Halal on T.V.

It’s early Tuesday morning here in Sydney. Last night millions of Australians were urged, on the nightly news, to watch Four Corners (Australia’s most respected current affairs programme) - a shocking coverage of live-exported cattle being killed without stunning (halal), in Indonesia. I thought I’d seen everything but nothing this bad. Lyn White and other brave activists filmed what we saw at many abattoirs there, showing unimaginable cruelty, terror and the slow death of so many beautiful animals. It won’t be on tonight’s T.V. but it will be happening all the same.
A 95 year old friend phoned me before the programme went to air to say she’d try to watch it - brave woman, one of the few meat-eaters I know who still wrestles with her conscience over her meat-eating. Most will have forgotten what they saw by around dinner time tonight, thinking, “We slaughter animals humanely, with pre-stunning, here in Australia. We aren’t as barbaric as those wicked Indonesians”. Oh yes?
So it goes on. The self-deception of the meat-eater: the anger and frustration of the animal activist. All of us know there has to be a convenient disconnect to continue a life of eating these poor defenceless creatures, as if their bodies were somehow necessary for nutritional reasons. The law allows it. What can I do about it? I can’t sleep for thinking about what I saw, yet I’m very conscious of the pointlessness of writing about it at five in the morning, to ‘blog’ it before going to work this morning. I could roll over and try go to sleep, and wait for the sun to rise.
But before the sun comes up I know there is a little time, a small chance someone may think twice, and that makes this worth doing. I imagine thousands of outraged Australians will be tapping out words as I’m doing, about that programme last night, just to get something off their chest but realising that soon enough the T.V. images will have faded and we’ll all be back to normal - omnivores eating animals, vegans trying not to be too wordy.
I know I’ve got to try to say something profound, something worth reading. Do I mention the ultimate terror, which came towards the end of last night’s programme, where we saw animals being forced to watch their mates thrashing about, being struck down and skinned and butchered, visibly shaking with fear at what was about to happen to them? I was watching this and at the same time wondering how many viewers had already switched across to another channel, unable to stomach any more of it.
If you still eat animals or use foods made with animal products of course you are supporting the death machines, perhaps not quite as bad as the Indonesian abattoirs but not very different either. How can any person handle that psychologically and not have to answer for it at some time in their life? It’s easy for people like me to rebuke since I, like other vegans, have stopped taking part in this ugly business. But it’s hard to admit our powerlessness to stop it happening. Lyn White had to actually watch the torture, live, and go on and on filming it. Most of us wouldn’t have the courage to do that. We all have to sit on our hands while the killing, the imprisoning of animals still goes on. All I can do is tap out a few words and post them on this blog, knowing that if any meat-eater reads what I’ve written it will be shunted off somewhere in their minds and I’ll be thought of as a self righteous freak.
But I, like my colleagues, have no choice but keep trying to find new ways of getting people to listen, to read, to watch, whatever it takes to end this terrible habit of animal eating ... whilst at the same time not seeming to want to antagonise. All we can do is advocate for the animals, since they’ve no other voice than ours to help them.
I hope you’re reading this and will think carefully before that next fork-full of fried chicken goes into your mouth. And if you’re in Bandar Lampung in Sumatra and thinking of picking up some beef for tonight’s dinner or you live down the road here in Sydney buying your McDonalds chicken meal, please imagine for a moment the animal terror that is part of your meal. I can’t say anything more. There’s rent to pay, work to go to, the sun’s about to rise, and I’ve already gone way over my self-imposed word limit for this blog. You might have tuned out way back ... but if you’ve read any of this at all ...

