The shackled omnivore

660:

It’s hard to shift normal behaviour today, especially when vegans are dealing with ‘majority views’.

If a person meets a judgemental vegan, they’ll want to avoid them in the future, the way they’d want to avoid a drunk. For that reason alone vegans may decide not to attempt to influence their omnivore friends. But that doesn’t mean we have to be on our best behaviour. We’re free to rattle their cages. It’s no threat to them when they see that we’re freer of the ‘nonsense reality’ they seem trapped by. Even though our friends may be hooked on their animal foods, I suspect we can still be seen as their possible future ‘escape committee’.

Ours is a prison-world, unless we’re determined for it not to be – both animals and humans are enslaved, they by us and we by ourselves. Humans may not be shackled in the same way that animals are, but most of us are restricted none the less by lifestyle, habit and addiction. But it’s true that many humans have broken away not so much because they have greater will power but because of something far softer, namely a determined altruistic compassion. And it’s because of this that we can walk out of our prisons.

By developing empathy, we humans do suffer unnecessarily and mostly by our own hands because we don’t see the pain of our own lives as being far less than our friends, the sentient non-humans.