The vegan bulldozer

When meeting people who don’t want to hear what we have to say, it’s easy to lose it. But if we are affable enough we can bulldoze them - some chutzpah can work as long as we maintain a sense of humour and some familiarity, (this is after all a serious and an intimate subject). We don’t have to be best buddies with everyone, we just need to build mutual respect and emphasise equality of status. If we’re open to their views, it’s more likely they’ll try to listen to what we have to say.
‘Out there’ there’s genuine interest. People want to know what we eat, they want to know what a vegan diet is, even what our views are. They might ask provocative questions, and to get this they’ll put up with a bit of cheek, even to the point where we can send them up for eating ‘dead animals’, but . . . there’s a hairsbreadth of difference between friendly chat and us making value-judgements of them. Maybe vegans feel, out of loyalty to the animals, that we should be deadly serious and confront people where ever we can – as if to show how deeply we feel. But once we get heavy they stop identifying with us and lose interest in what we’re saying. Passing on information laden with judgement (and statistics) is dull and confronting. It’s even worse when we change the ‘temperature’ by withdrawing intimacy. A spat becomes unfriendly, and that’s the end of our communication. If we go to all the effort to establish a connection it shouldn’t be broken lightly.
Even if we can’t be buddies we do have to work from a position of equality. We can’t afford to lose anyone because they think we consider them inferior – that would be such a wasted opportunity. We must be seen to respect all views as valid (even the wrong ones!) until proven otherwise. Serious conversation must remain a friendly discussion in which everyone feels free to disagree or concede a point. It isn’t a competition or an excuse to spark bad feelings, and for our part we must try never to leave another person behind. However far apart our views may be our feelings for each other shouldn’t be compromised. By keeping the human to human connection open we remain simply two individuals chatting. Or it might be a vegan speaking to a room full of strangers, but as long as some level of affection is maintained the interaction remains alive. It’s a sort of professionalism, setting the standard for our relationships as well as maintaining the reputation of the cause we represent.

Being friendly and not pushy

Animal liberation/ vegetarianism is a subject people discuss amongst themselves in order to build a resistance to it. They develop stock responses. They tar us with the same brush. They regard us as pushy, especially the ‘dangerous extremists’. In our society, the more the term ‘vegan’ is known about, the more frequently we are bagged. Already today most people are familiar enough with our ideas to be bolting their doors to us before we’ve even had the chance to introduce our arguments.
But not everyone is like this, especially those with a gentler disposition and more open minds, mainly the younger generation people. Not having made so many independent food choices as their parents’ generation they’re not as likely to be locked into defensive attitudes about foods. However, all non-vegans are keen to survive, and they may not believe a vegan diet is altogether healthy or safe. They may not be sure they can rely on our information about plant-based diets. This is why our initial contacts are so critical, and why we have to come across as well informed and genuinely concerned for people’s safety. To get that across we need high personal standards as well as panache and sensitivity. But above all, we need to be seen as friendly people.

Clash of opposites

Here are the levels of acceptance put another way:

Stage 1 - the sun is hot, the water cool, who gives a stuff about …”What did you say? Animals? You want me to think about … what?” (With an attitude like that it’s probably not a good time to be talking about animal rights).
Stage 2, where a person might not agree, but admits this could be a serious issue.
Stage 3, listening, re-thinking long-held habits and learning new ones
Stage 4, agreement and trialling the diet
Stage 5, moving towards being ‘vegan’
Stage 6, becoming a political activist and going public.

Stage 6 is the danger zone
At stage 6, the political vegan encounters difficulties with ‘stage one’ people (comprising most humans in all countries of the world). We can fall into the trap of reacting badly when they respond negatively - we meet people who don’t normally talk about ethics or the philosophical issues concerning animals. It’s likely that they don’t normally talk with people like us. In fact already they purposely avoid talking about anything remotely connected with animals. They intend not to ask about food animals or veganism, and that effectively stops us in our tracks. Because they override their own set of good manners (that would normally invite us to tell them about what interests us), they show zero interest. Even a person with a wide set of interests will baulk at this subject. And without invitation we don’t have the right to speak. And if we suddenly bring it up we’ll be labelled as ill mannered, pushy or just plain weird.
With ‘stage one’ people we have to break down the mistrust and dislike that precedes us, by showing an interest, getting to know them, establishing some real trust, and asking them questions about themselves. It’s useless to go ‘crashing their party’ by forcing them to listen to serious and potentially confronting issues.
If there is a spark of interest or even a question, then we’re in business. (That is, unless they’re just being polite and there’s no real interest at all). It’s so rare to be asked an unguarded, intelligent question that it might put us on the spot. When we have to respond intelligently it means answering without using the occasion as an excuse to launch into things we haven’t been asked about.
We might have a lot we want to say but if we don’t get the chance to say it fully, the tiny scraps of information we’re allowed to deliver is nothing but frustrating. We may have become so used to assuming people are either insensitive or purposely closed down on this subject, that we expect the worst. We get exasperated. Then we try to force the lock - we push our arguments - we try to put a foot in the front door, and then to our immense surprise find it closed in our face. The doorkeeper is defensive. Even kids will be sensitive if their privacy is violated. It’s a territorial instinct. For the more life experienced adult being confronted by a vegan activist who is too enthusiastic it’s a case of ‘once bitten twice shy’. Then for ever and a day all vegans, vegan talk, animal rights issues sit behind a door that is closed on us for ever.

Stage 5

Some practising vegans might choose not to be activists. Even if they reckon vegan food is the best food for them to eat, it doesn’t mean Animal Rights is a cause they want to promote. It may seem a hopeless case and becoming an activist a waste of time. They may think it better to leave ‘politics’ to others. If these ‘home vegans’ speak about the subject at all it will be with people they know.
Stage 6
If we decide to go further and attempt to persuade people it means taking on a lot of hard work. Obviously if we are vegan, protesting animal rights, demonstrating, getting involved with direct action, we need to believe the cause is worth fighting for. If we feel really strongly about promoting Animal Rights we have to remain passionate about it for a long time against a tide of seeming lack of interest amongst people. We need to be optimists, both in seeing the urgency of change as well what is already happening in people’s attitudes.
Optimistic activists aren’t starry eyed, they know it’s a mixture of concern we have, for the damage certain sort of foods are causing to people’s health and their guilt at what animals are being used for, for food. These twin concerns constitute personal change. With some of the plentiful supply of high energy (from our vegan diet) we should be able to direct our activism into inspiring people. Our aim should not be to separate from them, not leave them behind but involve them, include them in our concerns, along with our concern for the animals.
But we do have to keep our feet on the ground, knowing how unaware 95% of people still are that there is even a problem let alone about the level of animal cruelty and the dangers in eating animal foods. From most of the 95% we can expect negative reactions because this is an almost unknown language to them. Their reactions can range from indifference to passionate resistance. And so if that’s the way things still are today, we might have to get used to that, by recognising the different levels of acceptance and work through them systematically.

