are all undergoing the same journey, hopefully a less judgmental one, and there are no ‘right’ answers to communication. The only thing we can be sure about is that the principles (of veganism) are unshakeable and potentially world-transforming. Now that sounds attractive enough to make promotion seem a fairly straightforward business! Doesn’t it?

Heat stress

My good idea (becoming vegan) is like a beautifully engineered car with its engine cold, needing a kick start. My veganism, my ideals, seem half clear and half fuzzy. I wonder if I’ve laid too much hope on making these changes. Here I am, trying to change into a non-violent person (‘Go Vegan’ the slogan says). But I need more than fearlessness. I need a confidence that will uphold my ideals and ignore what others think about me. I’m inspired by the good idea but that doesn’t mean I understand everything about it, like what the implications of it will be. Perhaps it’s a bit like when we fall in love and then have to learn how to live together. We grasp the idea well enough but how do we get our brain around it, to put it into practice?
When we ‘go vegan’ - we like to talk about it. Boast about it too. And because we do, we have to make it work. Perhaps we squeeze it a little too hard and it takes on too much importance, all at once. We go in full-bore, because we don’t want our good idea turning sour on us. That would mean going back to square one, and we’d never live that down. And besides, this idea deserves our best shot, so that we’ll understand it better … all the better to reach others with it … all the better to get them to join up and be company for us. Overall, we want this change to work. But all this wanting leads to trouble … we stress about it. And that is characteristic of people starting out being vegan.
But the pressures remain, only they change. For longer term vegans, the food isn’t the problem, people’s opinions of us aren’t so problematic but the stress doesn’t go away, about the slowness of people to come round, to even discuss the subject. The world sleeps on and time is running out. So, for all vegans, young or old, when the scales fall from our eyes and we see what others are not yet seeing, then it’s stressful to see the extent to which the conventional world is reliant on animals and psychologically how fixed people’s attitudes are about animal use. So vegans have to learn to live with a certain level of stress, (the heat is in the kitchen and somehow we have to find a way to stay in the kitchen, heat or no heat).

The decision to 'go vegan'

I start the process of change. I latch onto this good idea and head directly into being vegan, non-violent, animal friendly, green, world transforming, ideal, and everything else indisputable! But I know that once started, I must continue with it or I'll feel like a failure.Definitely I want to leave violence behind me. I want to become a peaceful person. But how do I deal with the "feelings" of violence, woven so tightly into my personal experience and social culture? I’m overwhelmed by the difficulty of dropping it entirely. I aim to be clear of it all; no less than celibate with regard to animal abuse.I take on a vegan diet. I chuck out my leathers, and so on. The idea continues to inspire me. But what about my "feelings"? It may be a good idea in theory, but is it going to make me "feel" better? I have doubts, not about the principle, but about the practice. And that’s where having some sensitivity is a boon and yet also a burden. Great to reach this far, but am I making a rod for my own back? I want to toss this idea of veganism about, let it settle into my life, live with it, let it be known in my social group, without worrying about what others may say … and then I can feel comfortable with it. Then I can handle the inevitable flak.So, I decide to give up eating unethical stuff and that makes me think well of myself. So far so good. I get ready to change. But it’s hard, slow work because I can’t see any wheels turning or any momentum building. I’m impatient, waiting for things to happen. I want everyone to become supportive. And I know that’s unrealistic. I feel I’m wading through treacle, in a state of ever-increasing social isolation. Oh the burden of it all!But the benefits. On the plus side I get a surprise, in finding the change of diet isn’t such a big a problem after all. Well, not to me anyway. This diet switch is surprisingly easy (and that’s what I’d been dreading all along!) With some new products in the cupboard and a few new recipes, I soon come to like the different food and not miss the animal-stuff I once enjoyed eating. But there are other difficulties that need to be mentioned. Unforeseen ones. I worry about my resolve. It might fade before the new lifestyle kicks in. So I’d better go carefully and maybe change incrementally. Trouble is, I probably know a few people who have gone half way and never progressed much beyond that, which is a truly sad position to find yourself in. So, on thinking about it, as I head towards being vegan, I might decide to go in full bore. I’ll use sheer will-power, anything to get to the ‘other side’.Some people are gradual changers and some are more sudden. But whichever way works best foodwise, there are other substantial issues still to face. A newish feeling, how we feel when we begin to notice when something is missing, like losing something we’ve come to rely on. Like the acceptance of people, who now think we’ve gone a bit weird. And our comfort foods, gone! But hey, what's this next one? Seems to have come out of left field … seems as though, along with food and wardrobe, there’s other junk in the cupboard, like our favourite jar we keep full of value judgments. I might have really enjoyed my judgment-making. Perhaps that’s part of why I wanted to go vegan in the first place, to feel better than other people. And now . . . they look a bit rancid. A bit like the nasty poisonous things I've been chucking out.So, if I'm beginning to eat clean, why not start thinking a bit cleaner too? Lessen my reliance on making judgements and enjoying my little superiorities?As vegans we experience change on various levels when we start this product boycott. We face the tension that exists between our deepest passion and our patience. Some of us have to face up to addictions. And some of us have to acknowledge failure too. And whilst, in the beginning, veganism seems like such a good idea, it still needs to be reinforced regularly, to withstand the cold winds of criticism or the drag-down inertia of the conventional world.As an evangelist for veganism I’d want to say “it’s worth it: go vegan. It’s not that hard at all”. But in truth, it’s bloody hard. At least for some of us. But, all the same, certainly worth it.

