Article 27. Customer-Friendly Ethics

For animal eaters who won’t take the animals’ side, they must contrive ignorance. If this ignorance is widespread there isn’t a need to know what happens on farms and at abattoirs. They say that if farms and slaughter houses had glass walls, no one would be omnivores or carnivores. More importantly, if we did know what was going on and yet still chose to buy unethical items, it would mean that we are capable of being deliberately cold, and no one wants to think of themselves like that.
Today it is difficult to not know. It’s difficult to escape the obvious fact, that whatever we buy has to be replaced from a product pool (and in the case of animal products that means a slave-pool). Not only do we buy from it but we also help promote the acceptable face of it.
From their point of view, for public relations purposes, the animal death camps must not be seen as "death camps". The euphemism is "farm" and "processing plant". These places have to seem to be “efficient and humane facilities which are servicing the public with the best in food provision”. That must coincide with the image customers want. Meat-eaters prefer to hold an unbelievable picture in their head other than think about images of animals being tortured and executed. The consumer prefers to maintain a false illusion in order to continue enjoying what they enjoy - mainly pleasure foods. But this comes with a price. One has to be content to let go of the actual truth of things, even enjoyments like wearing fashionable shoes or visiting zoos. By performing some nifty mental gymnastics, we can double think our way past all these tricky situations.
Double think is especially useful in tricky conversations where we find ourselves defending an ‘impossible’ argument. With the aid of double-think, unconvincing though it may be, we can run a standard line of argument that eliminates the need to talk about certain things. We say: “It’s pointless to discuss this”. Meaning we don’t want to go there (or go anywhere near the subject of animal farming) and are observing our right to avoid both the issue and those people who want to talk about it.
Being part of The Vast Majority allows people to get away with things like downgrading the importance of subjects even when they are obviously important ones. We dismiss an issue as if we’re brushing a fly off our sleeve. But behind every rebuff meat-eaters make, they know the golden rule: whoever brings up the subject mustn’t get a foothold. This can never be made the subject of polite dinner table conversation. To put off any socially unaware person from shouting their mouth off, they must be sprayed with a little social ostracisation, just as we would spray the annoying fly. It can be done by belittling, ignoring or avoiding. Each hostile response gives the impression that it is almost immoral to waste time listening or participating in this kind of talk. Meat consumers (who represent at least 95% of all the people on the planet) reckon they have the right not to be bothered and certainly not to be intimidated. They have the right to ignore ethics if they clash with the majority, whose attitudes are rationalised in terms of bare survival – “essential to eat meat”. It’s something we learn when we’re young and it gains strength from safety in numbers. “As long as most people do it, I can do it”. The norm overrules ethics.
We often hear “It’s just human nature”, implying that it would be futile to try to change certain behaviour . . . implying that anyone going against the norm (who is in the minority) will inevitably find themselves between a rock and a hard place. In this case, between the normality of meat eating and the difficulty of being unethical. This is where the confusion is and where it hits us hardest. Young people especially. They pick up ethics by observing their elders, using them as a basis for their own self discovery. But they begin to wonder why ethical behaviour is inconsistent at certain times. Why do adults preach morals but behave unethically. Kids want to respect their elders but can’t help disrespecting some of the things they do. Thus, there is an all round confusion about what are good values.
As adults we prize values. They are the yardstick by which we assess and are assessed. These values are connected with how we want others to see us. It’s likely we do things ethically because we want approval. For instance, by developing a good sense of humour and by being kind and generous, we show how well we have learned our finest values. We’re judged favourably for them and if we can keep it up, if we display them consistently, we get a reputation. Adults want to be seen for their soft and their hard sides, so they try to be angels-cum-warriors. To achieve this image we have to learn, by way of ethical ground rules, not just the nuts and bolts of acquiring image, but how to be genuinely of benefit to others over a prolonged period. We need rules that are feel-good rules, that we revere as if passed down through the generations. We need guidelines that have worked throughout history and which today feel right, as if they have sprung straight from instinct. But today, with so many confusing diversions about, we have to be more conscious and clear about what our ethics are. In this modern age, instincts aren’t always enough to assess the complexities of human behaviour. We have to formulate ethics, consciously. Even if we don’t need to write them down, we at least need to discuss them. In the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of conversation.
