Fashion and benefit

735:

All our best arguments for bringing about a non-violent society might be attractive to someone who has taken the food plunge and got rid of the crap and is happy to be without it, but is it enough to convince others? We are a complaisant society that is self-indulgent; most people think they can ignore the value of vegan principle even though it represents the ultimately intelligent and compassionate path.

            It might seem laughable that our as-yet-small number could persuade people to so radically change their ways of eating (even if it’s only food that changes). Our task might seem almost impossible ... almost but not quite. Over the past seventy years many people have changed in this way, and in some parts of the world up to 1% of the population has become vegan. Recently, the increased percentage has been rapid, mainly amongst the younger twenties generation. So, if you happen to believe in miracles ...!

            If we are to pull this one off it’s going to have to be the biggest miracle ever. And if it happens it will probably be by way of a trend in fashionability, embodying a mixture of reasons for change; for health reasons; for the planet, for animals, for spiritual reasons, each benefit appealing to some more than others.

            The social kudos in being vegan can’t be underestimated. One might have all the highest principles in the world and be as politically correct as possible, but in the end most we are our own greatest judges. Most of us lay great store on being able to say something about ourselves for which we are proud, which makes us seem less superficial. To be able to say that you are vegan, without even mentioning the reason for it, denotes someone with self-discipline, and that’s something most people could envy, in much the same way that any other avoidance of something harmful might be envied. becoming a vegan is rather like adopting a whole other dimension to one’s life. By taking on this almighty challenge, by disregarding the temptation-power of so many foods and commodities, we stand that much taller. To stand up for something bigger than ourselves, to not be manipulated by the vested interests of the food and clothing manufacturers, to disassociate from the misery inflicted on animals, that a freedom most people might like to have. Apart from anything else, the not-buying of expensive meat and dairy foods, woollens and leather products, makes for a great saving in the budget. Just on daily reckonings I would guess that vegans could be financially far better off than omnivores.

A rather long blog which should be much shorter!!

734:

To inconvenience oneself by becoming vegan, for the sake of farm animals, will seem unnecessary to most people. They won’t think through the logic of the issues. They’ll come to the conclusion that we are attention-seekers. Our biggest challenge is to say what we have to say despite rejection, disagreement and even ridicule. And to remain vegan without the need for others’ approval or encouragement. I know ex-activists who have given up in frustration at the public’s ethical weakness over animal issues; they haven’t been able to accept that this radical change of attitude, affecting so much of normal lifestyle, might be very slow to catch on. It is, after all, a major shift of emphasis from human-centred concern to concern for the non-human. But that is why there is such a need for activists to stay active, to hang in there for the duration. Omnivorousness is SUCH an ingrained habit.

            It seems that animal issues, because they are so closely connected with our daily food, are shunted off into the too-hard department. In a conspiracy of silence the issues are rarely talked about, either in the media or at home around the dinner table. Maybe people make a small gesture, mainly for health reasons, of reducing their red meat intake. Maybe others give up meat altogether (for ethical and health reasons). But in general, stopping all compliance with animal farming and boycotting all animal produce is not on the cards, because the using-of-animals so very well suits human convenience.

            If we boycott animal products there is obviously going to be a dramatic change to our daily life. However, if we don’t, then we are condoning the abattoir and all that it stands for. If demand for animal products dropped, abattoirs would have to shut down: if abattoirs shut down, animal farming would stop, and animal products wouldn’t be available. That spells such a dramatic change in the way humans operate that it isn’t going to happen overnight. If there is no obvious threat to human survival such a change isn’t likely to happen. And if change doesn’t seem likely then an activist vegan might lose heart. But if we are NOT dependant upon the likelihood of change in order to remain vegan, then we are vegan simply because it is right. By leaving the normal style of life behind us, we choose to lead a life of non-violence, even though we know we might never see the sort of substantial change take place that we’d like to see.

            The abattoir symbolises compliance-with-the-norm. This side of normality, the shameful and violent side, is are rarely spoken about. The abattoir itself is located well out of town – most people wouldn’t know where the nearest one was. Nor would they know what went on there apart from the fact that in these places animals are slaughtered.

            From the Animal Industry’s point of view, the secrecy surrounding the treatment and execution of animals is essential. They are made up of the people who farm animals, kill them and produce things out of them. Their essential income is generated from animals. Their interest is in maintaining the market and their own income. We, the customer, cooperate. We play along since we want to maintain the ready availability of all the items we love to eat, wear and use, and to be able to buy them at the lowest possible cost.

            Vegans, however, are on the side of the animals, and since animals can’t defend themselves, we become their advocates and protectors against the juggernaut of abusers and customers. We hope to succeed in winning animals their ‘rights’ and maybe along the way realise that they seem very far off being won. But our efforts are not futile. I repeat, we do it because it’s right, but also there’s something substantial in it for us; we start out with high hopes and brave intentions and then comes disappointments, but something else unexpected happens along the way, and it helps our resolve. We realise what omnivores can’t possibly know, that our food is clean, our health is on the ‘up’, and what we do is beautifully revolutionary. The big surprise is to find that our own tastes are not as fixed as we thought, and therefore our cravings aren’t as powerful as we might have thought.

            In my own case, I thought I was addicted to all the yummy, creamy, rich, salty, meaty items I’d been indulging in all my life, whereas when I made the break, I gritted my teeth only to find a whole new and satisfying food experience.