Energy maximising

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Maybe as vegans we are convinced about our arguments concerning animal slavery even though we know it’s going to be a long drawn-out David and Goliath affair. The odds might seem stacked against us and the tide doesn’t seem to be turning our way, and our campaigns seem to leech energy to no obvious effect but should energy loss be such a great fear for animal activists?
I know that I spend time fretting over ineffectiveness, over the loss of motivation, over tiredness that can lead to depression. I try to steal energy from my other commitments, but then something else goes short in my life, relationships are stretched, there’s never enough time to do anything else well. I’m torn between doing more for Animal Rights and spending less time with my family and friends.
The original idea of Animal Rights is totally inspiring. Eventually it makes a call on my energy so I try to feed it by reading books or watching DVDs, or doing whatever it takes to keep up the passion.
If we let Animal Rights work interfere with our personal life, things may start to go wrong, so it’s a matter of getting the energy balance right. Where’s that extra energy to come from? Certainly from vegan food (no longer being slowed down by eating crap and stodge) but mostly energy is coming from the sheer significance of what we are trying to do. So, it’s crucial to get this energy thing right since the burn-out rate amongst animal activists is frightening.
If energy is a problem, maybe we have to start considering energy not as a finite resource, like having so much petrol in the tank to run the machine, but more like a self perpetuating resource - once released, the energy out-put generates more than enough energy in-put. Motivational energy, for such meaningful work, must become a type of energy that expands as it expends. Let’s say that acts of usefulness or kindness, where there’s big investment on our part, show surprisingly little energy depletion - how could this be? Perhaps activism that’s fuelled by passion defies logic. Perhaps it uses the sort of energy where the more we use the more is replaced.
I find it works that way, that as soon as I let go of self interest, the stronger I feel, energy-wise. Could it be that when energy is released for the ‘greater-good’ that we actually make energy, and set off a chain reaction? Could it be that when we begin to take an interest in a forest, an animal, a human, any global issue, that when we start advocating for them and not for ourselves, that the energy we need will appear from nowhere? And does the opposite happen, where self-interest drains our energy ... which could be why the insatiable thirst of the greedy fits the ‘more greed, more need’ pattern?
If energy works like this (harmful sources like meat depleting energy, harmless sources like plants fill energy) it puts a new spin on things - that however hard pressed we are there will always be enough energy for meaningful activities.

Vegan

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‘Vegan’ sounds difficult. Not hard to understand but hard to carry out. It’s based on principles a small child could understand but it comes down to giving-up favourite foods, and that’s not appealing. And what about clothing items, shoes, entertainments and cosmetics, boycotted because of their animal connections? And being social misfits? And a vegan’s motives being misunderstood? It’s enough to put anyone off.
But to put it all in perspective, this is one mighty principle that’s being defended. It’s so mighty that maybe we do have to put up with the pain of being misunderstood (as well as giving-up things). Our own life and integrity is on the line here, not to mention a better carbon footprint and the chance to solve the world food shortage in ‘hungry’ countries (where food not being fed to animals is available to feed humans). Being a vegan may be difficult but the clincher is in being able to disassociate with animal cruelty. Whatever hardships we endure as vegans, in a non-vegan society, nothing’s really that hard compared to what animals have to put up with. The thought of the suffering they go through makes boycotting their ‘products’ a small price to pay.
No, going vegan isn’t a breeze. On a personal level there’s addiction to certain favourite foods to deal with, and then being up against a popular belief that a plant-based diet might be inadequate. But once all that is ironed out something else begins to happen. There’s a wish to bring others across. There’s a need to start talking to others about it. And then a new frustration begins ... when one realises the scale of ignorance is far greater than had been realised, and it’s combined with a level of obstinacy, where people don’t know, don’t care or refuse to listen. Then the big difficulties begin.
The hurdles of actually becoming vegan, once overcome, make way for fresh obstacles where the vegan who wants to talk Animal Rights meets a brick wall, and feel so frustrated by this that they have nothing to lose by stirring people up. A huge divide opens up. A belief forms that the only way to ‘get people to listen’ is to shock them. You wear a badge with the slogan “Meat is Murder”, knowing that it’s really saying “You are a murderer”. Nothing could be more insulting than to call a person a murderer. So the battle lines are drawn.
From a personal project, with difficulties now overcome, we might never have taken into account how important recognition might be. To be NOT recognised for what we’ve achieved, for our gesture NOT to be taken seriously is enough to make the blood boil ... enough, indeed, to make war on all those who dismiss what we’ve done.
And that’s roughly where many of us who are vegan now find ourselves, unsupported and disliked because of the importance we’ve given to our ‘going vegan’.
How vegans deal with this is the great challenge.

