The comforts of carnivores

Over this matter of using animals, many people can’t make the great leap forward, towards herbivorous-ness. Like paedophiles who can’t help themselves and keep on assaulting children, carnivores continue assaulting animals. We can’t control ourselves - we can’t give it away, we can’t reduce our habit and so we take risks with our own ethics, health and our relationship with the natural world. We’re willing, for the sake of keeping our comfort food, to risk our very conscience. None of this animal food is actually necessary on any level whatsoever and none of it un-replaceable with plant-based alternatives, or if clothing synthetic alternatives, and yet we continues with it. Our habit prevents us from being in control of our choices.
This is a heavy price to pay, to keep the conscience quiet. People are willing to follow the crowd and give up personal integrity. We want to feel okay but also want to feel safe. And in the public perception our taking on a vegan diet seems to be risky. So we eat animal foods and hope to ‘get away with it’, healthwise. Ethically it’s not even credible that we can justify what we do to them. So there’s a tendency to ignore this and sink back into the comfortable belief that animals can’t hit back and it must be the natural order of things, that we predate the weaker species.
It’s true that they can’t fight us or pose any danger to us, well, not head on anyway, not in the same way as we attack them … but then, of course it’s not quite that straightforward. Their attack on us may not be intended by them or at all immediate. But it is always there, the danger of the long term, xeno-transplanted effect of consuming their material over a period of time – instinctively we suspect the animals have a sting in their tail. We know they do ‘hit back’, by way of the toxicity of their edible body parts, and the god-knows-how-much adrenaline-infused contaminants entering the muscle tissue at the abattoir, from all the fear and terror generated there.
Animal foods play the part of Montezuma’s revenge - if we eat animals and feel good we’ll keep on eating them, and then it’s likely we’ll end up NOT feeling so good. And I suppose you could say, speaking generally of humans, that this is a just return for all the appalling treatment the animals have undergone on our behalf. The penalty people pay for pretending NOT to know about the animals is largely a matter of ill health. Those who leave it too late to become aware, might one day realise the risk they’ve been taking over many years of their life.
Being largely unaware, until recently, of the dangers of eating animal foods (both ethically and health wise), humans have exploited animals, as an available resource, for hundreds of generations, since the first humans (2 million years ago). We have no written evidence that people ever related to animals in a compassionate, egalitarian or non-violent way. The human species has always been very utilitarian, taking advantage of everything that couldn’t fight back. Since animals have always been easy pickings, we’ve always caught them, kept them captive (and now today caged them), and we use the most scientific methods to efficiently breed them, and then we take what we want from them. And just to prove how much we don’t-give-a-stuff, we then have them killed in specially designed execution chambers so that we can (for chrissakes) EAT them. What sort of relationship between the species is that, one wonders?

The story of the way animals are treated is so sad that most people can’t think about it. And thinking is the key here. It’s the lack of thought and empathy that leads most people to go to the abattoir to buy the foods they want. We neither consider the animal nor how much money is extracted from us by the animal industries.
Every day we risk food-related disease, and rather like lambs to the slaughter we meekly accept our fate, which might very well mean an untimely or ugly death. I suppose the obvious question is why can’t people accept the value of leading a satisfying, guilt-free vegan lifestyle?