The grab

Big decisions are made based on ethics, and even though we experiment with them, the ones we choose must represent safety - the safe way to do new things. For instance building relationships, building the very future itself - ethics help us to emphasise what is important. Ethics expand consciousness. And if we use our brains enough (and if our ethics are comprehensive enough) we’ll let a new consciousness influence our everyday thinking process. Humans are fortunate to have that ability to weigh the rights and wrongs of quite complex problems. Other animals are limited in this way. They can’t necessarily ‘get out of the rain’ as we can. But we’ve taken this gift for granted, and used our discriminatory abilities to advantage ourselves, to the detriment of others.
Our sophisticated thought processes have shown us how to grab. It has allowed us to feather our own nests, but we’ve neglected our role as guardians. Our intellect has become detached from our conscience, giving us the green light to go ahead with things we shouldn’t be doing. We’ve wreaked plenty of havoc, and now we need to make amends, by putting ourselves second for a change, materially and spiritually. We owe it to our victims, to show gratitude for what we’ve taken. It’s pay back time. In other words we have to realise that our planet is our sacred responsibility and not something to trash.
However, we are up against the super-spoilers, mega-polluters and profit makers, and amongst them the animal cagers and vivisectors who simply regard ethics as obstacles to profit. And they intend to continue until they are stopped! But recently there’s been a change in public awareness, about the damage we humans have done. Now, to some extent, there is a level of environmental responsibility creeping into our consciousness. The environment gets good press after decades of neglect. But farm animal abuse gets virtually no publicity at all, because it threatens the huge food and clothing supply chains. It’s the purpose of the movement for animal rights to bring our responsibility into sharp focus.

Discuss values

We often hear “It’s just human nature”, implying that it would be futile to try to change certain behaviours, implying that anyone going against the norm (who is in the minority) will inevitably find themselves between a rock and a hard place. But it works both ways. Those who stay with the conventional meat-eating diet are faced with a worse choice, between agreeing with enslaving animals for meat and a guilty conscience for going along with it. This is where confusion hits hardest, for young people especially. They pick up habits by observing their elders but have to wonder why so called ‘ethical’ behaviour is inconsistent at certain times – some values are great, others appear to be so obviously unethical. Kids can’t help disrespecting some of the things adults do because they find themselves questioning what are supposed to be good values.
As adults we prize values. They are the yardstick by which we assess and are assessed. These values are connected with how we want others to see us. It’s likely we do things ethically because we want to feel good about ourselves. We want to win approval, for instance, by developing a good sense of humour and by being kind and generous. This is how we show how rounded we are, and how well we’ve adopted a system of values. We’re judged favourably for them and if we display them consistently we get a good reputation. Adults need to be seen as strong but fair – we want to develop our soft and our hard sides, so we try to be angels-cum-warriors. To achieve this image we have to learn not just the nuts and bolts of acquiring image, but how to genuinely benefit others over a prolonged period. We need rules that are feel-good rules, that we revere, as if passed down through the generations. We rely on proven guidelines that have worked well throughout history and which today still feel right, as if they’ve sprung straight from instinct. But today, with so many confusions and double standards, we have to be much more clear about what ethics we are going to follow. In this modern age instincts aren’t always enough to formulate our ethics and so we need to talk things through with others. We need to discuss them in the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of conversation. What we don’t need is for certain topics to be forbidden for discussion. What we don’t need is an unexpected explosion because we’ve raised a tricky subject. Agreeing and disagreeing are all part of the process of assessing values. We don’t so much need to agree or disagree with others’ values as we need to find others willing to talk about them with us.

Energy

On the face of it, dynamic non-violence calls for right-thinking which in turn depends upon our ability to discriminate right from wrong. But this leads us into the moral quagmire of making value judgments. Vegans, for instance, secure their position in the ‘right-thinking’ camp, but they often go on to compare themselves with others who aren’t as ‘right-thinking’ as they should be. Vegans often become judgmental and this can make them look unattractive and frightening.
We’d be on safer ground if we spent less time on good and bad values and concentrated more on good and bad energy. By becoming non-violent, vegans tap into a highly efficient energy production system. Energy used for non-violent activity contrasts with the energy-drain that comes with aggression and violence. Nobody actually advocates violence, it’s more like a fall back position. It scoops us up when we get lost. It appeals to our weak willed side. It’s a temptation not because it is wicked but because it fools us into thinking we can get a quick result. We fail to realise that it sucks energy out of us, and one of the worst energy losses comes when we try to get away with not getting caught out.
“No harm will come if we can get away with it”, which is probably how the obstinate meat eater thinks. They hope they can "get away" with their meat diet without too much damage. But of course the damage shows up later, down the track, when there’s chronic damage done to our system, by which time it seems too late to rescue ourselves. If we’d been less obstinate, listened to our instincts and all the good advice available, we might have eventually become vegan, and thereby not had to take such risks with our lives. Because we are all free-willed individuals, it’s only by our own willingness that we can start to consider making major personal changes that will affect the course of our whole lives and determine the source of our energy supply. Not only should we help ourselves, we should look to others, notably the animal slaves we keep for food. New attitude: Help them, don’t eat them.