Open letter

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Dear Omnivore,
I hope you like us. We only want to talk to you ... about you-know-what. I know we need to earn your respect ... so you’ll trust us not to ‘frighten the horses’. Please excuse our tub-thumping and lack of good manners, it’s a bad habit. You see, we’re used to fast talking or at least thinking up-ahead ... and that can be so off-putting. And some of us don’t try to weigh both sides of the argument - we’re polemicists, we like talking morals and ethics.
Some of us have a lot to learn - we’re not selling soap powder, we’re selling an idea, so we need to be ... well what we don’t need to be is preachy. In the past we tried to make you feel bad about yourself, for not thinking about what you’re doing. When we’ve suggested you “go vegan” we’d forgotten how much you hate being told what to do ... and that you’d probably dig your heels in.
It’s no surprise if you wanted to chuck us out, ideas and all ... you’d be doing that to teach us, that it’s a long climb back uphill, to get back to where we were ... in our conversation ... which might have gone somewhere if we hadn’t blown it. We did push and shove and make value judgements. We admit it.
Hopefully we’ve learnt our lesson. And so, what happens now? I for one will try not to be a ‘judgemental type’. And if I do stray into this minefield I know I’ll have to watch out for signs of nervousness in you ... about being attacked ... on this matter of food.
To nip it in the bud I must be frank with you. I do have a difficulty, all animal advocates do, of wanting say something but not making you feel like a ‘cornered-rat’ when I’m saying it. How I say it, my face - just my smile ... me smiling at you when I speak. I mean to show you how friendly I am. I want you to think I am friendly and non-judgemental ... but my smile is masking my disapproval of you ... and you very understandably see it as the ugliest smile of all. If I’m not a really honest type I know you’ll see through me.
We vegans who think we know about food should realise that any omnivore knows food too, in as much as they know what they like and believe they are what they eat. We must try not to underestimate you. We have to see you as a fast-tracking, observant human being ... no schmuck. We need to bend over backwards, to show we realise how difficult animal issues are and be willing, no, enthusiastic to have our arguments critically assessed. We aren’t asking people to agree with us, we just want people to think about issues and arrive at their own conclusions.
Up here in the clouds we vegans can easily forget how we got up here ... and we end up thinking the change we made (going vegan, for instance) was all quite easy, and we go around telling everyone so.
Going vegan is simple and quick, err, no, not for some of us. It’s more like an alcoholic giving up the drink. For some of us it means making a massive decision about ourselves, a central, integral change, perhaps triggered by a realisation which might have been brewing for some time. Our own journey, post to post, stage by stage, might have been sparked by compassion. We try to hold onto that thought and that feeling while we’re mixing into the day-to-day world.
It’s like coming out of a movie feeling pumped by the whole emotional impact of what we’ve just been through, and then later on, as we walk home, the details fade. We can’t remember quite why, only a half-hour ago, we got so carried away.
With new ideas, attitudes and opinions, if we don’t examine and digest them thoroughly at the time, the power of them fades too quickly ... and nothing consolidates deeply enough. And with nothing solid forming, we don’t get around to making the big changes suggested by the big idea. We revert back to safe-old, lifestyle habits and attitudes.
I know we vegans seem to go on and on .... and on ... about the same old thing but we need your support. First we have to work out a way of getting the omnivore on board.
If we animal liberationists can inspire change, may they be permanent changes. It means our arguments have to be introduced carefully ... well, as carefully as you’d plant any seed in reasonably good ground. We must take care to argue non-violently and non-accusingly - talking issues by touching sympathy spots ... which will stick in the memory like any great message we see in a powerful movie or read in a book. We should promote liberation for what it is, not just welfare reforms or incremental stages of granting privileges to animals or fiddling with omnivorous diets, but in terms of abolition. No more use of animals.
Whew! This is a big letter but abolition is such a big thing. And it’s from abolition that all else flows, as it did with the abolition of human-slavery, where a great opinion change took place before slavery could be ended. Then the slaves were freed and only then did people see why it always had to be about outright abolition ... so there could be no back-sliding later, when things got a little tough. I suppose I’m edging towards the ultimate question then - during wartime conditions when there’s no food, and it’s a matter of kill an animal or die - vegans would probably like to give notice of refusal - of the invitation to dine. We’d probably like to sign a paper to say we’d sooner die than touch the stuff.
So, thanks but no-thanks. I just wanted to write to explain why we are as we are.

