Have a bright, empathetic New Year

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Watching cruelty being done to farm animals, as painful as the video footage is, we need to keep looking at it. The mind wants to run away, to see it as a story rather than a documentary. The video keeps things real and down to earth. For the advocate, these scenes stop us running away from the fight or abandoning the future; until this practice of abusing animals stops there’s little hope that humans will ever be able to move on.

Apart from food, beyond vegan living, it’s a rebellion against arrogance, against the single thought of us being dominant over every other being on Earth. Few of us would want to let go of our dominant status, but it’s this disproportionate advantage that eventually weakens us (both as ‘dominants’ amongst other sentient animals and within that human sub-group, as members of the rich Western world). The danger of being addicted to our advantages should push us over the edge, towards personal attitude change. Animal Rights certainly did that for me. I was impressed by the way the Movement implied the need to feel for the most abused, the farm animals, and to regard them as we would siblings. It’s an egalitarian road we’re on, feeling for other people as our equals and not regarding animals as our inferiors.

            The only way I’ve found, to release my own worry about all this, is to be grateful for the things I have. My gratitude is the basis of my regard for the disadvantaged. I want to regard living beings, especially if they’re enslaved or exploited, as something worth fighting for, for the sake of social justice.

By focusing on what can be done, it makes me less pessimistic, about the destiny of this planet and about the fate of exploited animals. It’s the scale of the problem with animals that gets to me though, for three reasons: there are so many billions of them in gulags all over the world, their plight is deliberately hidden by the authorities, and there are seven billion humans committing slow suicide by eating them. Even if it were only about human health it would be a tragedy, since we are literally dying of unnecessary illnesses, but on top of this we are probably dying of the shame of stealing what rightly belongs to the animals. Omnivores are involved with a lot of ugly stuff in the course of their day, so why wouldn’t their vegan friends want to brighten up their lives? A resolution to go vegan would certainly brighten up the new year for them.