People power for peace

In a vegan world, our fundamental nature is consciously changed. If we want to become peaceful people, we must stop using animals because all animals are eventually barbarically killed. If we don’t step away from all this, our attempts at peacemaking will be to no avail. Peacemakers and planet-savers have to start spending their money on cruelty-free products thereby persuading unethical businesses to pursue a more ethical direction. The money in our pockets is the one power we have that can change things, that can help the animals.
I’m intending to get my saw out this week, cut a plywood panel for my bike, fit it under my saddle, with a new slogan to make road users think. I hope they get it. It says:

HELP THEM,
DON’T EAT THEM
(and in smaller letters underneath)
“g o v e g a n”

The toxic human

Vegan principles make a start to unlocking the violence humans have done to animals, but more so, veganism shows the utter waste of energy in producing food from animals. Once the plant-based food regime is up and running in our life, it then becomes clear that, in the past, we’ve been poisoning ourselves. The full extent of the toxicity of animal food is only now coming to light, in terms of its effect on peoples’ health. Epidemiological studies show that ill health is closely linked to the diets of whole populations, showing the links between a high intake of animal protein and the high incidence of deadly disease. But still there is silence on the dangers of using animal foods, not to mention the silence about the demise of our ethics in general!
We’re led to see ethics as a rather threadbare garment unlikely to keep us warm enough, so we’ve substituted ethics with other moral codes that allow us to do whatever we want, especially to animals. This is sad enough, but it has somewhat put us to sleep. We’ve lost our sense of outrage. We allow ourselves to comply. We no longer fight to protect the innocent. And this is why Animal Rights is so urgent. The protection of animals from us is essential. We humans can no more be trusted with animals than paedophiles with kids. And yet it seems we still care little about this subject or about the ethics of non-violence. As we continue to drive animals insane for our own advantage, our only fear is that we might become marginalised if we take up membership of the vegan world.

Clearing the way ahead

The mind, helped along by institutionalised misinformation, wants us to believe that plant-based diets are not safe. But evidence proves otherwise. If we read up on the subject (and there’s not exactly a shortage of literature on vegan nutrition) we’ll soon be assured about safety. Much has been written not only about the plant-based diet (supplemented only by regular minute doses of Vitamin B12) but the health and energy of that diet.
Once the physical and psychological safety factors have been satisfactorily dealt with, there is no other reason to be using meat, milk or eggs … or going to zoos! In fact the absence of animal stuff is a great weight lifted from us. You can see it in the many happy and healthy vegans living in the world today, who are themselves evolving and, by their benignity, are helping other species to evolve. As each irreplaceable individual animal has a chance to move past the terror and suffering we’ve imposed on them, they will have the opportunity (as humans have had for so long) to come to know who they are.

Animal material

It seems that today our human passion and outrage is reserved for environmental issues not for issues concerning animal farming or animal experimentation. Sad enough that the beautiful planet is being damaged, and sad too that rapid species loss is taking place, but more insidious is our deliberate attack on animals. Here we see a mindless perverting of Nature with no end in sight. And for what?
No animal product is essential, for any reason whatsoever. Sure, leather is strong and waterproof but life’s not threatened without it. Sure, cheese and eggs seem useful for making yummy products but they’re not difficult to replace. Nothing from animals is so essential that we’d have to compromise our principles to get useful things and find yummy food, and yet creature-killing has become routine in every human community on the planet. Humanity is hooked on animal stuff. We can’t see past these animal products, to where they could be replaced with plant-based equivalents. As with the kicking of any bad habit, it’s all in the mind. The big surprise with this one is how easy it is to kick.

Public awareness campaign

Big decisions are made based on ethics and even though we experiment with them, the ones we choose must represent safety - the safe way to do new things. For instance building relationships, building houses, building the very future itself - ethics help us to emphasise what is important. Ethics expand consciousness. And if we use our brains enough (and if our ethics are comprehensive enough) we’ll let a new consciousness influence our everyday thinking process. Humans are fortunate to have that ability to weigh rights and wrongs of quite complex problems. Other animals are limited in this way. They can’t necessarily ‘get out of the rain’ as we can. But we have taken this gift for granted, and used our discriminatory abilities to advantage ourselves, to the detriment of others.
Our sophisticated thought processes have allowed us to feather our own nests, but we’ve neglected our role as guardians. Our intellect has become detached from our conscience, giving us the green light to go ahead with things we shouldn’t be doing. We’ve wreaked plenty of havoc, and we now need to make amends. We need to put ourselves second for a change, materially and spiritually. We owe it to our victims, to show gratitude for what we’ve taken. It’s pay back time. We need to contribute something wholesome to the future. In other words we have to realise that our planet is our sacred responsibility and not something to trash.
However, we are up against the super-spoilers, mega-polluters and profit makers, and amongst them are the animal cagers and vivisectors who simply regard ethics as obstacles to profit. They intend to continue until they are stopped! But recently there’s been a change in public awareness about the damage we humans have done and now, to some extent, there is a level of environmental responsibility creeping into our consciousness. The environment gets good press after decades of neglect. But farm animal abuse gets virtually no publicity at all, because it threatens the huge food and clothing supply chains. The movement for animal rights brings our responsibility into sharp focus.