Persuasion

Tuesday 27th October

We’re in a tricky position as self-appointed advocates for animals, because we assume the right to talk about them on account of the fact that we don’t eat them. That’s a strong position to be in but it doesn’t give us the right to tell people what to eat or expect them to agree with us. Or even to listen to what we have to say.

How we go about persuading people suggests various stages of acceptance, theirs of us and then ours of ourselves.
1. We need to be invited to speak on this subject
2. We need to earn the listener’s respect and interest
3. We need to be convincing and go easy on the moralising

4. We ourselves need to agree with vegan principles
5. Be busily putting them into practice
6. And then becoming an activist by communicating, educating, informing and being sensitive to people’s problems regarding their food addictions and their relationship with animals.

Holding the interest

If the days of speaking in public, standing on a soap box are dead we may need to communicate in a different way. It’s a more intimate age today. And this subject having such a complex network of arguments doesn’t allow for slogans to deliver it. We need to be able to talk intimately about animal rights, even on a one to one level, introducing issues during an intelligent conversation. So, when talking casually-almost, this subject of animal usage might come up. The first thing that usually arises is one’s status in this development. If you’re a vegan it’s generally known that we do significant things that others don’t do. Status differences may be impossible to deal with, but if it isn’t destructive it may provoke an interest:
“You’re a vegan then?”
“Yes”
“Why?”
“It’s what I feel passionately about”
As soon as the significance of that mixes in with what is already known about veganism, interest may fade. As soon as it sinks in that we are supporters of animal liberation it may be overwhelming. They might regret asking the question. They may say something to stop us going any further, by changing the subject. Or they might go the other way, and try to provoke us:
“You’re what?”
It’s interesting how vegans can respond to this, by then making too sure they understand what a vegan is and boring them.
Ideally we get a green light. Gingerly, they might respond well by asking us to explain:
“y….e .. s, go on …”
Now, this last response, if sincere, is so rare that it usually takes us by surprise … but we need to be ready for it. By being prepared to say what we stand for and why, they can be made to feel quite comfortable, not assaulted by what we say.
But how effective is this approach? - how do we say what we want to say both casually enough and informing enough? How can we do it without confronting? How do we answer a question in such a way that leaves the other person interested and better informed but not put off?

Going public

When activists start accusing the exploiters and hurling abuse in public it works wonders … in the short term. It unifies our fellow protesters, it makes us feel good, and sometimes it’s brave – ‘aggro activists’ think if they look scary enough it might strike fear into people’s hearts. But unless we are willing to continually escalate this sort of protest it loses its power and is eventually ignored or it breeds distrust or it just fizzles out. Big talk and threats can only promise what can’t be delivered. The aim of any animal rights protest should be to win over by setting some sort of responsible example that people can identify with. If any one is moving towards veganism, even if only in their private thoughts, they are beginning to identify with the people they see who they like the look of. People who seem to be gravitating towards a non-violent way of thinking, who are pulling away from ‘hard nose’ attitudes.
If we are already established as vegans we may want to ‘go public’. We may want to make a huge fuss about the misrepresentation of veganism, perhaps to stop being easily ignored. The general public will ignore us completely given half a chance, not because of who we are but because of what we are saying. Any excuse will do when it comes to avoiding the dreaded subject of animal rights, and that includes the advocate.
This is mainly why it’s difficult for us, because we can’t catch people’s attention. We no longer bump into people on street corners and converse with them on serious matters. There aren’t any passers-by to talk to. There’s nowhere we can ‘address the public’. Today most people lead such private lives – we go from home to car to work to car to home, one closed garage to another closed garage perhaps. So we live in a cocoon. Life is so proscribed and random is a dirty word. No one meets the stranger, and so no new ideas circulate unless within the selected group or unless through the sanitised media. In the main, people no longer go searching for new or radical ideas because no one wants the aggravation.
So how, in the first place, do vegans make a connection and then prove we genuinely want to inform and, when there are differences of opinion, bridge the gulf in a non-threatening (non-judgemental) way? How do we convince people we only want to help improve their lives? Perhaps we do it most effectively via our manner. There’s that feeling you can have with others …

Pushing home our ideas

(Blog no. 500)

It’s like we, as vegans, have become strangers in our own land, having taken on a different culture linked with a different sensitivity. So we have to emphasise that we aren’t trying to draw attention to ourselves or show that we’re better than anyone else, we are just front line experimenters. We’re working on the difficult, initial, transitional stages of a switch-over - introducing a new idea to people.
Ours is a life-saving idea that will aid human development. However grand our goal may seem, however optimistic, we don’t stand on street corners shouting about it. We don’t need the ‘crazy’ tag! We simply need to be low key promoters and providers of ideas, helping people escape from their ridiculous eating habits as well as their enslavement to political corporations. Vegans generally want to help improve the quality of life. We believe we have a to save ourselves and the animals at the same time.
We are trying to persuade people to listen, because there’s a link between this issue (animal cruelty and human ill health) and all the other main issues facing us at the moment. Animal issues point very logically to the initial problems we have today.
We humans are probably now at the end of our most destructive phase and on the brink of a more positive realisation: that the universe is powered by what we know as ‘love’ which in turn rests on a bed of non-violent involvement with each other. At this root point we are in the process of deciding which way we go, so it’s not just dealing with the most urgent problems, like global warming, environmental protection or disease and diet, we need to fix our attitude to harmlessness first. Can we live on this planet relatively harmlessly? If we can, then the human race may face a very bright future. With non-violence as our rule no. 1, we can more efficiently and permanently tackle the other great problems facing us.
So, this is what vegans (or at least some of us) are trying to persuade others to think about - the possibility of maintaining a productive society without the use of domination or animal enslavement. Nothing will change if we try to fight violence with violence. But if we aren’t using violence then what do we use? Maybe we don’t have the word for it but we all know what it might feel like - pro-active non-violence or stirring the pot without spilling or challenging people without making value judgements – something along these lines is surely the way we’re heading. Most of us are so over war of any sort.
The war on animals is the first one we can stop, each of us can bring that to an end inside our own kitchens. Unless we display a non-violent (yet irresistible) approach there may be no other way of stopping the destruction … and so the consumer will continue to feel unwell … and so the atrocities against animals will continue. The world will continue to seem a very ugly place (which of course it is NOT!!). Our collective ‘greatest challenge’ is to find subtler and more persuasive ways of reaching one another. Sowing the seeds of ideas on willing ground without having drilling them in first.
Still compelled to using our disapprovals and judgements to show how pissed off we are, it’s also a strong statement to show how determined we are. But whether it’s ‘meat is murder’ or ‘death to Israel’, all slogans seem aggressive and tacky. It doesn’t have currency in the sort of world we’re stepping into. When we’re being aggressive, it’s in our voice and our body language. Our attitudes show how we believe. For those moving towards veganism our approach should reflect not only how we’ve given up meat but that we’ve given up the aggro personality or using violent or quasi-violent means to improve the human condition.

