Rocky road

621:

Convincing people of the link between food and the slavery of animals should be dead simple. But it isn’t. We are seen as the ‘spoilers’, for trying to do just that. But so what? We know it might seem that way when we open our mouths, trying to alter attitudes. But we know our intentions are good - the very opposite of spoiling people’s eating pleasures. It just doesn’t seem that way to the onlooker.

            Attitude colours everything we think about. Pleasure pushes its way to the front so, for omnivores, eating comes before thinking; their insistence on pleasure delays personal ethical development. Vegans can only clear the path and wait. Our insisting that a lot of what’s eaten is ethically wrong is simply removing heavy rocks from a path to make travelling on it smoother, and the bigger the rock the more useful vegans are for trying to remove it.

            Learning how to lift these attitudinal rocks is what vegans do; we pick up rocks wherever we find them and ultimately that’s the best training we can get, for communicating this awkward subject.