Farm animals for 'the eating’

Wednesday 28th April 2010

The most abused animals are the food animals. What if they could speak? What would they say about caged hens and machine-controlled cows? What would they say about denuded forests and the latest frightening changes happening to our weather? It’s sad. Omnivores are responsible for so much of this; the huge percentage of our greenhouse gases from animal husbandry, deforestation making room for grazing animals or for crops to feed them, and it’s down to the customers of the Animal Indsutries. Omnivores are compliant with the “mad men” who’re responsible for all this destruction. The average consumer, conveniently blind to all this, give up their valuable dollars to enrich the Industry, The omnivore, with all this to answer for, is still holding out against their own inevitable vegan makeover.
When this one idea eventually does take hold of peoples’ imagination, when the separate pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place, people will be forced to examine it.
Stage one: experimenting with it, trying to find out what is genuine about it, sniffing out genuine people to speak with. Stage two: experimenting with trust, of fellow vegans, trusting that a vegan diet is health-promoting and good for the environment. Stage three: discovering the quality that makes it pleasurable.
You can see where this is leading of course. But if you aren’t yet vegan or aren’t familiar with living on a purely plant based diet (or even wearing cotton and canvas instead of ‘other materials’) then all this might be unreal for you. One might consider the idea of veganism and it may easily enter the imagination but if it seems impossible, too painful, too daunting, then it’s likely however great the advantages, we’ll ditch the whole idea. Even if one has contemplated a vegan lifestyle and read a couple of books about it, it still might be beyond our practical daily reality if we can’t imagine being motivated to do it.
Why, for example, would we voluntarily opt for living ‘vegan’ if the pleasure of it still eluded us?
If you can’t come at ‘going vegan’ you’re no help to the animals. If you aren’t vegan it follows that you are still eating them.