Values

Sunday 19th April
We often hear “It’s just human nature”, implying that it would be futile to try to change certain behaviours, implying that anyone going against the norm (who is in the minority) will inevitably find themselves between a rock and a hard place. But it works both ways. Those who stay with the conventional meat-eating diet are faced with a worse choice, between agreeing with enslaving animals for meat and a guilty conscience for going along with it. This is where confusion hits hardest, for young people especially. They pick up habits by observing their elders but have to wonder why so called ‘ethical’ behaviour is inconsistent at certain times – some values are great, others appear to be so obviously unethical. Kids can’t help disrespecting some of the things adults do because they find themselves questioning what are supposed to be good values.
As adults we prize values. They are the yardstick by which we assess and are assessed. These values are connected with how we want others to see us. It’s likely we do things ethically because we want to feel good about ourselves. We want to win approval. For instance, by developing a good sense of humour and by being kind and generous we show how rounded we are, and how well we’ve adopted a system of values. We’re judged favourably for them and if we display them consistently we get a good reputation. Adults need to be seen as strong but fair – we want to develop our soft and our hard sides, so we try to be angels-cum-warriors. To achieve this image we have to learn not just the nuts and bolts of acquiring image, but how to genuinely benefit others over a prolonged period. We need rules that are feel-good rules, that we revere as if passed down through the generations. We rely on proven guidelines that have worked well throughout history and which today still feel right, as if they’ve sprung straight from instinct. But today, with so many confusions and double standards, we have to be much more clear about what ethics we are going to follow. In this modern age instincts aren’t always enough to formulate our ethics and so we need to talk things through with others. We need to discuss them in the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of conversation. What we don’t need is for certain topics to be forbidden for discussion. What we don’t need is an unexpected explosion because we’ve raised a tricky subject. Agreeing and disagreeing are all part of the process of assessing values. We don’t so much need to agree with others’ values as we need to find others willing to talk about them with us.

Indifference

Being part of the vast majority allows people to get away with things, like downgrading the importance of something which is obviously important. We can then dismiss certain issues as if we were brushing a fly off our sleeve. The meat-eater will always try to observe the golden rule of never letting ‘the subject’ get a foothold. These issues about how we treat animals must never become the subject of polite dinner table conversation or any conversation come to that.
To stop vegans from shouting their mouths off, they must be sprayed with a little social ostracism, just as we would spray an annoying fly. It can be done by belittling, ignoring or avoiding. Each indifferent or hostile response is really just a refusal to waste time listening or participating in this kind of talk. Meat consumers (who represent at least 95% of all people on the planet) reckon they have a mandate to refuse to be bothered or intimidated by it all. They don’t want to hear this ugly information about animals, and believe that they have the right to their view that “it’s essential to eat meat”. Whether it’s true or not is quite beside the point, as any smoker who ignores the warning on cigarette packs will confirm. It comes down to human rights and a blind belief in authority - if a product is available we want to believe it can’t be harmful, otherwise the authorities would prohibit its sale. Tobacco, meat, booze, it's all is on sale and sanctioned … and that’s good enough for most people. It’s something most of us learn as youngsters and it gains strength from continued practice – “as long as most people do it, I can do it”. The norm overrules ethics.

Euphemism

Animal eaters usually like to plead ignorance, saying that they “didn’t know”. The truth is usually that they don’t want to see what is happening. If this convenient ignorance is widespread enough there won’t be too many other’s having expectations of them.
They say that if farms and slaughter houses had glass walls no one would eat meat. More importantly, if we did know what was going on and yet still chose to buy unethical items, it would mean that we are capable of being deliberately cold. Most people don’t want to see themselves that way.
Today it’s difficult not to know that whatever we buy has to be replaced from a product pool, and in the case of animal product that means a slave-pool. If we buy, we help to promote the acceptable face of it, and if enough people buy it, we can all believe it to be benign and safe. It’s a case of safety in numbers.
For public relations purposes new names have been given to the most ugly aspects, so animal death camps are called "farms" and slaughter houses are called "processing plants". These places have to seem to be “efficient and humane facilities which are servicing the public with the best in food provision”, which coincides with what the customer wants to hear. Meat-eaters prefer to hold an unbelievable picture in their head (like that of the happy farm yard animal) rather than face images of animals being tortured and executed. The consumer must be helped, at all costs, to continue enjoying eating their favourite foods.
But it comes at a price. One has to let go of the actual truth of things, so that we can continue eating at restaurants or wearing fashionable shoes or visiting zoos. By performing some nifty mental gymnastics we can navigate past the realities.
Double think is especially useful here. For instance, when we are confronted with a tricky conversation, where we find ourselves defending an ‘impossible’ argument, we can mask our lack of compassion with double-think. Unconvincing though it may be, we can run a standard line of argument, saying that “animal products are essential for health”, or “animals can’t reflect on their life or feel pain as we do”. In this way we avoid both the issue and the people who want to talk about it.