Awake

Vegans are like the early morning wake-up call which makes us face up to the day. A little later in the morning we’re glad to have been woken up. In the short term vegans have an unpopular job, jolting people into new awareness. Our advice may not be appreciated at the time, but we don’t have to be more unpopular than necessary.
It’s not a straight forward job, advising but being pushy with our advice might seem as out of date as an old time preacher’s bible bashing. Communicating animal rights today has to be a subtle process.
How do we bring the concept of animal rights to people’s attention, bearing in mind we are waking them, even alarming them? How do we get them eating vegan food and thinking about animals, when they don’t want to? Not by finger wagging, that’s for sure. Nor by disapproval or making judgements about their values.
I suggest the principles we’re promoting should be coaxed along by the attraction of the foods themselves and by the attractiveness of our own personalities - then there is something for them to identify with. And that might need imagination on our part. For a start, we have to squash misinformation. We need to kill off the absurd notion that strictly disciplined vegans live on a diet of lettuce leaves. We need to show off how delicious vegan foods are and promote the attractiveness of a vegan lifestyle. That’s a job in itself and it hardly leaves us much time for nursing any personal resentments or indulging our own feelings of alienation. People need to see us as up-beat about our lifestyle and beliefs. We are, after all, keen to share the details behind our robust health.

Silence and scandal

Are we concerned about the way people are being kept misinformed today? … information isn’t prohibited or censored, but there’s a silence surrounding some things, particularly the animal scandal. Indeed the silence is so complete about animal exploitation that even the most outrageous aspects go unreported. People are ‘protected’ from knowing the truth - that animals are being attacked on a massive scale, everyday and everywhere. And because the media is weak there are no channels of communication open to us, to keep people informed about the scandal. The authorities try to give the impression that nothing bad is actually happening. It might seem incredible that educated and otherwise well informed people go along with the deception, but how is anyone supposed to be sure who to believe these days?
I suspect it’s the ordinary people, informed or otherwise, who’ll be most outraged when they eventually learn what’s going on. Once they realise they’ve been ‘protected from information’ they will almost certainly look around for a brave journalist, who can reveal the scale of animal cruelty and report what’s going on. And from the report the true scandal will appear.
Here are some possibilities, some ‘coulds’.
A scandal could stimulate an enquiry, which could take on a momentum of its own. A cover up of facts is something, once rolling, the media could lap up. Although animal cruelty might constitute the original scandal it’s more likely that the scale of the cover up could be the bigger story. It might start with uncovering the disastrous health consequences of animal food but, because of the added cruelty factor, it may take on the proportions of a scandal and be far too much to sweep under the carpet. Out of this could come a determination to clean up the mess, once and for all. To keep us all in the dark over our food and the sorts of places our foods come from it is a gap in our education we’d not want to pass on to future generations. The prospect for any of us to be ‘information protected’ is as frightening as the cruelty itself – people would have to come to the conclusion that humans can’t be trusted around animals. On realising this we let the animal industries go bust, and then look at alternative approaches. Which is where vegans would have to ‘be available’ with some useful information to help people make a practical transition. At this point that’s the last thing vegans need to be - angry.
Instead of feeling angry at people’s behaviour now, vegans need to look ahead, to be in the best position to alert people, inform them, answer their questions and provide practical assistance. As vegans we might want it all to happen now, but in reality it will take time during which many things have to happen. Veganism must seem significant before our brave and talented journalists could sell their story. We can’t hurry the process by going up to people and shaking them … much as we might like to. So, how do we set the approach roads so that those who are interested will feel safe? And other people, who might be hostile are given the best chance to understand what is happening? If we seem helpful we’ll be listened to. If we appear angry we’ll frighten people away.

Anger

When you tell some people about what’s happening to animals, they have the gall to say they don’t want to know. “Gall” - a word implying spiteful impudence. This isn’t a trait anyone owns up to. But it’s a see no evil-speak no evil sort of cop-out vegans are used to … and perplexed by. Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence or there’s outright avoidance, or denial or ridicule - nothing that makes very much sense. People give off such a powerful signal that they “just aren’t interested” (as we might say to tele-marketers who phone). But to a vegan activist it’s infuriating. When people aren’t interested it brings out the bulldozer in us. We might try to ‘break though’ with force.
All of which is a complete waste of time of course. It achieves the reverse of what we want. It’s a free country. No one has to listen. But even if some do listen, they often think we’re exaggerating. They listen but have a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them. (my diet: unhealthy? maybe there’s animal cruelty, but only maybe). If vegans can get angry about animals we seem just ‘too weird’, and if weird then it’s likely we might be lying too. It’s a Catch 22 for vegans, this one. If we talk about the subject too softly we don’t get heard, if too forcefully we are simply avoided.
For vegans this is the challenge: the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.
We don’t actually need to show anger if we can channel something more constructive, communicating by writing or public speaking, but whatever we do how do we deal with the frustrations, at people’s attitudes? How do we feel when we write to the media and get rejected? How do we react to a speciesist remark, say on talk-back radio? How do we deal with being laughed at?
When every argument we put slides off the duck’s back it’s frustrating, and yet that’s the reality. Public resistance comes from a low awareness mixed with deep fear that vegan food is all they’ll have to look forward to. It scares people into reacting unintelligently. It forces them to continue with the way things have always been, which usually means ignoring any possibility that our food is poisoned and trying not to feel guilty about animal cruelty.
Animal husbandry has to seem benign in a ‘God’s-in-his-heaven’ sort of way, but no one can wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’. To try to deny it is flat-earth – saying that animals aren’t sentient and don’t feel pain or that the cutting down an animal is no different to cutting down of a tree. It’s far too silly to get angry about.

Move to Activism

As vegans (who are also animal activists) we’ve made it our business to look, and what we’ve seen has turned us vegan. And by going vegan, by protesting, we are hoping to carry with us a large proportion of our community on a wave of fashion - being green and being ‘vegg’. With a substantial alteration of attitude our society and our businesses could so easily swap over to keep in step with the new demand.
What will drive this> Will it be a great surge of compassion? Is this an awakening to healthy food? Or is it just a new fashion taking hold amongst a gentler generation? The upset and consequent root and branch change in our own attitudes may come from indignation that we’ve been eating food from such places and kept in the dark about it. As the fashion gets stronger the question we’ll be asking of parents, politicians and teachers is “Why didn’t you tell us?”. All of this, the new energy foods, the cruelty-free foods, new awareness – it’s a springboard for us, personally, helping us to move over to a more vegan consciousness … and then thundering back to reality we ask ourselves a question – “in practical terms do I have the will power to make a permanent change?”
As we move into adulthood or at least into a state of independence where we’re cooking/ preparing our own meals, we have to focus on the job in hand. New food, new approach. We have to move on from blaming those who didn’t tell us. Who to blame anyway? Just about every one of us has blood on our hands. We can even blame ourselves more than anyone else, for perpetuating our own mistakes even when we knew we were making mistakes. Drop the blame. It’s what we do that counts and the way we get there – if we LOOK at how pigs are forced to live … then we drop pork, if we see how the battery system operates… then we stop using eggs. See an abattoir … stop using anything that has a face.
[That look! If you’ve seen a cow in the chute at the abattoir, as she is led into the execution chamber, her face is unforgettable – an animal looking at you as they are approaching their own violent death. Their pre-death groans are quite the most heartbreaking sounds you’ve ever heard. Enough to stop us in our tracks, check habits, boycott and fume silently.]

