Empathy bonding

603b

As we take up any conscience-driven, empathetic, cause-based way of thinking, so we can see more closely what something like vegan principle represents. It isn’t just about vegan food or just about animals on farms, it’s closely connected with other issues too; each cause calls for empathy, something uniquely needed and being strongly generated now.

Empathy is at the heart of vegan philosophy. Our vegan game plan, blue print or set of precepts, is empathy-guided. It’s out of this empathy-philosophy that the vegan-diet emerged, throwing up at first almost insurmountable problems. To be vegan is impossible, or so they once thought. The broad perception of ‘vegan’ was, and largely still is, that it is too demanding. Which then makes the advocate’s job, to address the practical problems of implementing a vegan lifestyle, all the more important to get right.

            But early days yet. Vegan consciousness has barely been born. We have a huge task ahead of us, to radically affect the thinking of whole populations, who’ve eaten and beaten animals for a million years. But then maybe that’s not what we are about, in being so specific. Perhaps our greatest contribution will be in influencing the growth of empathy.

Empathy has either been forgotten or become anthropocentric. To counter that (and to atone for it) we have to elevate animals to sovereign, irreplaceable status, just as we would a fellow human.

I’d consider it a main aim, to help refresh empathy; it slips away otherwise. (And one way is to regularly watch that video footage of what is happening ‘out there’ to animals). But empathy is its own reward. Strangely, the more attention I give my empathetic feelings the more it helps drive hard work. Perhaps you could call it the greatest energiser for the work of liberating animals. When you feel close to these beings it’s as if they’re no different than brothers and sisters.