I don’t want to know, thank you

Our instinctive ‘knowing’ lets us decide which direction to take and warn us of dangers. Instincts, linked to our senses, let us detect ugly, noisy or foul smelling things in life, telling us to avoid them. This is why animal farms these days are closed to the public (as are vivisection laboratories). They are neither attractive nor peaceful nor sweet smelling. They have all the charm of concentration camps. These are places people avoid. Today’s farms are so obviously hotbeds of unethical animal treatment that only those people who work on them (or the very few animal activists or environmentalists who’ve made it their business to see what goes on there) would even try to visit them. The general public is uninterested in ‘that sort of farm’. Enthusiastic consumers of meat and milk products have a picture in their heads of a happy farmyard (children’s picture books, circa 1930). They prefer to know very little about modern husbandry methods which are simply industrial processes being applied to the rearing and killing of animals. To know too much about this would spoil one’s journey towards becoming a better person. And spoil one’s dinner too!
Not knowing, not making it our business to know, not wanting to know: all these states of mind are dangerous and when it comes to animal farming, the powers that be are obviously trying to conceal something ugly, namely that their farms are really animal prisons solely geared up for death. By knowing even a little about all this horror, puts animal-eaters in a terrible ethical bind. Although not socially embarrassing (because everybody else is, more or less, locked into it too) it is troubling to us on a personal level. We like to think of ourselves as ethical people. But as soon as animal rights is brought up, we wonder if we are. Can we ever redeem ourselves, all the time we know these animals are in death camps and that it’s our dollars, spent on animal products, that keep them there?

We hope we aren’t getting carried away!

Travelling on society’s meat train, most people do. Some, however, don’t accept the terms of carriage. We don’t trust the ‘carrier’. We choose not to travel on this train despite the fact there are virtually no other trains running. Society makes it difficult to jump off the train and it doesn’t allow us to change the route it takes, so we have to accept what we are given. Shape up or ship out. We have to accept the whole journey without question or abandon the whole thing altogether. If we leave, we then have to reappraise each of our society’s moral codes individually, according to our own instinct.
Ethics are like the rail network or rather the hills and valleys which determine the routes of the network. Each route may lead us towards the same end, but we’re given a few choices – perhaps to take the fast route, or a more scenic route, or a low energy-consuming route or a less exploiting route. Each route has its own logic, otherwise it wouldn’t have survived for so long as a way to get to where we want to go. And we’re given the impression that our own choice is based on exercising free will. But the moral code of our society is such a strong persuader of choice that we fail to make any judgments on the nasty stuff we see. We accept what we’re advised to accept for fear of losing our momentum, our travel rights, our society’s help. We smile as we go about our business, as we continue to eat the body parts of our beautiful brothers and sisters of the animal world. Society gives us what we want but demands obedience in return.

A slip in our brain function

Where did it all go so wrong? We started to take advantage of animals’ defencelessness when we took to horses and chased them with guns. Now we’ve made it even easier for ourselves by herding them, capturing, breeding them, killing them and then eating them. It’s brutal and it’s all done with minimum inconvenience to ourselves. It is a long way from the original fair fight or equal chase!
In this age of factory farming, we’ve done a global warming job on our ethics. Even though it may merely be a slip in the brain function of the human, it is nevertheless a crucial one. We see our own vain image reflected back to us in the panic we feel over the current ‘climate-change’ threat. In terms of our treatment of captive animals there should be a similar panic and a consequent massive reduction in our cruelty emissions. For that to happen the liberation of animals must be the first step, where we rescue animals from the dangerous clutches of the ‘users’. We can no longer rely on society’s codes of morality to keep us ethical.
From the point of view of vested interests, morality has served a useful purpose. It has mobilised consumers into spending their money on goods - such as animal products. The animal industries have put their products out there, everywhere. The consumer uses them without a second thought.
On this train of plenty, people ride in complete confidence with the promise of better times ahead. As consumers, we’re not usually educated about food. We are lulled into a false sense of security by people misinform in order to sell their product. They make sure we are never morally challenged by using animal products. But in the use of them we each buy a ticket to ride the death train.
We all (nearly all) ride the same train and know it will carry us all the way to our destination. The train driver seems to know where the train is going and for that reason alone it wouldn’t occur to most of us to get off and walk the tracks instead. If we keep our seat on this train, by accepting its authority, we agree with its version of right and wrong. Most people accept the given morality of their society, of their parents and the majority with whom they identify. People follow morality as spoken by priests, politicians and teachers, even though it has been weakened by double standards. We don’t want to notice that the driver of this train has well and truly lost his way.

Enter the monster

Behaviour that isn’t obviously harmful, is different to behaviour that is. Sex before marriage or having homosexual sex may be considered immoral in some societies but most of us in the West wouldn’t consider it unethical. Whereas rape and murder always is.
The big problems occur in societies when there is authorisation for doing certain things and saying that it is morally okay when it is obviously not. This makes us lose our confidence in authority which undermines the cohesion of our society. It makes a nonsense of there being any standards of morality when we see pictures of chickens hanging upside down shackled to a conveyer which is taking them into the cutting blades. That this is legal and so obviously immoral makes one wonder what sort of madhouse we live in. For any sane society not to outlaw such a practice makes people lose faith in its whole take on morality. It shows us how vested interests make up the rules and pass them off as ‘right behaviour’. They will argue that people must eat chicken!
In order to get them to cooperate, authorities have to convince people that what might seem unethical is in fact quite moral. And that suits most people. It gives them the green light to go ahead, because it’s been morally okayed. Similarly when a society says that polluting the atmosphere or spoiling the environment is necessary for the progress of modern society, it becomes the norm and eventually it’s no longer questioned. Is this why thinking, caring people are beginning to turn their backs on their own society? Vegans, for instance, boycott all animal products. Animal Rights is a wake up call. In the beginning, we may have hunted animals on foot, with pointy sticks. It wasn’t very efficient but it worked to some extent on the predator-predated principle. All animals, humans included, lived together that way. Then as time passed, humans overstepped the mark. We stopped being predators and became monsters. Hunting became massacring, mass imprisonment and mass murder. It’s this monsterising of human nature that vegans refuse to be part of. We are trying to put a break on a violence that has gone berserk.