For a while this is a huge enough project in itself, but later, when the food issues have been resolved and shoes and clothes have been sorted out then, as a practising vegan, we can take time to compare all the sadness of what we’ve seen and the attitude that has crept up on us unnoticed, and consider ourselves lucky we’ve made it through. Vegan consciousness gives us self confidence and that allows us to be grateful for the chance we’ve been given, to advocate for the animals. What is really sad is when we start to make comparisons between ourselves and others, and lose faith in human nature, because of what we see in a few people around us. We need to develop an optimistic faith in the regeneration of humans. That mustn’t be lost, despite everything we see. The human capacity for transformation is our only hope for change. We have to believe in that capacity despite all that we don’t like about human behaviour.

How to hurt animals

An animal is a free creature whether a predator or predated. He or she is self-feeding, is a social being and has no interest in concrete structures or helping humans have a more comfortable life. But to many humans, a free animal is an animal wasted, a waste of good money. And it means nothing to them to capture and incarcerate them - they’re just money, a resource, and of course they are supported in what they do by their customers and the law that makes what they do legal.
Humans hurt animals. We not only use physical force to make them pull a plough or race around a track but we take away their freedom of movement by putting them in pens, cages, behind barbed wire … and we do it to make them manageable, to make profits and to guarantee food supply. It isn’t questioned. Unless in economic terms. As competition bites, people in the animal business cut corners to stay ahead of the opposition (who could be an overseas producer). And again, the animals bear the brunt.
In a way, what we do to animals we do to ourselves. We act like Barbarians because we’ll stop at nothing. We’ll cut off tails, horns, beaks and testicles, even their very sentience when necessary. We’ll do anything. We put them behind bars, behind glass as exhibits at zoos, we treat them as things. Nothing more. The evidence is everywhere in the countryside, mostly on farms where you see equipment for mutilating (‘marking’), tools for cutting bits out of animals’ bodies and the ominous, ubiquitous truck, parked, ready to carry them off to the slaughter house. The psychological cruelty alone would be bad enough but the slum conditions of all farms adds up to monumental cruelty. The more one discovers what happens on farms, the more one’s breath is taken away. But people in general know almost nothing about this – they are ignorant or pretend to be. We most of us live in towns and cities. We never go to the country and when we do we just see scenery. We see the cosy farm nestling into the hills with trees and paddocks. But we never see behind the scenes, nor want to. If we get to know, from pictures or TV footage, that animals are kept like this and we know our food comes from these places, why don’t we act? We must be aroused to the possibility that there’s something profoundly wrong. And isn’t it suspicious that we aren’t allowed to check out conditions on farms? If we did it would be a case of once seen never forgotten.

Authority

Who authorises what we may do, how we may think, what to eat? Kids follow adults, who give advice they followed as youngsters, perhaps modified but based on the principle of Mum knows best or doctor knows best.
To not question parents, teachers, doctors and priests leads us to NOT know for ourselves what’s best for us. Who should we listen to? Who is an authority? Should we rely on instinct? … but even then we have unreliable instincts. The pleasure instinct is unreliable. Maybe the pain instinct is better, but if it’s based on “if it doesn’t hurt it’s not doing you good” then it’s counterproductive. Somehow even our own instinct may need reference points, a guiding philosophy, some basis from which we can make decisions and then to confirm it by instinct.
I think veganism is not only an overall panacea for humans but it provides a framework for making most decisions. It simply says one thing – “no animal”, as in humans shouldn’t ever use animals. We aren’t to be trusted with them: we’ll always abuse them if they’re useful to us. It’s this one tiny principle to which all other details can refer. It won’t tell us what to eat or how to think but only what NOT to.
From this plant-based platform, underscored by a non-violent approach to everything we do, our daily food choices are straight forward. What not to eat makes it difficult for vegans to become obese or develop deadly physical conditions from eating ‘crap’ food. (There are crap vegan foods too of course!). Our diet avoids the sort of food that makes people fat or ill and filters out (boycotts) most of the rubbish food and fast food available. We miss out on so many things to snack on, the cakes and confections of life, but that saves us in many useful ways – our dietary principles filter out most of the fat foods on offer, because they’re usually made with animal by-products. By not wearing animal skins and body coverings we might miss out on current fashions in many ways, but that helps our pocket, filtering out expensive items such as leather goods and silks and furs.
Is all this a massive inconveniences? Yes, it could be - we get wet feet from wearing canvas shoes or cold, and have to wear a few more layers of cotton … and that may be inconvenient, but it’s nothing compared to the loss of the sheep’s own woollen coat and the suffering that causes on a cold hillside at night. The shorn sheep suffers exposure in the cold or sunburn in the heat. The cow, killed and skinned, the lamb killed and skinned, it goes on and on, it’s all such a messy business. The shame of abattoirs and shearing sheds and eggs from caged hens … we don’t need any authority to tell us this is just plain wrong.
Why then do we have any part in these ugly affairs of the animals industry? If we need guidance for our choices, we can refer to our own instinctive compassion, indeed the vegan principle - if it hurts an animal we mustn’t use it.

Breaking out

Young people have a much cleaner slate than adults. They’ve never had any freedom to choose their food so their conscience is clearer. Parents do everything for them. And when in their twenties they start living independently, the guilt over food may not have bitten too deeply, so they’re freer to try new foods, even to try out a vegan diet. There’s an added advantage. By taking this step when young they can literally move away from the old fashioned habits of their parent’s generation. Physically less heavy and less narrow minded. For these reasons alone they may want to take on a whole new lifestyle.
Small children, before they’re got at, often express horror at the way animals are treated. They want to say something and do something and insist on something. But at each meal their resistance wears down until they let it drop. But for that short while, when ideals sprang up before being swamped by the reality of needing to be fed, a remembrance takes place. It re-emerges later, when as independent adults we wake up our long-sleeping conscience.
If conscience is the most important sense we have, if it is our most delicate sensor of the world outside ourselves, then why don’t we refer to it constantly? If we don’t exercise our conscience daily, especially about the animals we eat, we’ll probably sail on forever, consuming what ever we like until our body can stand it no longer. Our health goes down the tube and we are so ashamed about all the crap we’ve eaten that we can’t get our life back on track. It’s embarrassing to think how readily we allow our food habits to remain unquestioned. Strange, because we question everything else. These habits are left unchecked, and we still eat what our mothers fed us. All without question. We fail to move on because we fail to set our own agenda.