            It’s like when you stop smoking tobacco or stop taking sugar in your coffee, the taste buds quickly readjust. And when they’re cleaned up it’s like ‘they’ are grateful. They tingle at the clean-out and the chance to open up new sensory sensations. I hope I’m not over-selling this.

            The biggest surprise for me was that I no longer craved crap. If any vegan had told me this would happen I wouldn’t have believed them, so if you aren’t yet a vegan I can’t blame you if you don’t believe me now. And yet it’s really the crucial stepping stone. Once you get this (about vegan food) you never want to go back to the old ways. I can only speak personally, but it was a huge surprise to me, how readily my body readjusted to an entirely different food palette. I was grateful on a number of levels; after being vegan for some while I found my energy levels were far higher, I was less sluggish after meals and my general health was noticeably improving AND, even with my small brain capacity, I was noticing how much more alert and mentally sharper I’d become. (Yes, I know I’m going on a bit here).

            I wouldn’t like to put up too much of a convincing argument for the diet itself and all the physical benefits of eating vegan, since others far better qualified than me have done that well enough already. My promotion base is about the self-esteem lift you’ll get when you stop doing what nearly everyone else is doing. It repairs the ‘spiritual’ damage done by years of using animals, and the condoning of their enslavement and killing. 

            My main point here is that if survival isn’t dependent on animal-foods (or animal anything-else) then we all must question it. If anyone could prove that I do in fact need animals to survive, my whole vegan argument would collapse, since it would be suicidal to ignore those needs. However, since no one has put up a serious argument along those lines (ever since the first vegans appeared seventy years ago) I continue to assume plant-based foods are efficacious and safe. (I do take regular vitamin B12 supplements to be on the safe side, as advised by vegan doctors).

            Based upon this safety-health assumption, I feel justified in adopting a vegan diet and adopting the non-violence principles of veganism. This then allows me to assume the role of animal advocate with a clear conscience.

            This is no selfless pursuit. It benefits me greatly to be vegan and to have this endlessly fascinating subject to occupy my thoughts and energies. It’s such an interesting subject and such a worthwhile project.

Laying it on the line

733: 

People don’t usually like hearing stories of cruelty and waste in relation to animals. They feel guilty about what they’re eating and wearing, but the problem is that they can’t imagine a world without animal farms and animal foods and animal-based clothing. They can’t accept life without meat or, if they’re vegetarians, without eggs, cheese, milk and products using animal ingredients. Most people think a plant-based diet would be boring and unhealthy. But today people are better informed on both counts.

            Back in the 1970s there was far less information, and so I was sceptical on both counts. But what made me most determined to try living as a vegan were stories I heard about what they did to the animals, for their meat and milk and eggs. I vaguely knew it wasn’t nice but didn’t want to know too much, in case I persuaded myself to act. I liked all the delicious foods and yet disliked them because of their animal content. And this is the dilemma for most people today, unable to face a life without prawns, steak, ham, eggs, ice cream, milk chocolate, melted cheese (on pizzas), fruit yoghurt and cakes with layers of cream.

            Every time I go to a dinner party or a celebration like a wedding, there are always attractive items to eat, made with lots of animal ingredient. To pass it up seems masochistic. And clothing, shoes, woollen jumpers, gloves, blankets and coats, all seem fashionable, and yet they too have to be ruled out if made from animals.

            Okay, you get the picture – there is a lot here to ‘do-without’. It’s a huge challenge to impose on yourself. If you decide to deny yourself these eating pleasures and wardrobe items, you will effectively be stepping aside from normality and from the lifestyle of your friends and family.

            Then, you might need to show this alternative lifestyle as attractive, by making plant-based foods seem interesting and canvas shoes, cotton, linen and synthetic fabrics look cool. You  might need to explain why such radical changes should be made in order to ‘save animals’. And at this point some will fail to understand, since they feel no particular empathy for pigs and chickens. But for those who do empathise, for this reason alone they must change, radically.

The consumer: no-touch-animal

732: 

We live in a country, indeed on a planet, where almost every human is using and therefore condoning the abuse of animals. The vast majority of these animals are imprisoned on farms and are denied any semblance of natural life. They live in squalor and die in terror. Until the consumer stops buying meat and eggs and dairy products and all the foods and commodities which make use of animals’ bodies, the cruelty will continue. It’s up to the individual consumer to stop consuming, only then will products be free of cruelty.

            The vegan animal activist, in order to live according to their own principles, has to adopt a philosophy of not-touching-animals. I mean by that, not using them, not condoning the imprisonment or killing of them, and of course not eating them.

Almost everybody is involved in the exploitation of animals. Those who aren’t, ‘vegans’, have made an agreement with themselves to keep their food and clothing plant-based and animal-free. In this way we show how life is possible without using animals for anything.

How to stop hurting animals

731: 

You can ask any three year old kid why we are hurting animals and, even if they don’t know the answer they’ll understand the question. It isn’t complicated. It’s just a sad indictment on those of us who are still caught up in the whole sorry mess of violence-towards-animals. It’s an adult-ego thing, I think. Most people try to prop up the popular food regime system, or they try to justify what they do. The average adult still argues that we DO need animal food for our health, even though they probably know the argument is dead, even when they know that the evidence is to the contrary. They might realise the benefits of plant-based diets, and they that they are quite safe, healthy and maximise energy, but still be reluctant to change.

