The monster at work

The reason a vegan might feel angry with the world is because people are so reluctant to change. But there is also a sense of futility in everything we try to do, in expecting our fellow humans to be more conscientious than they actually are. The constant disappointment is that others seem so oblivious to the suffering of animals that they continually pass up the opportunity to change. They continue to eat rubbish foods, continue to get ill and continue to hold violent attitudes. It seems such a waste of personal potential and so, for many of us, it causes us exasperation rather than anger.
Vegans who are active in the animal rights movement invest their free time in a great cause and just when they think they are getting somewhere they find no one is taking a blind bit of notice. Even close friends. And then when the braver activists try to go into the public arena and speak up, they get knocked down, or worse, they’re made to look like fools.
Everything we stand for - the principle of plant-based diets and animal rights and non-violence - is given minimal press coverage and if we try to bring it to public attention we’re prevented. We have to stand by and see misinformation moulding people minds. It’s difficult to see momentum building or any real sign of people questioning what they’re told. Not surprisingly we get nervous for the animals who can only rely on the good nature of humans to save them. The hope is that people will eventually tap into their own good nature. But for the present we can only see them condoning slavery, captivity and killing. It’s practiced by the animal industries but we consumers support it. And involving fewer animals but involving greater cruelty is the vivisection industry. If we could visit factory farms, abattoirs or vivisection labs (which we are not allowed to do) we’d see that with some animals humans can be monsters.
Perhaps it’s easy to see people this way when you think of the live cutting of an animal for scientific research. White coated creatures of one species objectify a living, breathing, feeling creature of another species. It does seem to be monstrous behaviour, experimenting on them as if they had no feelings. When you think of a rabbit, for example, being used to test a shampoo (for eye safety), by restraining its body, taping open its eye lids and then squirting corrosive chemicals into its eye. This action must be just about the most terrifying experience any sentient being could undergo, unable to defend itself or escape. What we see here is an animal being made to experience torture.
Whether the suffering takes place on a vivisector’s slab or on the killing floor at an abattoir, the coldness with which pain and suffering is inflicted by the human is frightening. It’s a terror no sentient creature should ever have to undergo. No human should be capable of devising or carrying out such acts. Nothing can justify it. The perpetrator is not only insane to do it but dangerously insane by influencing others to think it acceptable.