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 and 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 way 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 feel right about it - that it’s neither weak, nor leads to submissiveness. It may be a weak-looking characteristic of submissive animals but that’s because they’ve been driven to it by having their lives and living conditions continuously under threat. In wild conditions animals are far from submissive or weak.
If we can adopt non-speciesism we can then let the animals show us the values they represent. They do things differently to us. Think of any farm animal that hasn’t been driven insane and you’ll picture a peaceful being, utterly non-violent. Their disposition is something we can all learn from.
We all know humans are superior to animals because they can build houses and read books, but animals have a few tricks up their sleeves. They can sense things! They smell things a thousand times better than we do and often have an uncanny understanding of what’s going on. Just think of how prescient our cats and dogs are. They don’t have to work everything out before they do it. Their non-violence shows up in their completely non-judgmental behaviour.
When our companion animals know us, they can often tell us truths about ourselves that we can’t rely on humans friends 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 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. It’s genetically encoded I suppose. 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.