Justifying the unjustifiable

Even though each of us would like to be known as a compassionate person, as soon as we consciously decide to buy something that is unethical, the game is up for us. It’s the same when we buy a ‘pet’ from a pet shop. It means another ‘pet’ will be bred to replace the sold one, so the cage is never empty. Whether first or second hand, whenever we buy an item made from animals, we create a vacuum for another item to be produced to take its place. To offset this is impossible. There are no carbon credits for animal use! Even when we think we’re being generous, in thinning out our shoe rack, we fall into the same trap. We give away a pair of shoes to someone who needs them (good deed) but we leave a space on the rack which gives us an excuse to ‘go shopping’ for more (the bad deed).
The idea of "justified robbery", stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, may be okay (Robin Hood, etc) but stealing from the poor to make the rich even richer, is never justifiable. In the same way, stealing the life of a voiceless animal to benefit humans … our attitude is always ‘to hell with the victim’. This thieving is no different to the exploitation of children or the desecration of a forest. It’s just that same old human habit - using our advantage to harm the defenceless.

Wardrobes

In our society, we are encouraged not to know about animal issues. Factory farms, abattoirs and animal laboratories are closed to the public. But it’s unlikely the public are keen to visit them anyway because they are such ugly places. More importantly, it’s frightening to see how easily we kid ourselves. We reckon we can’t object to what we haven’t seen with our own eyes. We also reckon that if teachers at school thought we should know about all this, they’d have taught it to us from an early age. If we aren’t taught something then we reckon it’s probably not worth knowing about anyway. And if any of this warped logic doesn’t sway us, we can be sure that our own backup defence shield will swing into action, to act in our ‘best’ interests. We know all too well that if we take on board issues concerning animals, then our life must change radically and that we’ll be inconvenienced.
By heading down this road, one realisation leads to another. For example, as soon as dairy products are implicated in the cruelty argument, everything made with milk is ethically questionable and our conscience is going to pressure us into avoiding dairy products altogether. That spells inconvenience big time. If vegans are allowed to explain why they boycott dairy products, they almost pose a threat to society’s whole existence.
Vegan ethics compromises the status quo. Imagine what would happen when the same arguments are applied to our wardrobes. Health arguments obviously don’t apply here. Leather shoes, for instance, are not "bad" for ones health, but they are hardly ethical items since they come from exactly the same slaughterhouse as meat does. (Leather is not so much a by product as a co product, since the viability of its production is usually on an economic par with meat). Our most fashionable attire is often associated with the death of animals. Even vegetarians who still wear leather can’t justify it and that puts them in a difficult position. If in this respect they are compromised they can’t hold (let alone promote) an animal rights position. And so that’s the problem. People who seek the liberation of animals may still be propping up the animal industries by products they buy and use.

Vegetarian middle roaders

This great gulf of perception between animal users and vegans does have middle ground but it looks weak, compromised, convenient and somewhat hypocritical. The middle-roader gives a bit by eating free range eggs or drinking organically fed cow’s milk, but essentially they continue being indifferent towards animals. A vegetarian avoids meat but still takes care not to go too far, for fear of being too radical or too different from friends. For them leather shoes are okay, as is wearing silk and wool or eating butter and eggs – “boycott all these things and you’ll go crazy”, they say. So, it’s the middle of the roaders, as distinct from the uninformed, who know enough but who are still unwilling to act and who (from our point of view) are ethically most at risk. We urgently need to make contact with them. But this is where things get tricky for vegan educators, because to the middle roaders the biggest threat to their self esteem comes from vegan argument.
If vegans want to entice middle-ground people to disassociate from animal slavery altogether, they must act as guides rather than inquisitors, educators rather than judges. (Having said that, even the above might sound confronting and pontificating to a lacto-ovo vegetarian). Vegans need to be informers of details – about what really happens to animals down on the farm, about the practicalities of applying vegan principles to daily life. It’s our job to allow anyone who is considering becoming vegan, to take the initiative of changing themselves without being shoved from behind by us.

Cheese from a vegan point of view
For vegans the perception is exactly opposite. But because we are in the minority and what we say largely ignored. Cheese comes from milk which is stolen from cow’s bodies at the expense of the calf for whom it is intended. That very few people accept this or any of the other even more obvious cruelties of animal farming, is a torment to us. ‘Our subject’ is unlike any other subject; it isn’t like a hobby or something we can be casual about, it’s a matter of prime concern, a matter of trying to right perhaps the most terrible wrong of our society – the enslavement and brutal killing of innocent beings. For us, this is not an attitude we can agree to disagree about because we see it as a dangerous attitudinal disease affecting our whole species. Our stand on animal slavery is something many of us feel must be argued strongly, so that we can drive our central point home - that animal slavery has got to end. If we are ‘abolitionists’ who think no animals should ever be used by humans, if we propose a total ban on animal food, we will almost inevitably come across as being unbelievably radical and confronting. But, to us, that position isn’t violent, it’s simply a matter of passionate promotion. It’s as if we were selling soap powder, only unlike soap what we are selling is pivotal to future human development. In our eyes the changes we are proposing are essential. That’s our view.
However, we only need to hold that view, not necessarily force it down peoples’ throats every time we talk to them, or every time animals are mentioned. There a time and a place for our vegan voice. Just as much harm can be done by sounding off at the wrong time as there can be good done by sounding off at the appropriate time.