            There’s been an information revolution over these past two decades. There’s an abundance of nutritional details available on the Internet. There’s advice about preparing vegan food, learning what to buy, and how to make vegan food taste good, and where the vitamins and minerals are to be found. It’s all there at the click of a mouse. Where we used to spend hours searching for information from books in the library, it now takes no time at all, simply by following the links we are interested in.

            There is no excuse for not knowing. It’s now just a matter of being prepared to learn and make changes to personal eating habits. If we aren’t prepared to change then it augers poorly for us. We can’t plan for the future for ourselves, because we can’t adapt to the changing world nor therefore see any hope for the world. And so the whole sorry mess of our situation continues, and animal farming (and our part in it as consumers) mirrors the resistance within our own heads and hearts.

The reluctance to change is based on the fear finding out what we already know, namely, how to stop hurting animals and how to save ourselves from our own complicity.

Telling it as you see it

730: 

How do I, as a vegan, see things?  I see the violence in the ugly foods people eat, because of the things done to animals, and I find it’s hard to eat with people while they eat animals. I even feel awkward mixing with them socially, because of their insensitivity. It’s no wonder I seem to be a social pariah. But there’s an up-side for me.

If this is the lonely reality for me, you  might think it sad, but at least it builds up my will power. I need that, for those times when I say “no” instead of  “yes”. It’s easier to fit in, to do what others do, to indulge in the evident food pleasures on offer. But once the line is drawn there’s no going back, and I’ve often been surprised to find that, when I stick to my principles I find it’s not as hard as I thought it would be.

            For me, as for other vegans, it’s important to build a resistance to the popular culture. If I can’t do it then how can I expect others to do it?

The most important driver for me is that I must want to make the attempt to counter the culture. And be convinced that by following a vegan lifestyle it will be liberating, and will bring me happiness. If I’m gritting my teeth and only ‘doing it for the animals’ it will never work. If I don’t think it will make me happy then I won’t be able to persuade others of anything. Why would you take any notice of me if you didn’t think I believed that veganism made me happy?

In truth, there’s always a struggle. It isn’t a breeze. To stand up against such an entrenched culture isn’t in itself  meant to make me happy. Because it’s not an easy game to play, I must also say to myself that I do not necessarily have the right to be in a constant state of happiness while so many animals are suffering. Why should I expect to enjoy my freedoms when so many creatures languish in cages? This is at the heart of social justice.

Becoming a vegan isn’t just about me. It’s not about my feeling good about myself, it’s just as much about developing empathy whilst being part of a world of indifference. And if I ever  resent missing out on all the goodies on offer I must be able to balance that in terms of my sadness for what my own species is doing to other species, knowing that nothing can change for the animals until something changes in humans.

            Instead of our becoming more compassionate as the human advances, we become less so; animal suffering gets worse; the planet dies another death every time we miss our chance to revive it, every time we procrastinate. And we must wonder why people are so blind to the crime of exploiting animals, and why we can’t see animal slavery for what it is.

            Vegans don’t want to offend people unnecessarily. As individuals we don’t set out to lose all our friends. But, whatever the cost to us personally, we can’t condone the zombification of the human species. We can’t stand by and passively watch the drone mentality take a hold.

I don’t want to whinge. That will get me nowhere. My attention should be on how to talk effectively, how to talk from the heart and how to talk so that even kids can understand. I want to talk to fellow adults so they don’t become embarrassed but do grow in their understanding. All I want to get across is that whenever we buy anything from animal sources we attack them. And if this can be understood then it’s upto the animal advocate to find a way to appeal to people’s hearts. It’s really not so much about healthy eating or saving the planet but about the human ability to rise above the ubiquitous habit of animal-eating. Once the habit is broken then there will be no stopping the advance of the human. 

How vegans/veganism are perceived

729: 

There are two things vegans are saying, firstly about  the criminal attack on animals and secondly  about the opportunity afforded by vegan consciousness. And the bonus too is that by avoiding all animal-based foods we prevent ourselves from buying crap food.

            All good, for us, if it were only a private matter of conscience and personal diet, but some of us feel duty bound to speak about it, so that anyone unaware of all this will be able to get to know about it.

In our modern day culture enough is known for there to be avoidance of the subject; when we inform people we get back silence. It’s obvious that most people don’t want to hear. And as vegans, we don’t have the power nor the right to change their minds. If we attempt to change people’s fixed attitudes we’ll immediately seem too ‘good’, too superior. If we stay silent we seem too stand-offish. Certainly vegans are open to criticism for rejecting the traditions of our culture, and crazy for ignoring the fine cuisines of the culture. At the very least it seems like self-denial to restrict ourselves to a plant-based diet.       

The usual reaction, when someone finds out I’m vegan, is that it’s “NOT for me!!”. They say. “I’d go mad denying myself all these foods, let alone the animal-based clothing”. They’ll conclude that we are “just trying to be different”. More generously they might say, so as not to hurt my feelings, “I admire vegans for what they stand for” and “I wish I could do it myself”. But what they’d really be thinking is, “Ugh! No way! Never! Not for me!”.

Vegans: Toughening up and softening up

728:

In these ‘early days’, of the growth of animal-rights consciousness, vegans need to become hard working, and to adhere to their plant-based food regime whilst helping to build a new product market. We need strength of character. We need to be committed and press for change in others.

            But pressure! It can work both ways. When people want to know what we’re on about, we can tell them, but not by using any unsolicited pressure. If we tell others to give up animal-eating, there’s usually a negative reaction.