An egg to start the day

So here’s the state of things at present. We have billions of humans wanting foods produced by animals, who are unwilling to reform their diet or consider the feelings of animals. Perhaps, justification wise, there are other concerns pushing animal rights onto the back burner - money worries, family concerns, job insecurity, global warming and ill health … it’s all too much. In fact our worries can be so overwhelming that making our daily life more bearable is ALL we might want to do. So we open the fridge and choose our favourite food, for pleasure and diversion. But if we do escape this way, by eating, we know there’s a negative health pay-back plus a sting in the tail - another tiny death to some part of our conscience and another tiny death of the animal involved..
After sunrise at the abattoir the killing begins. And in a way it begins when we wake up too, when we’re eating our breakfast, lifting a small spoon to crack the shell of our breakfast egg. This reminds us of the same egg we saw on TV last night – when a group of animal liberators went to rescue some hens at a battery farm, who were living in squalid conditions … and here, as we sit eating an egg we notice it’s the last one in the carton, reminding us to buy some more from the store. And so the cycle continues.
We use products containing eggs (which are always from caged hens). We follow appetite, we don’t follow conscience, and the oftener we do it the less attention we pay to it … and then the conscience ceases to function altogether. So we see the animal cruelty on TV and immediately forget it as ‘just another story’, because we want eggs and we’ll soon be buying some more eggs. We can always rely on our habits to get us what we want. We can always rely on habits to let us down!

Wanting

Because people are focused on wanting they won’t listen to what we have to say. Vegans can scream about it all they like, but we have to deal with things as they are. We are looking at a deep seated fear in people, often unexpressed, that illness is waiting to grab them, and yet they still prefer to live dangerously rather than give up anything. Take a person with heart disease who has to face surgery. They might have avoided the damage by not clogging up their arteries with fat-saturated food, but they didn’t. They continued to clog their arteries, and let the hospitalisation deal with the problems later.
So vegans have two jobs: to make plant foods attractive enough without needing animal products, and to convince food addicts that prevention is better than cure. We need to be inspiring on the one hand and warning on the other. And we need to be flexible enough to play both hands at the same time - interacting with others on this matter like a proper friend would.

Those people who are most obstinate are the most food-seduced – in their mind they’re unable to be without particular favourite animal foods. It’s not just a matter of nutrition, it’s the problem of getting off the ‘fix’ of these foods … easier said than done. For two whole decades before reaching adulthood, most of us have been powerless to change our eating habits, and in this respect most parents are guilty of feeding their children addictive, harmful and unethical foods. When kids grow up and start feeding themselves they soon get hooked on the fast food version of what Mum used to cook them. Weight creeps up and a ‘live-now-pay-later’ mentality prevails. Kids aren’t warned about the dangers of food addictions - Mum and Dad turn out to be the kids’ ‘dealers’.
Like the use of narcotics (or anything stimulating which is difficult to give up), animal foods are in our daily lives from the word go. And with such a great variety of mildly addictive products on the market many of them are as difficult to shake as any of the classic abuse-substances. Once we’re in the grip of these products there seems to be no easy way out.
If animal foods are addictive, not in quite the same way as heroin but addictive all the same, then these foods, the taste of them, the thought of them, the low cost of them, make people determined to get them. It may be the hunger for a burger or chocolate or pizza, but every day that ‘hunger’ arrives and, once satisfied, it leaves its mark, especially since we can repeat the experience whenever we like. For the wealthy Westerner there’s no thought of doing without these foods, unless they’re making us fat (and then when it’s far too late we try to change things). The very idea of giving up a favourite food because of the link with animal suffering is unthinkable. In fact animal welfare, let alone animal rights, is something most people never give a thought to. It wouldn’t even be on their radar.
But if it is … they’re probably already on the way to becoming vegan.

Anger

When you tell some people about what’s happening to animals, they have the gall to say they don’t want to know. “Gall” - a word implying spiteful impudence. This isn’t a trait anyone owns up to. But it’s a see no evil-speak no evil sort of cop-out vegans are used to … and perplexed by. Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence or there’s outright avoidance, or denial or ridicule - nothing that makes very much sense. People give off such a powerful signal that they “just aren’t interested” (as we might say to tele-marketers who phone). But to a vegan activist it’s infuriating. When people aren’t interested it brings out the bulldozer in us. We might try to ‘break though’ with force.
All of which is a complete waste of time of course. It achieves the reverse of what we want. It’s a free country. No one has to listen. But even if some do listen, they often think we’re exaggerating. They listen but have a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them. (my diet: unhealthy? maybe there’s animal cruelty, but only maybe). If vegans can get angry about animals we seem just ‘too weird’, and if weird then it’s likely we might be lying too. It’s a Catch 22 for vegans, this one. If we talk about the subject too softly we don’t get heard, if too forcefully we are simply avoided.
For vegans this is the challenge: the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.
We don’t actually need to show anger if we can channel something more constructive, communicating by writing or public speaking, but whatever we do how do we deal with the frustrations, at people’s attitudes? How do we feel when we write to the media and get rejected? How do we react to a speciesist remark, say on talk-back radio? How do we deal with being laughed at?
When every argument we put slides off the duck’s back it’s frustrating, and yet that’s the reality. Public resistance comes from a low awareness mixed with deep fear that vegan food is all they’ll have to look forward to. It scares people into reacting unintelligently. It forces them to continue with the way things have always been, which usually means ignoring any possibility that our food is poisoned and trying not to feel guilty about animal cruelty.
Animal husbandry has to seem benign in a ‘God’s-in-his-heaven’ sort of way, but no one can wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’. To try to deny it is flat-earth – saying that animals aren’t sentient and don’t feel pain or that the cutting down an animal is no different to cutting down of a tree. It’s far too silly to get angry about.

Care

We might say we care, but it has limited meaning because we continue eating the stuff of animals, who themselves could be our most precious objects of care. We eat their by-products, we consume the whole of their bodies, and we know this activity is only possible because we enslave them. Slavery is the only way a farmer can survive, by aiming at the lowest costs, in rearing their animals. The consumer goes hand in hand with the farmer in this, each dependant on maintaining the violence to stay afloat. And for this, at some level, both farmer and consumer will lose self respect. How can anyone approve or enjoy being caught up in routine violence towards animals?
Look at this from the individual animal’s point of view. Take a hen. There’s nothing natural left in her life. She only ever knows loneliness and pain - she’s mutilated, roughly handled, imprisoned, and when very young her pen is a smallish prison cell, into which there comes no sunlight, no fresh air, no soil, no plant life, no natural sounds and no mother, but what comes aplenty is food. Afterwards, for the rest of her assigned life, there is a period of some eighteen months (whilst her body menstruates and she lays) which now becomes that much more painful. There’s an even greater space restriction – she’s caged into a tiny no-room-to-move space, with two or three other hens. Her whole existence is spent standing on a large-mesh wire flooring, breathing ammonia from the excreta of thousands of other birds who also live in the shed. Synthetic lighting, screeching of demented hens, the inability to move within her cage let alone escape from it - this tormented imprisonment is what consumers support every time they eat an egg, or buy a product made with eggs in it. Is it any wonder vegans are so outraged. Not only by the cruelty but by the indifference of their fellows, who have the gall to say, “No thanks - I don’t want to know”.

