Grabbing what’s on offer

Has anyone asked the animals whether they have permission to take things from them that are theirs, their secretions and, for heavens sake their very lives? No. No animal has indicated in any way that we may steal from them, and yet we do. This is fundamentally why vegans get angry and judgemental.
Now, if we really want to get the omnivores to start thinking along these permission lines we need to seem not so very unlike them. Which means a radical change of attitude towards the “wicked consumer”. Drop the judgment of them, drop the anger. It’s not a good look. It looks like a hissy fit, in that the onlooker knows it will pass, (vegans will tantrum and then it will pass). Omnivores therefore needn’t take too much notice of it.
That’s not how we vegans think about our little shows of ‘outrage’. It’s what we do. It’s all we can do, so it seems. For us it isn’t clear what else there is we can do. So, we keep saying much the same thing, over and over again, hoping that by repetition something will stick, penny will drop, etc. We may not realise why it’s always just a hissy fit and why it hardly ever hits home ... because what we say isn’t original, not ‘ fresh’, nearly always stale, nearly always using stats we haven’t checked, inevitably we’re repeating what someone else has said. Call it lazy activism. The information we’re sending across look like ‘lectures’ and ‘difficult’ and ‘dull’ - cant.
We say “Look, will you, at what they’re doing to the animals. It’s absolutely … etc”.
For those of us who are concerned (and I’ll include vegans only here since unless one is, the idea of ‘concern’ is almost ludicrous). For us. the way we look at our driving principle, our veganism, is a double worry. We’re as much worried by what’s happening as we are our own inability to stop it.
I often think it’s like passing a house and looking at some activity going on in a house. You turn to see through a window, a kid being beaten up by a parent (or adult authority figure) and being entirely unable to help, to enter the house and intervene. “Oh, they’re just having a scrap, none of my business”, and we walk on.
It’s very difficult for the animal activist to imagine how any of this killing will be stopped. Lying awake at night I, like many others, picture small animals, alone, frightened, and god-knows-what-else unimaginably horrible. Lying awake thinking, “this is happening tonight, now, at this moment. What brew of disgustingness is bubbling in so many cauldrons of suffering, located just down the road, not far from us.
In these merry sleepless moments I might well think, believe, we’re all in the frying pan. We’re doomed. And on I go, seeing the torment as the breakfast eggs are being laid each night, and on I go, hearing them screaming ... unheard behind-closed-doors.
I can either imagine or remember that sound. It doesn’t matter, Either way the thought gets into my head and I know one thing - a scream is a scream. My heart goes out to them ... to know nobody really cares about them, No one hardly ever thinks about them. They’re abandoned to the whims of the slave-masters, the humans.