“You want us to be like you? It’s a free world. I can eat what I like and no one’s going to stop me”.

The main question facing vegans is how we talk about animal issues without seeming like nut-case evangelists. We need to solve this question, of how to ‘talk-animals’ to people who initially don’t want to know. And we need to learn how to interest the media, who also don’t want to know.

To a vegan, this subject is so ‘on our minds’ all the time that it’s difficult to resist the temptation of ‘talking vegan’ to non-vegan friends, in the hope of converting them, but generally people won’t be pushed into anything quicker than feels comfortable. Pressure! It does do damage to how people relate to us, and it’s worth keeping our friends because they are our most precious resource; so by being pushy with them it’s likely we could already be on the road to becoming an ex-friend.

            Friends keep us going when we are down so it seems a good idea to show our friends and indeed everyone we speak to that we will love them at all costs. My advice would be to answer questions, but resist the temptation to try to convert. Unless they ask, say little. Reserve the oration for those times we might be invited to speak in public. And of course, there’s always the people’s forum, the Internet!

Choices

727: 

Humans have two choices; either we ignore the plight of domesticated animals or we act to liberate them. It’s the one big choice still left to us, and it’s the only choice an individual can make that can break the cycle of violence within our collective nature. Each of us can choose one way or the other. If we do choose to work to liberate animals, then it follows that everything else may fall into place.

Every mistake has the potential of repair, and in this case one thing can so easily lead to another. On an individual level, the use of plant food can lead to health. This can lead to a more ethically healthy conscience, which in turn can lead to environmental sensibility, and inevitably to a solution to world hunger problems. But if we choose NOT to go along that path, then nothing can substantially ever change. Things will only continue to get worse, and we more shackled than ever.

            Freeing ourselves starts at home, making personal choices, and disregarding Society’s indifference. It’s a grass roots approach to social change and it has to start this way because no government will ever take the initiative and close down the abattoirs without the electorate’s consent. All the time abattoirs are open the commercial interests will flourish and animal issues will be sidelined.

Public attitude to farmed animals can only change when people are inspired by vegan principle, and not put off by it; fashion changes when there are enough suitably-minded people who are trying to make their principles work for them.

Vegans therefore need a face-lift. We need to become attractive. Our food, clothing, ideas about non-violence, all this must come across as the most intelligent and self-benefitting choice one could ever make for oneself.

Attitude

726: 

It’s deep set within the human attitude towards animals that allows billions of beautiful, innocent, non-humans to be ruthlessly seized (bred), imprisoned, have things sucked out of their bodies and then cruelly killed. It’s the unremarkableness of this attitude which is such a worry. We routinely exploit and think nothing of it.

Our attitude contains no sympathy for the animals that are enslaved and even more tragically, we fail to see this attitude as dangerous for us. We kill without care, and this type of killing is the very opposite of mercy killing; it’s cold and hard and cruel.

            This is mainly why vegans call for such a radical change to our eating habits.

Collective attitudes are like customs, are so subconsciously embedded in our psyches that they seem rock solid. We dealing here with food, with habits from childhood, with habits practiced since time out of mind. And we’re dealing with determined human beings, intent on eating meat and enjoying the textures and flavours they have loved since childhood. And then there are others whose livelihoods are entirely dependent upon animals; they make their money from producing animal products.

A whole world culture has this one thing in common – the using of animals for human benefit.

It is no wonder therefore that almost no one is listening to us yet. Not the producers, not the consumers and not the educators of children. Vegan animal rights advocates have a lone voice. But we’re saying what we have to say, nonetheless.

Gutsy Talk

725:

To stand up for animals you have to be vegan, and to be vegan you have to have guts. No need for any tickets on yourself. No need to start boasting about it. You just need a strong will. Being vegan is not for the faint hearted. It isn’t a breeze. Apart from no longer indulging in the huge array of delicious animal-based food products, you’ll find even your best friends will pretend they can’t understand your reasons for abstaining from animal-based foods.

            So, why do we go this far? Perhaps because it’s the starting point to all the changes humans need to make if they really want to move on from the violence-based natures that we’ve inherited.

The humans have done horrible things to each other and even worse things to the animals, and in the process nearly wrecked many of the delicately balanced systems of the planet. Those who are making the strongest and most significant stand against this deeply ingrained violence are vegans. We have such a simple solution, and yet because the starting point involves abstaining from animal-based foods, most people refuse to see the connection, and so have to dismiss us. By rejecting the rationale for our diet and the ethics behind it, they miss the solution. And the problem of human violence is allowed to continue.

 The reason we make such a fuss about animal slavery is because it’s as ugly as any slavery gets. It reflects the nastiest side of human nature, the ability we have to turn a blind eye towards something so clearly visible and acknowledgeable.

For this alone we should all be ashamed. It is, after all, the clue to solving global problems related to the destructive behaviour of our species; the clue lies in the way we’ve chosen to treat the ‘sub-species’.

Letting her speak for herself

724: 

It’s worth knowing the story of the caged hen. Perhaps I should let her speak for herself:

“What exactly is it you don’t like about hens? Keeping us pressed behind metal bars like this. It hurts. There’s no room to move and the ammonia rising from our excrement makes it hard to breathe. There’s no fresh air in the shed we’re kept in. There are thousands of us crammed into tiny cages. We lay an egg nearly every day of the year for about one and a half years, then we’re taken to the processing plant. 