Squirming

You take any man or woman on the street and ask them if they know what factory farming is. They will squirm and struggle and pretend not to know. But of course we don’t go up to people on the street and ask them this sort of question, so there’s very little squirming going on. But privately, some ugly decisions are being made, that affect others. When we feast on animals it’s always linked with unresolved questions. The after taste is associated with mistakes and ‘false intelligence’, mistakes which are costing us dearly, moneywise, health-wise, ethics-wise, and always we are still profiting the producers. Our health is being damaged by dangerous chemicals in animal feed, our ethics damaged by what is done to get this so called food to us and that’s before we count the cost of buying it. By taking part in all this, by consuming dubious products we take a part in humanity’s most regrettable mistake.
As an example, take the egg sitting on the breakfast plate? The egg is the first thing we see in the morning. To not care where this egg came from is the problem here. This is NOT what people want to know. It’s where most people turn off, obviously, because it points the finger straight to their own plate.
The egg is biologically forced from a hen in a cage. The steak we eat is likely to be from a castrated bullock. Our animal food has to involve mutilation of the animals whilst alive and always the same murderous process on their last day. No death no meat (or animal products). We hire assassins to do the murdering for us. It’s not their cutting blade but our cutlery that really does the killing: the animal dies because we order the killing of it … and as justice would have it, we die from our animal food diet because we kill it.

Animal generating dollars

The ‘domesticated’ animals - what is happening to them? Nothing is happening for them, that’s for sure. To their minders, their health and welfare is only important if it affects the creature’s economic viability. As soon as Daisy isn’t earning her board and lodging she’s off to the abattoir. What sort of calculated and violent relationship is that?
It is in fact simply slave master and slave. It’s practically no relationship at all, leastways not a pleasant one. But this relationship she or he is forced into from birth. All through a foreshortened life and all the way to the executioner’s block. This is the situation for farm animals.
Perhaps her slavery is even more pernicious than human slavery because, unlike a human, she’s got no way of dealing with the torment of it. She has nothing to hand (hoof!) with which she can reason or project a future, because f course there is no reason and she has no future. A life of having your lifeforced sucked from you, some life, thence to have you throat cut. What plan of escape can she possibly have. Her every ‘now’ moment must be an empty place, especially as her minders are crueller and more indifferent than ever. And ever more desperate to extract all they can from their animals, to keep themselves in clover. From their point of view it’s different: they have difficulty in turning a profit and this is compounded by the vast numbers of consumers demanding low priced foods, all competing with cheaper imports, and that must mean lowest prices which translates to lowest living expenses for animals. Customers want cheap (and they’ll buy imported goods if they’re cheaper), so the finger of blame certainly points to …? Who? Everyone who spends money on animal food and clothing …
But there’s more to it than buying and eating. By wanting to stay uninformed about the current ‘methods used in modern animal husbandry’, the ordinary consumer is not so very different to the shareholder of an arms manufacturer. They want the goods, they want the dividends. They don’t want to know what the weapons do - no one wants to know about the provenance of the goods and services they buy because they’d have to share the responsibility for making them. They’d be needing to know at the very least what goes on behind the scenes. A share is not just money, it’s a share of the responsibility for the product that is generating that money.

Obstinacy giving way to change

When it happens, or rather when the majority make it happen, by sending animal businesses broke, we’ll probably see rapid change; changes that seem so clear because there aren’t any exemptions possible; it won’t be so much a legal change as a fashion change; animal foods will be on the nose; uncool to the 99%ers but stuff available on the black market; plant based foods pushing ‘other stuff’ off the shelves. It could happen this way, in ‘the West’.
The country we live in (if we have some arable land) allows us the choice to be vegetarian, a herbivore. Obviously there are communities in the world where they’re entirely dependent on animal foods for their survival, but over 90% of the world’s population aren’t Inuit, dessert dwellers, highlanders or islanders, where plants grow. We in fertile lands have access to plant foods and can flourish on them (as societies have done, healthily, down through the ages). The relative ‘cleanness’ of plant food over animal food is so evident that why anyone would knowingly poison their body with sub-standard food is a mystery. Or why anyone would choose to live with so much on their conscience, another mystery.

Obstinate to the core

A vegan’s conscience is outraged at the very idea of slavery and particularly the obstinacy of thought that we can’t survive unless we enslave animals. It’s reminiscent of the ending of human slavery in USA when they predicted inevitable collapse of the cotton and sugar industries – but the industries survived and thrived … and soon enough the idea of enslaving humans became repugnant and then illegal. It could be the same for animal slavery. Animal industries would die out and be replaced by N)N-animal industry.
We can survive and thrive without eating animals or using by-products or co-products like leather, and we can certainly survive without consuming the body parts of animals themselves. We can also be happy and healthy without being clothed or entertained or medicated at the expense of animals. In the future will be but in the present we aren’t. That sort of future isn’t believed in by most people. It isn’t even taken seriously. And that’s our (vegan) great challenge.
But when it does happen, once it is realised, then it’s business-as-usual for humans, then we can get on with human development, uninterrupted. Once we drop the animal dependency (errr … not until !!) then we can address the other major problems still facing the world, such as war, disease, pollution and hunger.
The agony of the human race is it’s obstinacy, having solvable problems held back by a collective reluctance to drop animal slavery. Instead of challenging ourselves to work with Nature we attempt to bypass Nature and “do it my own way”. We fail over and over again. Our addiction to animal products compounds our obstinacy and condemns us to stasis. We stand less chance of surviving because we keeping acting out this role of slave master to animal. It’s a warped, macho, sexual thing I suppose. But it works in a clumsy, short sighted sort of way. And so, why not DO things that way? We seem to have got away with it so far?
And this just means the thief isn’t caught yet, not that the crime is not being committed.
A compassionate society can’t grow whilst human slavery exists, and that is a slavery to a mindset about animals: we free ourselves by enslaving animals – which has to be about as absurd as arguments go! The only chance humanity has of surviving is by giving up bacon at breakfast and leather shoes and enjoying aquariums full of sea creatures. The lot must go if we want to move on.

