Sequences – when deciding to go vegan

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Let’s say I consider the possibility of going vegan. My first question is probably going to be why? Why go to all this trouble? Why open this Pandora’s Box? Wouldn’t it better to deliberately NOT consider issues concerning domesticated animals? To leave it on the back-burner?

            We might reason, amongst all the other important and urgent issues facing humanity, that there’s no room for ‘animal issues’. So, we take this one off our ‘to-do’ list. But maybe we know it’s too important for that and start to consider moving towards a vegan lifestyle.

Here’s what I think happens - a plant-based eating regime suddenly lights up all the lifestyle changes that are involved, it lays before us a whole sequence of events which will take place; once started there’s no going back. Then comes the warning, “Don’t retreat at the first hiccup, push through, don’t give up”. Then we’re moving at speed, the idea takes on its own momentum, becoming like a wave we decide to ride. Then, once aloft, we realise if we jump off we must do it quickly, before it picks up speed. After that it will be harder to get back on again, the next time we are moved to try.

Going vegan is not a frivolous day trip activity, we realise that we’re taking on a life-long project, and that we must eventually be relaxed with it. As with the development of speed travel, with aeroplanes for example, veganism starts in one place and moves quickly; it changes us so quickly, showing us what, before, might have been unrecognisable. A tiny biplane using propellers turns into a vast metal construction of speed. If the aim was simply to fly we’d have stayed with all the romance of biplanes, but if we want speed-travel we go with the jet plane. Vegan consciousness is really just a sped-up version of the old lumbering omnivore lifestyle.

Omnivores have given away their greatest asset, independent thinking. They deny logic, and have left themselves with nothing to fend off what vegans are saying, namely that humans have become monsters. The average human is in denial of the fact that terrible things are being done in their name and they are sponsoring these terrible things. Imprisoning sentient animals in cages and pens to extract food from them is just about the most cold calculated and cruel thing anyone can imagine. And yet we’ve done it and we, the consumer, support it. And that is surely enough to earn human the title of monster.

The reason we become vegan is to overcome the omnivore’s denials. We know we’ve got to do whatever needs to be done to get their attention and keep it focused on what we are saying, however uncomfortable it may be for us to say what we have to say or however uncomfortable for them to listen. We’ve got to get them talking, get them to trust us, get them to see our ‘genuine’ natures. We have to keep in mind why we became vegan in the first place, to free the creatures from prison. That reason has to be, for us, more important than any other consideration, and of course there are plenty more reasons to become vegan.