“You saw on TV the other day a story about egg-laying. You used the word “disgusting” when you saw those batteries of cages in the shed. Nasty sight eh? One shot showed a hens claws grown around the wire-mesh floor so she couldn’t even lift it. Another shot showed a dead hen in the cage being used as something soft for other hens to lie on, and lay on.

Maybe it caught you by surprise. Sitting there in front of your TVs. There was a lot of shaking of heads in disbelief, and some drawn-in breaths, and a few despairing hand gestures. But there wasn’t much more happening. You didn’t say “No more eggs for me”.

So much for all that disgust and shaking of heads. What did it mean? Probably not very much at all.

I suppose you’d sometimes like to boast, “I’m a Vegetarian – I abhor all killing?”. Well, let me tell you, vegetarianism isn’t just about not eating meat. Eggs are all about killing too, and worse. When we hens don’t lay enough eggs, they throw us into crates and take us off to the killing factory, which doesn’t sound too bad when it’s called a ‘processing plant’. Then they hang us upside down by our thin spindly legs and send us on a conveyor into a prickly trough of high voltage water that stiffens every nerve in our body, so they can  position our necks for the final cut, a set of sharp revolving blades. And that’s the end.

“Can you believe this happens? No? Well, let me tell you, it’s been this way for a long time, the egg business has pioneered the ultimate cruelty, from caged hell to the terror of the killing machines. And YOU don’t care, because here you are, all seated around the breakfast table, tucking in to your breakfast eggs, with no thought for us poor birds.

“We suffer unimaginably, from birth to death. We girls almost envy our brothers who were thrown, live, into the grinding machine, on Day One. At least their agony wasn’t prolonged. They never had to experience the terrible suffering we went through for the twenty or so months of our lives”.

An egg for breakfast

723:

There’s a belief that eggs produced by free-ranging hens come from happy hens. For sure, they’re probably happier than their sisters in cages, but when they become no longer economically viable they go to the same cruel deaths as their caged sisters.

A vegetarian friend of mine, who still eats eggs, reckons she pays three times the price for her free range eggs. And because these eggs cost more to produce, it’s the ‘battery egg’ which is used in commercial food products that contain egg.

Most eggs eaten for breakfast are from caged hens, there are ten million in Australian cages and three billion caged hens world wide.

I shall be interviewing one of these three billion tomorrow.

A visit to a dairy

722: 

Once, I visited a dairy in Queensland, to see for myself how the dairy cow lived. I had to be up early. It was pitch black – 5 am. Two all-terrain-vehicles were already roaring around the hillsides rounding up the herd. At 5.15 things were coming to life. The main approach to the dairy sheds was getting crowded. Two hundred and fifty cows queuing to be milked. Every day at this time and again in the afternoon, they queue in mud and excrement, some for up to two hours, eventually entering the yards and then the milking shed. Inside the shed it’s all bright lights, hard concrete and iron. Twenty cows on one side of the milking pit are plugged in to have their milk drawn from their udders whilst being fed cotton seed to supplement their poor diet in drought-affected pastures. After being milked they are released, but by 6 am only sixty cows have gone through. One hundred and seventy were still waiting outside.

In one corner of the holding shed, in a pen, there was a newborn male calf, who had good reason to feel frightened. On the dairy farm he’s regarded as trash because he’s male (and therefore useless to the dairy) and shortly he would be disposed of. If the calf was female, she’d be taken away from her mother 6 hours after birth, which is thought to be adequate time for her to receive all the essential antibodies from her mother’s colostrum. She’d be taken to the calf rearing section of the farm, quite a distance from the grazing herd, and some months later she would join the heifers in another paddock. At 2 ½ years she is mated with the bull or fertilised by artificial insemination - and she bears a calf. From here she starts a career as a milker, and bearing a calf every year. She’ll be milked daily until she is no longer economically productive, at which time she will be sent to the abattoir. She’ll have her throat cut and bleed to death. Her body will be used for canned dog food.

Meanwhile, at the calf sheds, it’s 7.30 am and 30 young animals drink milk from buckets and are put out in enclosures which are ringed with electrified wire and infested with flies. High above swarm a huge flock of cockatoos attracted to these paddocks, mainly by the undigested cotton seed from the excrement of the cows. Their constant screeching adds something of an eerie atmosphere to the place. There’s a feeling of doom here. The river is drying up, not only from drought, but because its water is being used to irrigate the winter rye grass being grown for fodder. Chemical fertiliser is being spread over the paddocks and these same chemicals, mixed with the wastes from the dairy herd, leech into the river causing a bloom of blue-green algae. This particular river has always been clean enough for platypus, but now there is a danger that they might disappear. And all this destruction and interference is just for milk. Milk to pour on our bowl of corn flakes or into our cup of tea, or be the main protein-rich ingredient of countless popular ‘dairy’ foods.

So, who will benefit? The big dairies down south will and the intensive dairy farms that push their cows to three milkings per day - they will! It’ll be cheap milk for all, but for the animals it will be just more misery and slavery. 

Getting kids to eat their breakfast

721:

When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is eat. It’s a routine most people observe, young and old. It often involves milk. There’s a vague sense that protein is needed to start the day, an ingrained habit, often a ‘corn flakes and milk’ habit. Kids go for cereal and milk, which makes it easier to get them to eat something for breakfast. Milk is central to breakfast and therefore great for the milk industry.