The speaking conscience

While we can still speak out we should. While it is still legal to disparage animal foods, while there’s no risk of being thrown into jail for it, we should speak as widely and as wildly as we want to. It, and animal rights, is surely a sound enough basis for a valid, non-violence-based, protest movement.
But for the protesters, who are vegan, it is also a whole way of life. Trying to get our message across is often an uphill slog, but on a personal level, once our vegan lifestyle is securely established, it’s a downhill run. It’s a surprisingly attractive thing to be doing these days, and it’s that feature which should be worrying the authorities, including the animal industries. There would be a fear of society’s collapse if people no longer wanted to buy their stuff.
They’d probably attempt to push animal rights underground by making food denigration illegal. It would all be done gradually, but as they will inevitably try to limit our freedom of speech it will spice things up no end. It will bring focus to the one subject that doesn’t thrive under any sort of regime.
With this in mind we should appreciate our present freedom to speak up for animal rights, and shout about it as loudly as we can. Not to put people off but as a show of bravado and pizzaz – either way, if people get to listen it’s our strong beliefs they’ll admire, as well as the courage of our convictions. Our outrage is our strength but we need to be able to moderate it all with quietness. It’s okay to show off a bit, but we mustn’t pretend to have all the answers.
We know amongst ourselves that we do have a set of principle that represent some extremely valuable answers for life, but we aren’t so much preachers as observers, and we’ll remain that way as we keep trying to solve the mystery. It’s a question that niggles all of us. It concerns human psychology. We still don’t know why conscience pricks some people and not others.
So, as much as we need to speak out we also need to listen. We need to find out where other peoples’ head are at, thence how to reach them – it’s not just a case of delivering information, we need to discover what is blocking people’s conscience.

Talking isn’t a crime, yet!

The major issues in our world are being trivialised or ignored completely. The issue of animal exploitation is a prime example. We are pressed, as if idiots, to see a benign picture of happy farm animals living in pretty farm yards. We’re soothed by TV chefs doing animal cuisine shows. We’re beguiled by the way supermarkets care for quality. And all the while we know it’s phoney; it’s misleading the public.
Once we get past this and become vegan, it’s as if we then have to take on the whole world. And that’s too much for anyone so, we need to be practical. Yes, we might want to right the wrong, but actually doing it is tricky. Veganism is hard enough just on a personal level or in terms of surviving within our own community, but to knock away the cornerstone of our society, by questioning the efficacy of its foods and the integrity of our food producers, that’s a bold step to take. And if there is any headway made, towards too many people recognising animal rights, the influential people won’t be happy.
In Australia it might not yet be a crime to ‘disparage food’, but in certain parts of America, disparaging certain foods in public is a crime. And that’s because people with influence want to prevent any profit-destroying truth getting out. If it all became public knowledge, the meat trade could go into meltdown. Not only would it be damaging to the allied industries but the ripple effect could bring the whole economy down.

Getting satisfaction

So, here we have it, the battle between body and conscience. The battle goes on every day in our decision making. We project all the factors we can think of and then make our choice, usually in our own interest. Sometimes that choice is at the expense of animals. Could we call them ‘satisfaction decisions’ because they aren’t based on ethics?
In a subsistence environment we’d have hardly any choices to make, but in our world it’s different. We’re offered so many temptations that some things we do, and not done especially consciously, turn out to be mistakes. We follow others, we follow habits and we follow the autopilot. We prefer minimum thinking tasks. We do like to emphasis personal energy-conservation. We prefer doing things the easiest way possible.
Was it for that we humans were given such good brains? Now, as couch potatoes, it makes very little sense to stand up for things, and certainly not by getting too active against the majority viewpoint. Therefore we don’t question normal practice, and we don’t look at the rights and wrongs of things. We are true believers at the dinner table. We’re eager to follow … when the food tastes good. We do what we do unquestioningly, just as we’ve done for the whole of our lives. We segue into adulthood on the lubricated wheels of habit. We continue to do what we’ve been taught to do. And when that involves food most of us gladly roll over … if it tickles our fancy.
So, by questioning our community on such a grand scale, as vegans do, we marginalise ourselves. We lose about 99% of our support base just by the way we look at food. But we go further. We seem to go to war with our own bodies. We alienate our taste-buds and every other food-experiencing sense too. Off-side with people, masochistically off-side with the body?
Ah but! All becomes clear when the great purpose of it all is purposely NOT hidden. It’s for the sake of the animals. This is what balances it all. This is the reason for taking such a bold step. And it might be a mixture of animal compassion, the future of our children and grandchildren, or just a cheaper food bill. Whatever the reason, it’s the kick-start outrage at how cruelty, irresponsibility and waste of money. It’s the misinformation and being misled by teachers, parents, doctors, VIPs, priests, rock stars, writers, academics – they don’t stand up in our eyes any longer and as vegans we need to make this clear.
So, we are misled by each and every leader (with notable exceptions). We’ve been led astray to such an extent that we might want to put that right before we do anything else. And the first step is to step away from the whole ugly mess. To disassociate … which brings us back to the animal question itself: excess animal abuse, vested interests, gullible consumers. Always, if in doubt about any of this, simply refer to conscience. It’s always the guide.

The horror of ‘it’

The real friction between vegans and non-vegans is that all the stuff we avoid they look for. But some carnivores don’t like what they do. Some are almost as horror-stricken as vegans but they know they have to keep shtoom about it all because they still use **** (it). That’s why they can’t speak too loudly about being “horror-struck”. They have to bite their tongue – they belong to the Quiet Club. They might feel bad in all sorts of ways – it might not always quite right in the stomach, “the bacon I ate at breakfast this morning was poisoning me”, but it’s the animal cruelty thing that haunts us. Knowing about it but not making a stand about it fill many people with self loathing. But the longer we continue ignoring the horror of it all the quicker we get used to it.
Whether we feel poisoned, guilty or ashamed, it’s likely we don’t always have a feeling of well being or a feeling of wellness. If we are still ‘using’ animal foods we may have good enough genes to combat the worst of the damage they do but there are no genes to hold back conscience - the forced insensitivity damages a central part of our guidance system. By eating animals we wreck our body and disqualify ourselves as peace makers but we also spoil our chances to see the world as it is or look forward to an improved world to come. If we’re observers we take note of what we see. If we don’t take note we give up on the dream (of being well and feeling well-being).
If we’re a signed up member of the Keep-Quiet Club we’ve given away our only true chance to be an agent of peace in the world. It seems sad that food attachment screws everything up for us. Or maybe we’re too far gone anyway, too lured by other attractions, like perhaps a fur wrap over our shoulders or a lambs wool jumper or a visit to the zoo. In whatever way we’re drawn in, and it always means we have blood on our hands.
So here we are, a world full of humans, doing nasty things to animals and feeling unwell from the poisons in our bodies. It’s all soul-bruising - each day, by what we do or actively condone, we perpetuate violence. There isn’t a nicer way of saying this.
Every time the knife cuts the life out of an animal and we condone it by spending our money on meat we also cut ourselves - the animals’ bodies when eaten by us make us ill, usually the slow way over many long years of illness. Simply by ingesting animals’ every day (of our lives), consuming the concentrated toxins in their bodies plus the adrenaline of terror at the point of their execution, all this conspires to weaken our immune systems. And after that has been wrecked we don’t stand a chance. This is why vegans simply say “keep off the stuff, keep your health and keep your conscience”.
If we don’t buy the stuff it means we’re not under the control of our own totalitarian tastebuds. By controlling our buying (and eating) habits we stand a better chance of avoiding the ravages of addiction. If you aren’t vegan then it isn’t only food involved, there are shoes and zoos and (animal tested) shampoos. By spending money at our local ‘Animals Ar Us’ store we go with the crowd. We have to give up any idea of growing spiritually.

