Taking the initiative

As individual vegans we should obviously have a no-touch-animals policy – keeping it simple and understandable. There are overtones here of “humans can’t be trusted around animals”, which is true enough when animals are dollar earners, but it’s best avoided since the common perception is that humans love animals, as indeed they do, some!). Broadly though, unless lovingly we shouldn’t touch animals, in the wild it’s dangerous, companion animals it’s for love, farm animals, that is where the word ‘touch’ means ‘have anything at all to do with”. If we can apply this no touching of animals maxim to ALL animals, from this stems the principle of practical day to day harmlessness, and then from this all the other arguments for attitude change fall automatically into place.
This principle manifests in the foods we eat and the relationships we have with one another. It starts at home, in personal behaviour and the building of personal thought patterns. If we want to be independent thinkers we have to set our own standards. We can’t rely on others to set them for us. No one else is anyway going to make or be responsible for the big decisions in our own lives. For example, no government is ever going to close abattoirs. It would be political suicide if they did. Short of a catastrophe forcing their hand, it is surely never going to happen that way. We need to make changes for ourselves and let others notice them. In other words, let yourself be seen, let others be turned-on by what they see … until there are enough harmlessness-inspired vegans to demand change.
When this happens, who knows when, it will almost certainly be a slap in the face for politicians, academics, spiritual big shots and media, who’ll have missed a golden opportunity to lead, and then it will be for them to admit they were wrong and that the animal thing was all one big dollar earning hoax and that maybe quite a number of war crimes were committed, etc., thence to fall into line with the current trend. Change will happen only when ordinary people begin to think for themselves and gather together to make their feelings felt.