Selling your soul for a steak

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I worry for about the deaths of certain beautiful sentient beings, and worry even more about the traumas we inflict on them whilst they’re alive. The injustice of it all! They have absolutely no say in their own destiny, in fact they have no actual life at all.

            What we do to them, what each consumer encourages being done to them, is a worry. All I ever see are these rows and rows of sentient beings, on farms, waiting to die; for them it’s a living death.

            For these imprisoned animals, life is one perpetual suffering ending in a grisly execution. There could be no worse fate devised for any being than the one daily imposed upon billions of animals. Notably, their treatment and execution has been coldly devised by humans, and most humans can’t yet see this as being so. If you were in their position, if you were a farm animal, you’d be suffering all sorts of physical pain but mentally you’d be experiencing utter hopelessness. You’d have been made impotent, unable to take any meaningful part in the present world or in the building of a better future. As a slave, whether you are human or animal, you live in limbo-land, with none of the characteristics we associate with ‘life’, apart from the physical functioning of your own body. It’s as if the soul has its hands tied.

Now, it’s strongly suggested to children, and repeated endlessly to adults, that all this thing about animals is okay, since animals don’t have souls. But if humans do have souls then we have sold them out.

The problem has always been the same for humans - we are led into dodgy behaviour early in our life and then find it difficult to escape these behavioural habits. As young adults, we follow what others do and forgo our own instincts. While young, by swallowing the food others prepare for us, we continue to eat in the same way when we reach adulthood, and thus perpetuate the mindless violence of our species.

Until we become aware of all this, how can there ever be any change to the collective consciousness? We think we are superior beings, however to animals we must appear to be dunderheads who can’t even forage for our own food, as every other animal can do. We only have a certain type of strength and we use it to dominate and steal; we cannibalize others to provide energy for our own lives. Many humans are intelligent and sensitive but haven’t yet been able to see the nastiness of this particular habit or see through this confidence trick their society is playing on them.

            You might have thought the con was obvious, that no one, when reaching adulthood, would continue to ‘swallow first and think after’. You’d think, in this well-informed age, that we’d all mistrust the authorities enough to be re-examining those ‘core truths’ we’ve been taught, to see if they stood up to scrutiny. But it doesn’t happen. Perhaps it’s never occurred to most people to question such big things, let alone ‘go vegan’; they haven’t even begun to realise what would happen if they dissociated from social norms and changed their whole way of life accordingly. To them, a voluntary, radical change in lifestyle, ‘going vegan’, would probably equate to serving a life sentence in prison.