The central dilemma

495: We are taught to believe that being omnivore is the only safe way humans can live, and not enough prominent people have contradicted this ‘common perception’. Eating animals is still normal. The 250 executions, per year, per person isn’t a well known fact (its being little-known is significant in itself) but even if it was, would it touch people enough to change them? Maybe not, because Society’s ‘universal acceptance’ says that animals fall into a special category. People are not necessarily contemptuous of animals as such, because we know most of us do love animals, but there’s a cut off point about certain specific animals. (As there used to be over racial inferiority). That ‘cut-off’ point is central to omnivore-thinking and it’s useful in tricking the mind, to make speciesism acceptable. This is surely how we can all stay within the safe confines of normality, eat the food we enjoy and not have nightmares about it. To be normal one must be willing to consume animals, in fact to partake of just about any food on the menu. If we can eat (the same foods) together we feel together. Happily, it is also a gratifying part of living the good-life, with good-tasting food being very much part of that lifestyle. Animal-based foods are everywhere, in restaurants, home-cooked dinners, street snacks, packed lunches, hearty breakfasts, feasts and celebrations. And normality extends beyond food, with cashmere sweaters, silk shirts, woollen blankets and many other animal fabrics, not the least of which is leather. It all comes to us by way of an astronomical loss of life of innocent creatures. Animal products are our biggest ‘turn-on’ - it’s the stuff we love and can’t do without. It doesn’t enter our heads to think of the pain, fear, cruelty and death without which these items could never reach us. The experience of animal-based food and clothing is a little like anything else we experience which is illicit - stolen fruit always tastes sweetest. We might be attracted to it (and the Devil take the hindmost) or we might be repulsed by it and the seduction of it. We might be reluctant to change our diets or we may be convinced that we can’t change. It may be that we have no interest in this whole issue but it’s clear that animal products have always had an indisputably powerful effect on humans. We are used to using animals to get every benefit possible. It might seem virtually impossible to bring our impulses under control when it comes to the use of animals - it would have to be something very powerful to draw us away from the so called ‘good things of life’ and persuade us away from conforming to this sort of ‘normality’. My question here is about whether what vegans are saying could ever act as a powerful enough counterweight to all this habit, taste, conforming and lack of interest in animal welfare. Could there ever be anything which would swing people over, enough to liberate all animals entirely? What I’m attempting here is simply an exploration of this one question, and whether it’s a jolt that’s strong enough to build a stand against the locking up of animals or an inspiration enough to step beyond ‘Welfare’ and take us on into the establishing of ‘Rights’, I don’t know. But I do know there’s a dilemma facing most thinking people - that animals are sweet to love but also sweet to eat. Most people have trouble working that one out.