My milk, if I use it, comes from soy beans or rice or oats, but traditionally milk comes from cows. Children use milk, as it’s associated with sweet things, used with sweet cereal, and kids grow up believing milk is essential food. They’re told that it’s ‘given’ willingly and comfortably by cows.

That’s all they need to believe for an uninhibited milk-habit to form. From the parents’ point of view it’s a great food, it’s fresh, it’s cheap (subsidized) and available from any corner shop. Milk is found in every fridge. Children drink lots of it and so do adults. It is an unquestioned food, and yet how it comes to us is a mystery to most people, other than it comes from cows. Most people wouldn’t think that milk involves cruelty and death, but it does.

Cows get killed for milk, and their calves too. The dairy cow must be made pregnant to stimulate her mammary glands to secrete milk. Simple biology. And because humans want the milk, the calf isn’t allowed to drink it. So once it is born, the calf has served its chief purpose and, unless it’s a female destined for the herd, it is usually killed, either for veal whilst still very young or fattened in a beef herd and then killed when fat enough.

If a female calf is produced, she may be put with the dairy herd and milked and impregnated for seven or so years, after which, as a milked-out dairy cow, she is sent to the abattoir - some 10 years short of her natural life span. Her milk output will, by that time, have dropped below the commercially viable level which has earned her the gratitude of the farmer? No. It simply makes her no longer useful and therefore expendable.

Milk production is something most people don't want to know about in case it forces them to associate it with animal cruelty. If they turn away from milk on ethical grounds they will have to turn away from all the thousands of food items made with milk. And that wouldn’t go down too well with kids, which is why they are never told about cruelty to dairy cows and calves.

Children love to see animals

720: 

What message is given to school students taken to zoos, by their school teachers or parents? If I pity the animals, I also pity the kids for being forced to attend these places, on the pretext of educating them about wildlife. They get to see a lot of bored, caged animals, and that’s all.

In the grander scheme of things, I suppose it helps to desensitise them when it comes to their acceptance of animal factories. It helps them to see the intensive battery cages that hold thousands of hens, as okay places.

Our society certainly doesn’t want children to be too sensitive towards animals in case they stop eating them. By the time they grow up into adults the process is supposed to be more or less completed; by this time, the adult should be too obstinate to see what their own eyes are telling them. Just as they are supposed to believe that animal-based foods are essential for good health, so too they should know that zoos “save animals”.

So just what do we get when we pay to get into zoos to see a lot of imprisoned exotic creatures? We get what we see, namely a show of the worst sort of horror, the reduction of wild beauty to captive ugliness. We see how clever humans have been in capturing so many exotic animals and condemning them to a lifetime of incarceration. If you love animals don’t go to Taronga, it will upset you. If you like horror, the zoo is just the ticket.

What I saw at Taronga Park Zoo

719: 

Zoos busily justify themselves on the grounds that they provide "captive breeding programmes" and "constitute a 'lifeline' for endangered species", implying that they offer a sort of protective custody for them from the unsafety of the wild. But with diminishing habitats, there’s little likelihood of a return of any zoo animal, to the wild, either for present or future generations. In reality zoos are in the entertainment business, and a lucrative one it is too. But I wasn’t entertained; I was too ashamed to look too long directly into the faces of these animals.

That day at the zoo, I saw things which haunt me still, particularly the once-mighty lion reduced to a mere shadow of his former glory, living in a sort of purgatory between life and death. There was a clouded leopard with merely six square metres of flooring and no exposure to any sunlight. Great apes were reduced to walking about like zombies. The fur of the Kodiac bears was rubbed to the skin, from lying on concrete all day. I saw Back Swans swimming in a shallow concrete tank with their wings clipped to prevent escape. The mysterious Dancing Brolga was cooped up in a 4 metre high cage, and was certainly not dancing. A 2½ metre-wingspan Andean Condor was imprisoned in a similar sort of cage.

And then I visited the ‘Nightlife Show’. Inside a concrete bunker there was a row of glassed-in cages, containing some of Australia’s nocturnal animals and birds. They are being kept here in perpetual dim blue light (to simulate night in the bush). To give the place a ‘realistic atmosphere’, these creatures endure a continuous ghostly drone of a dingo howling (from a hidden tape recorder). The design of this display must surely have arisen from a particularly sadistic imagination.

Do we want children to grow up immune to cruelty like this? If so give them a day out at Taronga Zoo.

Zoos are prisons

718: 

Some animals are imprisoned on farms and executed when the farmer is ready. Food is produced and omnivores pay good money for it. Other animals are not being fattened to be eaten or reared to produce food, they are reared and captured for the sole purpose of entertaining us and to some extent educate us. But what price education?

Some years ago I summoned up my courage and visited our local zoo here in Sydney, Taronga Park Zoo. I paid good money to get in (which grieved me), but I had to see for myself what they were doing to animals there. It turned out to be a harrowing experience. I hear people say that the animals are better off in the zoo than being hunted in the wild. I say they are better off dead.

Those of us who don’t eat animals or wear them or gawp at them in cages for entertainment are ever more incredulous as the years go on, that zoos are still legal. We are amazed that our fellow family and friends, who are supposedly sensitive, well educated kind and caring, refuse to listen to what we have to say about animal cruelty.

