Harmlessness

Our aim should be to encourage confidence in the things we say. And for that we need non-violence in our voice and as the basis of everything else about our daily life, our eating and shopping, thinking and talking. We need to be assertive, we don’t need to be indecisive but we need to be open to suggestion from ‘outside’ even when it contradicts us. If we once become closed off we lose whatever advantage we may have had. The Animal Rights movement doesn’t have a good track record on effective communication because we aren’t too good at the complete non-violent approach. Is this because we say we hate violence but still allow it into our lives? Those of us who are the noisiest about our dislike of violence often don’t notice the ways we practise it. To make matters worse if we doubt non-violence itself, we’ll move forward far too slowly in winning people over. If we merely observe veganism in our eating habits but aren’t so very different to our omnivorous friends in other respects, we won’t be taken seriously.
We need to be sure about non-violence. We certainly give it a tick of approval when we become vegan, so we need to try it to feel right about it; that it’s neither weak, nor leading to submissiveness. This is where we need non-speciesism to show us the values animals represent to us and how they do things differently to us. Their disposition is something we can all learn from.
Animals sense things! They smell things a thousand times better than we do and often have an uncanny understanding of us, as our cats and dogs at home show us in their approach to us. They don’t work everything out before they do it. Their non-violence shows up because they are not judgmental.
When they know us, they tell us truths about ourselves that we can’t rely on humans to tell us. They can give us an accurate appraisal of how we are doing in our progress towards non-violence, since they are masters of it when it comes to spotting a peaceful person. They are drawn towards them. They are attracted to an affectionate nature because, to them, it denotes trustworthiness. To cats and dogs and many other animals we get close to, this is value number one. Having suffered so badly from human violence throughout the ages, animals, wild or domestic, have become arbiters of good taste in the matter of harmlessness.