Big decisions are made based on ethics and even though we experiment with them, they nevertheless represent safety - the safe way to do new things. For instance building relationships, building houses, building the very future itself. Ethics help us to emphasise what is important. Ethics expand consciousness. And if we use our brains enough (and if our ethics are comprehensive enough) we’ll let a new consciousness influence our everyday thinking process.
Other animals are limited in this way. They can’t necessarily ‘get out of the rain’ as we can. Our sophisticated thought processes have allowed us to feather our own nests. But we’ve neglected our role as guardians. Our intellect has conspired with morality to green light what we shouldn’t be doing. We’ve focused on our own benefit and consequently wreaked havoc, and we now need to make amends. We need to put ourselves second for a change. Materially and spiritually. We owe it to our victims to show gratitude for what we’ve taken and contribute something wholesome to the futures of our children. And to the future of Gaia.
Our planet is our sacred responsibility. We are up against the super-spoilers, mega-polluters and profit makers, and amongst them are the animal cagers and vivisectionists who simply regard ethics as obstacles to profit. They intend to continue until they are stopped! But recently there’s been a change in public awareness about the damage we humans have done and now, to some extent, there is a level of environmental responsibility. The environment gets good press after decades of neglect. But animal exploitation gets virtually no publicity at all; because it threatens the huge food and clothing supply chains.
So it seems that today our human passion and outrage is reserved for environmental issues not for animal farming. Sad enough that the beautiful planet is being damaged, and sad too that rapid species loss is taking place, but more insidious is our turning a blind eye to mass animal exploitation. Here we see a mindless perverting of Nature with no end in sight. And for what?
No animal product is essential, for any reason whatsoever. Sure, leather is strong and waterproof but life’s not threatened without it. Sure, cheese and eggs make yummy products but they’re not difficult to replace. Nothing from animals is so essential that we’d have to compromise our principles to get them and yet creature-killing has become a daily ritual in every human community on the planet. Humanity is hooked, and we can’t see past these products to where they could be replaced with plant-based equivalents. As with kicking any bad habit, it’s all in the mind. The big surprise is how easy it is to kick the whole animal product habit.
The mind, helped along by institutionalised misinformation, wants us to believe that plant-based diets are not safe. But evidence proves otherwise. If we read up on the subject (and there’s not exactly a shortage of literature on vegan nutrition) we’ll soon be assured. Much has been written not only about the safety of a plant-based diet (supplemented only by regular minute doses of Vitamin B12) but the health and energy of that diet.
Once the physical and psychological safety factors have been satisfactorily dealt with, there is no other reason to be using meat, milk or eggs … or zoos! In fact the absence of animal stuff is a great weight lifted from us. You can see it in the many happy and healthy vegans living in the world today, who are themselves evolving and helping other species to evolve. As each irreplaceable individual animal has a chance to move past the terror and suffering we’ve imposed on them, they will have the opportunity (as humans have had for so long) to come to know who they are.
Vegan principles make a start to unlocking the violence humans have done to animals, but more so, veganism shows the utter waste of energy in producing food from animals. Once the plant-based food regime is up and running in our life, it then becomes clear that we’ve been poisoning ourselves. The full extent of the toxicity of animal food itself is only now coming to light in terms of its effect on peoples’ health. Epidemiological studies show that ill health is closely linked to diets of whole populations, showing the links between high animal protein and high incidence of deadly disease. But still there is silence on the dangers of using animal foods, not to mention the silence about the demise of our ethics in general!
We’re led to see ethics as a rather threadbare garment unlikely to keep us warm enough, so we’ve substituted ethics with other moral codes that allow us to do whatever we want to animals. This is sad enough, but it has put us to sleep. We’ve lost our sense of outrage. We allow ourselves to comply. We no longer fight to protect the innocent. Animal Rights is urgent. Their protection from us is essential. We humans can no more be trusted with animals than paedophiles with kids. And yet it seems we still care little about this subject or for the ethics of non-violence. As we continue to drive animals insane for our own advantage, our only fear is that we become a minority ourselves, marginalised by a vegan world in which there is a total ban on unethical products, including foods and clothing using animals.
In a vegan world, our fundamental nature would have been consciously changed, individual to individual. If we want to become peaceful people, we must stop using animals because all animals are eventually barbarically killed. If we don’t step away from all this, our attempts at peacemaking will be to no avail. Peacemakers and planet-savers have to start spending their money on cruelty-free products thereby persuading unethical businesses to pursue a more ethical direction. The money in our pockets is the one power we have that can change things.