Here in the zoo there’s a perfect example of Society sanctioning animal cruelty. The animals imprisoned in these places have no hope of any kind of natural life. They are merely exhibits. Parents and teachers bring children to these places and in doing so effectively desensitize them. To kids, a visit to the zoo (let’s call them animal incarceration centres) becomes just an exciting day out. Small children are likely too young, when they first go to a zoo, to be revolted by what they see - especially when the adults around them are telling them that zoos are good places ... and tell them that zoos help to preserve species, and that zoos treat the animals well, and that the animals are safe from predators, etc. Ah yes, safe from all predation except for the money grubbing humans, who turn a nice profit from sales of entry tickets.

For these once-free animals, at zoos like this one in Sydney, each day brings deadly boredom in barren surroundings. As you walk around, all you see is concrete and iron bars and thick (but very clean) glassed-in enclosures. The animals are in prison here for life, in entirely sterile surroundings. There’s a mock mountain for the goats, a concrete tank for the seals, a high walled enclosure for the lions, and iron-barred cages everywhere you look.

It’s odd that they call it a zoological garden. What little greenery there is tends to be separated from the inmates by electric fences, otherwise I suppose the wicked animals might eat it.

Go to your local zoo, pay for a ticket, take a note book, write down what you see and then write to your local paper and explain why you are sickened by seeing all these banged-up animals. But if you want to avoid being accused of child abuse, when the kids grow up and learn the truth about these places, just don’t take them there. And don’t let their teachers take them. Ask children what they think it would be like to be shut in all day, every day. Ask them what that would feel like if they were freedom-loving beings.

Child-friendly propaganda

717: 

Family-friendly farms got me thinking just how we indoctrinate children about animals. These farms look like fun places, for animals and children alike. Kids will believe anything if enough adults are telling them the same thing. After all, they’ve spent their entire lives being taught by adults how to do things, how to survive, how to enter the world of the grown-up.

            It’s important that Mum and Dad, who provide the food for their children, get them to eat what they believe will make them healthy and strong. And these same adults have grown up believing that their parents fed them the sorts of foods which made them what they are today, and which will be good for their own children. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, teaching the rights and wrongs of life to kids, so that they can pass the same thing on, when the time comes.

            However, we are not only born with parents and teachers to advise us, but instincts too. And for many of us those instincts are strong enough to make us question our educators. We might see the cruelty shown to animals and decide to take up a vegetarian diet, to avoid the worst of the animal cruelty. Some become vegans to boycott every aspect of that same cruelty, and at the same time re-examine the value of certain foods in order to avoid illness and the eventual poisoning of the body.

            But desensitisation of instinct takes place on other levels too. Children are led to believe that instincts are unreliable or misguided. So if we see fear or madness on the face of an animal (or a human) it might not warrant pity but instead give rise to contempt. The child is taken to the circus and sees bears dressed in frilly skirts or lions leaping through rings of fire. The animals are seen as subservient or ridiculous, without any semblance of dignity. It’s as if they are too stupid to protest or too cowardly to refuse to cooperate with the friendly-looking humans, who appear to love them. Such is the deception played out on gullible, innocent children. The child is taken to the zoo, for much the same reasons, to desensitize them and make them doubt the validity of their instinctive sense of compassion. They are told that these animals are happy, when patently they are not.

How could a child question the adult about such things when they have no basis for questioning, except their own innate instinct. It would be a brave child who stood against such a barrage of the sort of persuasion which is put up by teachers, parents, uncles, aunts, and seemingly the whole of their society. As children grow up, if they have come to accept the rightness of zoos or the rightness of eating meat, they will be indoctrinated. Their attitudes will have been fixed, since they will have taken part in so many questionable activities, for so long, that any tendency to protest will have been drummed out of them long ago.

Child-friendly propaganda

717: 

Family-friendly farms got me thinking just how we indoctrinate children about animals. These farms look like fun places, for animals and children alike. Kids will believe anything if enough adults are telling them the same thing. After all, they’ve spent their entire lives being taught by adults how to do things, how to survive, how to enter the world of the grown-up.

            It’s important that Mum and Dad, who provide the food for their children, get them to eat what they believe will make them healthy and strong. And these same adults have grown up believing that their parents fed them the sorts of foods which made them what they are today, and which will be good for their own children. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, teaching the rights and wrongs of life to kids, so that they can pass the same thing on, when the time comes.

            However, we are not only born with parents and teachers to advise us, but instincts too. And for many of us those instincts are strong enough to make us question our educators. We might see the cruelty shown to animals and decide to take up a vegetarian diet, to avoid the worst of the animal cruelty. Some become vegans to boycott every aspect of that same cruelty, and at the same time re-examine the value of certain foods in order to avoid illness and the eventual poisoning of the body.

            But desensitisation of instinct takes place on other levels too. Children are led to believe that instincts are unreliable or misguided. So if we see fear or madness on the face of an animal (or a human) it might not warrant pity but instead give rise to contempt. The child is taken to the circus and sees bears dressed in frilly skirts or lions leaping through rings of fire. The animals are seen as subservient or ridiculous, without any semblance of dignity. It’s as if they are too stupid to protest or too cowardly to refuse to cooperate with the friendly-looking humans, who appear to love them. Such is the deception played out on gullible, innocent children. The child is taken to the zoo, for much the same reasons, to desensitize them and make them doubt the validity of their instinctive sense of compassion. They are told that these animals are happy, when patently they are not.