Separation

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To really keep separate, to really control people, whether low caste, uneducated or vulnerable, all we need to do is keep our distance and not get too familiar with them.
The necessary distance-of-separation depends on how soft we are - how far we want to ‘do the right thing’ by them, or how far we’ll be happy to screw them?
A range of exploitative attitudes pass from generation to generation till they become group attitudes. 'Separation-ists', learning how to put a person ‘in their place’, find it convenient to be on an ‘auto-pilot of dislike’. By disliking our victims we can better justify what we do to them. We’re primarily talking here about resource animals (so useful yet so docile), of whom there’s a vast population on the planet. Farmers say they love their animals. I don’t think that’s true. I think they rather dislike them. For, by actively disliking them (because they are different to humans), they can justify their heavy handling of them.
On farms, any amount of heartless treatment is fair game, and all the better if it’s routine and barely-thought-about. This emotional separation becomes an essential skill for those who are hands-on, working for the Animal Industries.
If you aren’t a ‘separation-ist’ you may be more attracted to the egalitarian, and likely you’ll have a yen for minority views ... and be un-put-off-able on the subject of differences. You’ll quite likely like those very differences, between other people or other species. If we are non-separationist, we’ll surely be in favour of giving anyone the benefit of the doubt and want to give to the marginalised the best treatment possible.
But separation-ists are still in the ascendant. Their view is keep others ‘in their place’, a ‘people-attitude’ which helps when applying similar attitudes to other species; culture-discrimination transposes to species-discrimination. Most humans rate animals (plus specific ‘lesser-people’) as being lower than themselves ... hence can treat them badly ... hence, not feel bad for doing so.
Humans do terrible things to animals and can still maintain the grimace of a smile. Equilibrium is reached, nothing bad is happening ... and a nice dinner is waiting for us on the table - what could be better?
And it’s always been like that down through the ages ... until, in the nineteen forties, someone had the audacity to call “crap”. They proposed to seriously question this.
Until we burst the bubble, about what really happens to animals, we will sit at the dinner table, just hoping there are no vegans amongst our number. Listening to vegans talking about ‘kinship with animals’ spoils your appetite, especially if you’re eating an animal at the time.

Animals’ use-by date

115:

Once we feel safe to exploit, separation has already taken place, essential if we want to farm animals. It’s essential with humans too - if we ‘use’ people, we must first practise separation on them ... then we can put them in their place.
Once we’ve made up our minds who is superior and who is inferior, all we have to do is simply withhold friendly feelings, then everything’s so much easier. A dependent employee, for instance, in fear of losing her job, doesn’t need to be befriended by the employer who, from a superior power base, can push her to her limits.
Much the same thing happens on farms with animals, only much worse – a farmer, by having biological control over the animals, can feed them and breed them at will. Animals pull carts, produce eggs, they fatten, they reproduce and earn farmers money. Then ... then they can be liquidated. It’s the same, often, with companion animals who’re ‘put to sleep’ when vet bills get too high.
Determining the fate of animals is what humans do to underline our superiority and their inferiority. Inferiority, low standards and less sentience equates to us justifying being pragmatic ... about things like ‘use-by-dates’ - unproductive human slaves were never allowed to slip into retirement but were extinguished as redundant property. It’s exactly the same with animal slaves.
‘Food animals’ are owned, they’re the property of someone. They’re objects. They’re not irreplaceable, sovereign, individual living beings. They’re slaves, and ‘put here’ for us ... to do with them as we please. They are the spoils of the species wars. They’re benefits accrueing to the dominant species ... thus we, the human masters, dictate the entire fate and current existence of ... the milking cow, for example.
She is artificially inseminated to produce calves, and often these calves serve their only real purpose ... in embryo. Humans learnt that handy piece of biology long ago.
Before they’re born the foetus’ presence in the womb triggers high lactation in the mother cow, thus releasing delicious quantities of highly profitable MILK. The cow is powerless to stop her calf being born (...and then disposed of) or in fact any other of her biological functions. What a ‘convenience store’ this has been for humans. And now she is made into a machine.
She lactates and gives birth all her life. Normally dying around 20 years of age, she’s ‘put down’ at about half that age as a dairy cow. She’s too exhausted by constant pregnancies and milking to live much longer and, more importantly, she’s no longer economically viable to the farmer. (She can’t earn her board and keep). She warrants no more life.
The human decision is that cold.
The cow bonanza is just one of many other farm-animal bonanzas, from which the owner benefits - not just from the sale of the animal’s carcass but from co-products like leather or various by-products (like milk and eggs) taken from her while alive. Animals make ideal slaves. They don’t complain and they don’t fight back. There’s no need to make friends with them, any more than there is for bosses with employees.
Humans have learnt how to ‘do’ separation. We do it so routinely with animals that our normal behaviour with one another or the normal standards of care we show to companions animals is thought not-to-be-necessary for ‘those other’ animals.

Shopping

Blog 123a

Humans are by nature kind people. Most of us would be completely incapable of deliberately making an animal suffer. But we’re duplicitous enough to let a proxy do what we can’t do - imprison them and kill them. In our minds we reconcile opposites, and with 99.9% general support we (the consumer) come out smelling like roses.
This is the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ syndrome. It’s ‘what our eyes don’t see our heart won’t grieve over’. We don’t make ethical decisions when shopping, so there’s no ‘heart or mind’ factor. We find food, we buy it, no contention. We see familiar packaging on the shelf, we reach for it (as we’ve done a thousand times before), drop it in the basket and take ownership of it at the check-out. Then it’s as good as eaten (since none of us have ever shelled out for some delicious food item and then not used it). And no worries when we do use it because we know there’s a never ending supply of more of it.
If we buy a battery egg or a leg from a lamb, we buy it because we want it. We have the support of our fellow humans when we refuse to concern our self about the way it was produced ... we buy it because it’s irresistible. No one is in favour of cruelty to animals but what shows up is a nasty fact of life - whenever animal welfare reforms are made, prices go up ... which is why they aren’t made ! Economics supersedes ethics. When we want something, we’ll buy it despite ethical reasons not to.
It’s interesting to note: bringing that thought out into the open is enough to stir a revolution.