Cheese

There’s an enormous difference of opinion between the protectors of animals and the users of animals. Many of us who are animal (or environmental) activists have been involved for so long, that it’s possible we’ve forgotten how it felt when we still accepted things the way they were, living as an integrated part of mainstream society. And now, all we know is how it feels to be part of a minority and to be shut out of discussing these matters that are so dear to our hearts. But for non-vegans things are very different. On these issues they’ve always been part of the majority view, that food is available and the majority eats any foods they like. Just to take one example of a routinely used product, cheese. To most people cheese is just cheese. There’s little thought given to the cruelty of the industry behind its manufacture. How it comes to us doesn’t enter the thought process. So when we say “no dairy products” (which includes cheese), the cheese eater cannot connect that food with something that’s wrong. We can talk all we like about animal slavery but to them cheese will just be cheese and vegans will just be weirdos.

Ethics starts with non-violence

Apart from veganism being a great diet, it is also an ethical diet, giving one the opportunity of leading an almost completely non-violent life, but we might not realise how vital non-violence is or how aggressiveness can creep into our interactions.
If we accuse someone of being violent because they eat meat or dairy products, that accusation may be construed as a "violence" in itself and for that reason alone we should avoid doing that. Any confrontation or aggression loses the chance of discussing things rationally. Once someone feels they’re being attacked, they’ll counter attack, and so on. The discussion will go round in circles, we’ll get bogged down in minor details and central arguments will get lost. If we end up ‘shouting’ at people who disagree with us, they can always simply walk away and their hostile attitude towards animal rights will become entrenched; they’ll always be wary of an outburst from us or suspect we have a hidden agenda. They may come to believe that animal activists will only tolerate people who agree with them or that we are people who want to subvert society (by liberating animals).
Instead of seeing us as educators who are putting forward the idea of surviving on plant foods and being compassionate towards animals, we can be seen as spoilers with a grudge. People pick that up by the feelings we show. If we use anger and invective to attack animal foods and animal food eaters we can come across as being destructive and dangerous, and then people become defensive and stop listening to us … and the animal industries cash in on this and up the ante, by pushing for the denigration of food to be made illegal. This is what has happened in some parts of USA. So we, as activists for animals, play right into their hands when we use aggressive tactics to promote our cause. Instead, if we really want to help free the animals we need to be persistent, always non-violent and carefully explain the issues without getting personal or without losing whatever goodwill that is at present. There may not be much of it around but we should build on what exists.

Nutritious arguments

In a debate the animal righters have a much bigger problem dealing with matters of vegan nutrition, making a case for the safety and healthiness of a plant-based diet. If, for instance, we say meat is bad for you, healthy young people may not agree since they’ve eaten meat all their lives and feel okay. They’ll likely hit back with “go talk to a sixty year old. Not me. I’m not interested in ‘the health repercussions’ of my meat diet”. Their fear of illness is still a lifetime away.
It’s easy to get bogged down in nutritional arguments (although we need to know the rudiments of vegan nutrition) so instead we might need to mention the other danger, of being complicit in cruelty. If we emphasise "ethics" we can win people over: all we need to mention regarding human safety is that:
1: Plant-based diets are safe and all nutritional needs are met from plant food.
2: Vitamin B12 may need a supplement and to be on the safe side, vegans should take about ten micrograms of this vitamin every day for the rest of their lives, unless blood tests show that it’s not necessary.
For more information we can advise people to “Google” vegan nutrition or read Michael Klaper: Vegan Nutrition, and Gill Langley: Vegan Nutrition. There really isn’t much serious disagreement these days that vegan food is otherwise complete and nutritious.

Bring on the debate

If this were a debate, the subject might be as interesting as it is controversial. Two opposite positionssides delivered in a very ordered. But in the real world outside the debating chamber, stereotypes, prejudices, half truths and misinformation abound. Before attitudes will turn around, there are two things to get clear, activists must seem to be okay people (ie not aggressive) and the meat eaters must seem fair-minded (ie not dishonest). No progress can be made until people on both sides can discuss these difficult issues calmly. It’s a very emotional subject and yet we should steer clear of emotion. Our adversaries should know that we still "like" them and they should show that they’re willing to “respect” us.
Because we are taking the initiative, to draw the majority towards a minority view to initiate debate, ours is the responsibility to set the standards of behaviour. If we can get our non-violence across at the outset, then we can establish a fair footing. And if we seem confident it shows we are at peace with our position. We need to show faith in the power of logical argument so that we never feel the need to go on the defensive. And because we have such a powerful argument anyway, there’s no need to lose that advantage.
But to get the pot boiling, we might need to be a bit cunning. We are after all coming from a minority viewpoint, so we need to find just the right opening for what we have to say. Demanding that we have a right to speak isn’t going to do the trick. We have to let them want us to speak. Even if only to take us on. We mustn’t pick a fight, although we can prod and kid and fool about with people’s sense of their own truth. We can’t make them respond to us. It must come from them, this wish to talk about all these issues of cruelty and animal slavery.
Once we are up and running, discussing freely, exchanging views, then our arguments have a chance to appeal to reason, the reasoning based upon ant-violence. However hard they try to defend animal use, however hard they try to argue that “it isn’t cruel”, their arguments ultimately fail on this one unsupportable premise – that animal use always involves violence and is therefore unethical. As soon as they engage us in discussion we don’t need to labour the point, merely mention it. Nothing much more needs to be said!