Quality life versus a seconds world

If we aren’t ready to move on, towards eating vegan food, then as semi-vegetarians we lump ourselves in with the meat heads. If we use animals in any way whatever then we can’t condemn their use by anyone else. Non-vegans may not like eating meat but because they eat the by-product of animals and are users of co-products like leather, they condone the cruelty and still belong to the Quiet Club. What can they say? “no I don’t eat them but I use their skins to make my boots” or if a full-on user “Yes, I eat ‘it’ but I know it’s wrong”, which makes no sense at all. We literally have to put our money where our mouth is and buy cruelty-free all the time, or remain voiceless members of the silent masses.
If we don’t play a vegan-principled role in their liberation we can hardly play a part in the world-wide awakening consciousness. We can’t draw much meaning from activism if we’re still part of the system. How can we condemn it when we’re having to look to divert ourselves all the time? And divert we do, in general entertainment and self-satisfying activities.
This could be seen as blocking a certain quality of satisfaction. It could take away the meaning in our lives, of being an advocate for animals. Without having this substantial cause at the head of our list, what can we do profitably if this is not dealt with. The loose change we feel is in our pocket is all we have to spend on it. The mission is hopeless and so we are forced to retreat into the fun world. That’s all bells and whistles, a poor substitute for the real thing. If you can’t help save the world, just go to the movies and forget about it!!For each day to be fully meaningful, passionate and goal oriented, our activities (in whatever form they take) should, you’d agree, bring satisfaction? Whatever we do should be bringing some extra quality into our own life and into our own world. We should, at the end of the day, feel that we couldn’t have done anything any better than we did. Not completely, but to some extent, vegans know this feeling. If you’re still living in Seconds World , try going vegan and see what you feel then!!.

Open to suggestion

As we grow up we split into two camps, those who make a living out of animals and those who don’t. It’s from this second group that people move into the Animal Rights Movement. And from there we make certain suggestions to others.
If the hard-hearted or obstinate ones, and those working in animal businesses are hostile (because vegans are a potential threat to their lifestyles or livelihoods) they’re even more so because they don’t like being told what to eat. Those who have committed to a lifetime of meat eating, especially those who work for the industry, can’t contemplate the idea of animals having rights. And if they’re protective of their jobs, imagine how much more protective the rich animal profiteers are, with their fortunes in the balance.
So their unapproachableness is understandable. All we can do is show them we love them no less … and then move on. If they’re hostile and rigid with fear, and trying not to show it, they may seem not to care about justifying what they eat. They belong to a group who continues eating their favourite foods undisturbed. They have a protective shield to fend off anyone spouting vegan propaganda at them; they maintain a ‘pleasure-head’ lifestyle and we can’t change that. We might have to move on and not worry about what they think; it’s others who’re more interesting. They think their food is pleasurable and not poisonous but they’re open to suggestion. That openness may be their saving grace, allowing them to discover other tastes and textures in food. After that it’s easier for them to shop and try new things and cook them, as an all-vegan food trial. Out of that may come a realisation that non-animal foods are okay to eat. And that could mean it’s okay to go vegan.

The disconnect

Because the law allows the exploitation of animals, none of it registers as a crime, whether it be the caging of animals in zoos, the experimenting on them in laboratories, the suffocating of fish on the decks of boats or the ultimately disgusting factory farming of pigs and chickens.
For the mass of the population, there has to be a ‘disconnect’ between two great forces – the inner beauty of our own humanity versus the inner weakness of food cravings and all the blind-eye turning that goes with it. Animal food is so endemic in our community that it affects the educated and rich in much the same way as the uneducated and poor. Almost all of us fall for it. Whether or not we’re religious we’re all seduce-able. We all want food enjoyment. But we also want to justify what we do, so that we can maintain social acceptance by way of the food we eat. If we like to taste and eat certain foods, eating it with others is even more of a pleasure. The provenance of our food doesn’t interest us. We want no disturbances about animal farming a food that’s “not good for us”. The origins of our food we ride over – as an adult it mustn’t matter but these very origins when they’re discovered by children it can bother them. It’s a shock to them when they first find out where there food comes from and ‘what happens to animals’.
Kids aren’t in any position to complain. They do what they’re told. And unless they want to starve or be deprived of yummy things to eat, they conform. We all did. We weren’t reluctant to conform because the foods we were expected to eat were often a pleasure to eat - dinner table conformity wasn’t usually a problem because Mum dishes up ready-to-eat food and it’s easy to accept that. From the earliest age we are programmed to accept animal products and enjoy them too.
At adulthood there are some decisions to make, and the provenance of our foods is at the centre of an ethical dilemma.

Not free to choose

Even though conspiracy theories abound and we laugh at them and call them preposterous, somewhere in our mind we suspect we are being taken for a ride. To those with vested interests, our money spent on animal industry products is more important to them than considering our welfare. To those who care little about animal cruelty, customer conscience doesn’t concern them. The ones who could help, the law makers, the politicians don’t help at all. Their inaction, their complicity with scientists and the shareholders of animal industries guarantees their own support base. Each benefits from the other. They play into each others’ hands to make money out of the consumer, win our support and we let them. When they poison the public (or at least peddle unhealthy food to us) the consumer lets them get away with it. When they are complicit with animal cruelty we raise no objection. The consumer is the victim of an outrage here but consumers, as individuals, have a choice. And they must choose in the end because what is going on, there’s nothing illegal about it. Our own compliance is legal as is the industry’s cruelty to animals. It’s still legal to be an omnivore. It’s legal and therefore socially acceptable. And of course it is very acceptable, economically, to the chief animal abusers who are getting richer by the minute.
But the strangest thing about all this is that these same people are falling on their own swords. The profiteers of the “animal abuse system” are wealthy enough to eat ‘well’ and usually they’re inclined to eat rich food, and, you’ve guessed, that includes a lot of animal products. Ironic! The same animals they use to make their wealth ruin their health. The big question is, why doesn’t it occur to them to avoid these foods? They may be wicked enough to produce them but not bright enough to avoid poisoning themselves with them. The scientists especially should know the dangers associated with animal foods. And you’d think the spiritual leaders of our communities would respond to the horror stories about animal farms and abattoirs. But no, they say nothing. It seems that social status in our community relies so heavily on conformity (and that includes communal dining), that to blow the whistle on it would be social suicide, Whatever group we associate with, it’s our own security we value most. And conformity is integral to that. If anyone from the establishment spoke up there’d be hell to pay. The scientists would lose their grants, the politicians their pre-selections and the priests their parishes. That’s why they wouldn’t ever consider supporting vegan principles. No one in their right mind would inflict that on themselves. So, the habit of using animal products continues. And for the consumer to be part of that they must numb their feeling for animals and oppose the idea that animals should have any rights.