Kinship

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Although adults have more life experience than children they nevertheless, in one particular way, don’t differ from kids ... since both adult and child have an innate sense of kinship. They enjoy each other’s company. They have a sense of guardianship for each other, the elder for the younger and (perhaps later in life) vice versa.
In the same way each child and adult has a strong sense of kinship with companion animals - the family dog is like one of the kids in the family. Humans seem to be naturally wanting to protect vulnerable ones from being hurt or exploited ... but turn that ‘protect-switch’ off when we are busy entertaining murderous thoughts. We like to think of ourselves as loving and yet we still want to be brutish ... so, isn’t that why we let ourselves be persuaded to feel differently, feel hard ... when needs be? When it comes to naked self-interest, when it’s about food, we go ‘not-protective’ ... when it comes to certain other animals ... in other places ... instead, a brutish sanctioning of murder takes place.
At that point we are not our own person ... in as much as we cave into the violence creed of society. Perhaps it’s embedded so deeply in our culture, cauterising the softness in ourselves. It feels almost natural. We accept that we’re incontrovertibly programmed and can’t unprogramme ourselves ... “it’s in the hardwiring” ... and all compassion-ey stuff is deliberately NOT to be thought about too much.
Even if people fancied the soft side of themselves, it’s too risky to go that way ... more often, we just can’t resist the validation that violence brings. We think “impossible. I just couldn’t overcome that” ... and that fits in nicely anyway, since most people don’t really want to drop that side of themselves. Why would they need to? To date, things are working out quite well or well enough. Why rock the boat? “Go vegan” ... “You’re surely having a lend of me?”
For just about every human living today, it’s vital to think “calm sea and prosperous voyage”, it’s a sort of compromised compact we sign in return for a quiet life. Of course this turns out to be a disastrously misguided compact ... but, by which time, it’s rather too late, too many habits are ingrained, etc., and rocking the boat seems suicidal. So we settle for the compromised version of life and say, “Yes”. It’s okay to exploit animals if you eat them”. And, “Yes, they may be killed but if I eat them and make fullest use of their bodies, that will exonerate me, somewhat”.
This proposition is weird, but it’s likely that most people privately subscribe to something similar (a sort of crypto-environmental angle ... on the okay-ed-ness of killing animals). It’s nonsense of course because it’s so obviously attempting to divert from the core thing here, our inner need to be softer, more compassionate, etc.
All this is a thousand times magnified when it comes to those people who live by the animal.
If you are an employee of the Animal Industry, if exploiting animals produces your dollars and wages, if you work in the field, it’s hardly likely you’ll have much of a ‘guardian instinct’ for the animals, you’re helping to kill. Being non-guardian, cauterising this side of ourselves ... it’s a must for farmers. But not that much different for consumers.
Little wonder then, that society does not discuss welfare-issues (concerning those animals used for food and clothing) let alone ‘rights’- issues. State-sponsored education never mentions having kinship with these sorts of animals, only a need for kindness and respect towards certain other animals ... wild or companion. Most education revolves around the need for humans to eat meat, milk and eggs, and it emphasises the serious danger to our health if we don’t. This is what vegans are up against.

Being superior

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Humans have always been advantage-takers and inferior-bashers, whether in the name of racism, speciesism, snobbery or cruelty. Advantage keeps us separated from others. We are hardwired in favour of separation and against equality. Little wonder animals are thought to be inferior - so much easier to exploit them.
If we want to understand this attitude, especially in regard to animals, just look at the way most of us treat new people who are different in a ‘less-so’ way - we practise separation on them. We want to avoid getting too close ... in case, in case ... we have to go in hard on them, later. We don’t admit to this, and in fact we might even appear benevolent towards strangers (to make them think we’re liberal-minded). We show compassion and make a show of it, but it’s like relating sweetly to the neighbour’s cat - it masks our contempt ... for them.
Here’s a suggested process - we half-heartedly get to know strangers; help them but not in an abundant way; so, they start to feel patronised and keep us at arm’s length; so, we feel rejected by them … which lets us complete the circle, where we feel justified in separating from them. We might say, “I guess they’re not worth getting to know” ... which lets us dislike them … which lets us think of them as not-equals ... which brings us to separation.
I lived in a town after the second world war to which Sikhs migrated, and English people in our town had no previous experience of living with other races. They thought they smelt (as of course they did, and we to them too, no doubt!). People would say, “... and they don’t even speak proper English”. To this day the two communities haven’t accepted each other.
In our cocoons of separation it’s more comfortable not to integrate. We’re so used to ‘practising separation’ on others, when it suits us, that we have no trouble doing the same thing with animals - we believe them to be ‘brutish’ and therefore less sensitive to pain ... so, we can exploit them and feel no pity for them.
Separation-beliefs are integral to ‘that’ attitude which is all about hierarchy. The ones on top mark some humans and absolutely all animals as inferiors, allowing different treatment from that lavished on ‘nearest and dearest’.