Confronting – does it work?

Unless vegans are asked to comment on animal rights, it’s likely that whatever we do say will only be heard by the already-converted. Anything we say uninvited, about animal rights or vegan issues, is likely to be seen as deliberately confronting, and people don’t like moral confrontation especially concerning their meals! If vegans question the ethics of people’s food choices, we’ll be put in the ‘whacky’ basket. It will help our detractors feel justified in denigrating us and rejecting all of our intrusive comments. We may not care about that. We may say these people deserve to be confronted … but the freewill of people allows them to walk away from confrontation. So, who wins?
The alternative to this somewhat bulldozer-ish approach is for us to strike a balance when talking about Animal Rights. It depends on who we are talking to. Face to face we can soon judge if there’s a genuine interest to listen or a brick wall against us. If we ignore the vital signals people are putting out when they don’t want to hear, they’ll regard us as moral bullies and have no trouble pushing us away. Such a waste, since these are the very people we should be trying to reach.
Society is split on this issue, as to whether or not rights should be given to animals. In most parts of the world this question never even arises because they haven’t even thought about it. But where the question of rights for non-humans is discussed, you can guarantee that no other subject hots up as quickly as this one! At animal rights demonstrations, dramatic clashes are shown on TV news, between those who are keen to eat animals and those who are animal rights activists. The activist tries a bit of moral bludgeoning, their adversaries denigrate them … and it’s been like this for decades. Some progress is made but nothing in the deep psyche of people is touched. So, nothing changes as a result.
Most people throughout the world have never even thought about these issues. And these are the ones who are surprised when the subject is aired. For them, using animal-food is as natural as drinking water or breathing air. Every main meal they’ve ever eaten contains animal, therefore a meal is never seen as an act of violence. In all innocence they might ask what all this fuss is about. And yet when the issues do have an airing maybe something rubs off. They begin to think about the way animals are treated on farms, and maybe it shocks them, but it’s usually not enough for them to want to take up a vegan diet.
There are some who have thought about it. Our arguments are familiar to them. But still they’re not ready to change, so their response to us is a rehearsed one aimed at maximum resistance. And it’s likely their main aim is NOT to learn more but to avoid it like the plague. In reality, the subject of Animal Rights is never discussed willingly by anyone who still uses animal products.

Nowhere to hide

Ultimately humans need to take on a more humane approach to save their very souls. The writing is on the wall, the warning signals are there. It’s a case of “coming, ready or not”! Our fear of ill health, our horror at what we’ve allowed to happen to so many innocent animals and to the structure of the planet, is forcing us to take on new attitudes, many of them seemingly outside our comfort zones. To make up for lost time we will eventually have to apply (non-violent) ahimsic principles to just about everything in sight.
If we can achieve this we might stand a chance of maximising our available energy and put it to good use, especially if we don’t squander it on wasteful rearguard actions like judging, disliking or disapproving of others. The focus needs to be on setting our standards high enough so that we can operate constructively and drop value judgments altogether. Once we can drop our destructive habits we’ll like ourselves the better for it, even to the extent of liking those who don’t yet agree with us. It seems to me that this is the best way we can plug an energy drain in ourselves, and then to concentrate on the job of getting our ideas across to others.

Violence is convenient

(Thursday 2nd April)
Violence would have been dropped long ago if it weren’t for the fact that humans are so quarrelsome with each other and willing to be so cruel to animals. Our thirst for war and our need to dominate animals has been our undoing.
As it is, we’ve let the violence roll on and do us so much damage in many different ways. We are having to face up to things like climate change, mass starvation, obesity and water shortage, and all because we’ve got an exploitative mentality, most particularly towards the animals we enslave.
We now have to reassess things, personal things, about what side of the attitude barrier we are going to stand on. Climate change has been a big jolt, to make us see the need for a complete re-think. We can either carry on grabbing or start thinking about how we may give back. There’s a lot of healing needed to be done. Humans have been given a violence warning and it can’t be ignored for much longer.

Passion not preaching

Ultimately, we need people to listen to us. We need to give them information about things they’d never normally listen to (like animal rights), and get them to want to listen. Gone are the days of making people think our way by showing them pictures of ugly abattoirs and bloody corpses.
A first introduction to the subject should include some “what’s in it for me?” - the good points about how things could be in the future (healthy humans, freed animals, sustainable environment), and how we get from the present mess to the future redress. As activists, our only role in all this is to offer the complete picture of how things could be and how we as people could eventually transform ourselves. If this sort of picture isn’t included when we try to get people to listen then it’s just pulpit warnings. We’ll come across as bores and be seen as anti-pleasure and anti-convenience.
If we are passionate about creating a non-violent world, we have to sell the picture of how things would be WITHOUT a slave trade in animals or abattoirs or animal farms … or a heavy dependence on medication, hospital surgery, premature ageing, early death … or a permanent guilty conscience over exploiting the animals and the environment. If we encourage people to use their imagination they will likely visualise a new reality for themselves. And if that leads them to look forward to good times ahead and an increasing sense of altruism, then so much the better.
While altruism may seem like dull daily bread, if one day it becomes normal and natural to be altruistic, then it’s only a matter of time before non-violence and non-judgment merge, and at long last we see a more mature human walking the earth.