Violence-free fridges

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Every day I work in other people’s homes (I’m a handyman) and put my sandwiches in their fridge ... I have a squiz ( ... unlikely, unlikely) to see if I’ve stumbled on a vegan fridge ... in thirty years of fridge-peeping I’ve had no luck … how disappointing is that?
There they lie, the same old bits of dead flesh in nice white trays or there’s moulding cheese or a p.-c.-correct carton of free range eggs ...
My clients - usually lovely people, are far (this is where I start my judging) far from the forefront of social change.
‘Transformation of the Species’ is a book I’ve been HUGELY influenced by, Google it, read it. My first response to it was “What a chance we have!”
I’ve come to the conclusion that moving away from animal food is where a ‘transformation-of-the-species’ starts ... because it’s animal-food that symbolises humans’ most routine and widely practised habit - violence. Our uncaring attitude to where-our-food-comes-from represents the hard side of ourselves - it’s the violent side of human nature which obviously needs changing ... and of course animal foods symbolise the general acceptance of that side of ourselves.
The soft side of ourselves, drawn to harmlessness and non-violence, is familiar to all vegans - it makes our life very different to other people’s. Wee buy different things for a start and consequently our kitchens smell different and we have, what might be called, ‘violence-free’ fridges.
Vegans, by boycotting violence-foods, begin transforming the species ... which is why veganism, to me anyway, is where non-violence starts and where non-violence inspires people to become vegan.

Why vegans go out on a limb

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The group, shall I call it ‘Vegans Incorporated’, is my family, my ‘group’. It’s nice to belong - to be amongst people I can identify with. Even nicer to feel special. We all want to feel special. We like being special to our family, to our circle of friends. Most of all we’d like to be special to our whole town … and what we wouldn’t give to be famous in our own country? The bigger the group that 'knows us and respects us’ the more special we’ll feel. I could almost sell my soul for fame - ego dreaming of the great prize. The ‘on-top’ people then have to be squeaky clean, nothing in their past, etc, and if that’s all clear the it’s the Big-Life for them, enjoyment-wise ... but, on condition they stay loyal to an ugly Society. When the goals of our society seem wrong and we have to seriously move away from it, we can expect people’s deliberate misunderstanding of us. Naturally this ain’t pleasant. It’s the opposite of approval. It’s the kiss-of-death to social ambition and we end up feeling alienated. And that’s very similar to punishment. No one likes being excluded. No one wants to be a freak.
Yet vegans accept all this downside and stand against their almost-whole society to earn the chance to explain why.
Most don’t, or won’t. They stay doing what others do.
As a society we dress the same, talk the same, behave the same … that is, until we come to something we can’t accept, which we must speak out against, even if we’re going to be harshly judged for it. To us that very judgement is the worst thing we have to put up with from our society. It’s the unfairness of the judgement that makes many of us so angry, because some very sensible stuff is nakedly being ignored.
Animal Rights advocates often feel like victims. The danger of this is that we show it. And it looks martyry. And that translates as superior. And it’s that which is confronted. And when confronted we react, as if we’re a burglar caught in the act of a crime. We twitch at being ‘seen-through’. For a conceit at feeling superior to others. With our swag of sharp arguments we then become the victimiser, judging people who don’t agree with us.
The real reason behind Society’s harsh judgment is that we are following our principles, principles which are largely not-thought-about. It’s why omnivores are so antipathetic.
From our vegan point of view it seems like a no-win game we play with our adversaries: it starts off reasonably enough, then turns aggressive, and once true dialogue stops and the bun-fight starts we know it’s all gone pear-shaped. Maybe we even blow our whole relationship with a person, by getting too over the top with what we say. Showing our true aggro side. Unfortunately some of us do get aggressive in order to make ourselves be heard, to show how deeply we feel about Animal Rights issues … and then it’s a fine line between being assertive and being aggressive. To be outrageously noisy is one thing - making value judgements about people to their faces is usually counter productive.
Today, at a place I was working, the client said to me, “I see you’re a vegetarian” (he’d read the slogans on my bike, thought it said something about animal eating) and I hit back with “Yes, I don’t eat what you’re eating” (stew for lunch). I thought about it afterwards. That was a rude way of saying it a much better way ... if I’d given myself time to think. Of course it sounded rude to me as soon as it’d left my mouth, so I smoothed it over … but I was ashamed of myself ... he’s a really nice guy and very old too.
I was miffed because he’d been cooking beef for his lunch and I couldn’t stand the smell and had to go out for about an hour, that’s me polite, never saying a word about it ... it being his place after all and he innocently just making himself some lunch, as he does everyday.
I looked back on it, when I got home this evening. I got to thinking “me different to him” ... apart from his beef lunch and he being thirty years older than me, he was a nicer person than me. And that made me think!
As soon as there’s any disapproval in my mind, however convincing my argument, the message of it gets lost-in-delivery, in the sound our words make. When the message doesn’t actually get across we aren’t much help to the animals.
The anti-bonus here is that, after any bun-fight, we get a reputation for being a bit aggressive. That way we lose support all round. And the losing of friends isn’t the main aim here! It’s not to make war that we go out on a limb in the first place.

Plant-based diet

100:
This crude, human-advantaged world we live in now wasn’t what Mum and Dad expected for their family - surely the world had learnt its lesson ... about violence and war?
But it was never going to be that simple. The war on animals was continuing, and about to get worse. ‘That’ war, that bomb, that cage - I suppose each had to come into being so humans could see reason to find an alternative ... and the lesson couldn’t have been clearer - the war - a true performance of violence. The war and the bomb were supposed to revolt us so much that we’d find a better way to live together ... that means human to human but extending no further. The Insecure Human - the dread of hunger shared with the same dread all animals have. It’s always been feeding by violence and humans have taken that to diabolical levels. We’ve always got what we got by violence. We’ve never tried it another way.
We kill animals and eat them - the animals are always here with us to remind us ‘we gotta drop dat violence’.
Here are the animals. They’re here, they’re food. Humans still think it’s proper food! But instinctively we suspect it isn’t, and that somehow we might one day not have to ‘go there’ anymore. But this is the big one. This is something most people will say they’re “not ready for”!
And you can see why. Peoples’ attention is directed elsewhere, towards other matters, in fact ANY matter that will divert them from the collective bete-noire … the matter of animal slavery.
The whole world is currently focused on climate change. It’s made us sit up and take notice, but not much more. We still believe in serendipity and again, it seems, we talk a lot but don’t do much. And that’s not surprising since most buggers have actually GIVEN UP ... self-pityingly “lacking the motivation and energy” ... “Concerning this ‘way-out’ (by ‘Going Vegan’) - we just won’t get it together. Imagine the inconvenience! Our own lifestyles would be screwed up overnight, and as for our personal relationships. And then, what about our own habits-of-addiction? Arrgh! We: selfish: act for the greater good: ugh! ... and one more thing while we’re at it. One is especially reluctant to ‘make a start’ when one’s mates won’t. We’d rather say, “You first, me next”! So we wait.
In fact we wait for nice vegan food to come down in price so it’s cheap enough to consider buying. We wait. I could write a whole poem about waiting, but we must hurry on ...
We shouldn’t waste any energy on making judgements about people who are too stupid to go vegan. Be done with it. There’s no serious judgement here about the eating of animals, it’s just that we are experiencing (all the time) a ‘time glitch’ in the common psyche - it disappears as a Scotch mist rises from the river in the morning. So, deal, no more poems!! ... and getting back to the practical, the useful, the panacea.
One has to ask why we didn’t find a creative way to supply food without causing chaos and misery to so many sentient beings? You don’t have to be Einstein to spot reluctance ... in humans ... to drop the macho-dominator thing. Be strong: be right: be a man: be human - we still haven’t got over that one.
Vegans can do one thing better than omnivores, they can look at the faces of the animals. We can look them in the eye. If you take up a plant-based diet the experience is so fuckin lovely that you almost scream at the lost time spent dithering. It’s easy (I don’t believe that for a start!), it’s straight forward and ... admittedly something that gets more important as you grow older ... this damned vegan stuff fixes up most health problems ... but that’s quite incidental.