How could a child question the adult about such things when they have no basis for questioning, except their own innate instinct. It would be a brave child who stood against such a barrage of the sort of persuasion which is put up by teachers, parents, uncles, aunts, and seemingly the whole of their society. As children grow up, if they have come to accept the rightness of zoos or the rightness of eating meat, they will be indoctrinated. Their attitudes will have been fixed, since they will have taken part in so many questionable activities, for so long, that any tendency to protest will have been drummed out of them long ago.

Child-friendly propaganda

717: 

Family-friendly farms got me thinking just how we indoctrinate children about animals. These farms look like fun places, for animals and children alike. Kids will believe anything if enough adults are telling them the same thing. After all, they’ve spent their entire lives being taught by adults how to do things, how to survive, how to enter the world of the grown-up.

            It’s important that Mum and Dad, who provide the food for their children, get them to eat what they believe will make them healthy and strong. And these same adults have grown up believing that their parents fed them the sorts of foods which made them what they are today, and which will be good for their own children. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, teaching the rights and wrongs of life to kids, so that they can pass the same thing on, when the time comes.

            However, we are not only born with parents and teachers to advise us, but instincts too. And for many of us those instincts are strong enough to make us question our educators. We might see the cruelty shown to animals and decide to take up a vegetarian diet, to avoid the worst of the animal cruelty. Some become vegans to boycott every aspect of that same cruelty, and at the same time re-examine the value of certain foods in order to avoid illness and the eventual poisoning of the body.

            But desensitisation of instinct takes place on other levels too. Children are led to believe that instincts are unreliable or misguided. So if we see fear or madness on the face of an animal (or a human) it might not warrant pity but instead give rise to contempt. The child is taken to the circus and sees bears dressed in frilly skirts or lions leaping through rings of fire. The animals are seen as subservient or ridiculous, without any semblance of dignity. It’s as if they are too stupid to protest or too cowardly to refuse to cooperate with the friendly-looking humans, who appear to love them. Such is the deception played out on gullible, innocent children. The child is taken to the zoo, for much the same reasons, to desensitize them and make them doubt the validity of their instinctive sense of compassion. They are told that these animals are happy, when patently they are not.

How could a child question the adult about such things when they have no basis for questioning, except their own innate instinct. It would be a brave child who stood against such a barrage of the sort of persuasion which is put up by teachers, parents, uncles, aunts, and seemingly the whole of their society. As children grow up, if they have come to accept the rightness of zoos or the rightness of eating meat, they will be indoctrinated. Their attitudes will have been fixed, since they will have taken part in so many questionable activities, for so long, that any tendency to protest will have been drummed out of them long ago.

Friendly farms

716:

My next door neighbours have just come back from their holiday in the country. I knocked on their door early, to give them their mail. Their little girl is four years old and she couldn’t stop telling me about the piglets she saw when they visited one of those ‘family-friendly farms’.  She was allowed to play with them in the straw. “They weren’t very little” she said. She stretched her hands out wide, the size of her small dog. “Just like Sammy” she said. “And they snuggled up to me and they let me hug them. They grunted and pushed their noses under my arm”. She was over the moon.

            She went on like this for some time. While I was listening to her story I could smell their breakfast cooking in the kitchen. Bacon and eggs frying. I figured Mum and Dad weren’t going to be telling her about pigs and bacon. I assume they’d decided not to spoil her memory (her innocence more like). I knew they’d be nervous about me speaking up. As if I would!

            I’m not a parent. I don’t really know the dynamics of all this. But I do realise why the truth about animals may not be made clear to youngsters and that parents, usually quite consciously, decide that their kids must be kept in the dark to prevent them making the obvious connections.

            “When they’re older they’ll understand ...”. But understand what? Perhaps the kids will understand that a loving parent can be ultimately duplicitous, not on the scale of telling fibs about Santa Claus but over the truth about violating animals! If a young child’s curiosity about animals and meat and farms and killing can be sidestepped, it’s likely the whole thing will blow over soon enough. On some level, as a child grows older, they’ll stop worrying about the animals and start salivating over how delicious crispy bacon tastes, and how tasty the googy-egg!

            The cynic might suggest some rules of parenthood: don’t make the connection between animals and the food you feed them. Tell the kids as little as possible about animal farming, if you want to keep their dreams alive. Keep the memory of that summer day at the farm with the little piggies - it’s priceless. Let them keep this much while they are children ... until they have to get their priorities straightened out, in preparation for the real world beyond, so that they fit in ... so that when they grow up they can, without a second thought, ‘bring home the bacon’.

Indoctrinating kids

715: 

Food is a dilemma. There’s too much promotion of unhealthy but attractive food and too little authoritative promotion of plant-based foods, which anyway, are not nearly as attractive to kids. And it’s kids who make the loudest demands. Unlike adults, children have fewer pleasures and freedoms to distract them, so food often figures large for them. They’ll make strenuous demands to have what they want, aided and abetted by the advertisers who heavily direct their messages towards young people.

            That old familiar boast by the Church - “Give us children for the first seven years and we have them for life” - applies just as well to diet. Raise children on meat and they’ll always see it as an essential component of every meal. But if that is true, it simply emphasises how impressionable kids are. Therefore it lays the onus on the parent to mould the habits of their children. What sort of mentality do parents want for their children? What priorities should they emphasise? How much control of their children’s upbringing do they give up, for fear of losing favour with their children?

Family habits and dilemmas

714: 

Everything happens within the context of its surroundings. Take a typical family, where eating habits have formed since birth and parents pass on these habits to their children. The eating habits of the whole community have been the same since time out of mind. Food outlets offer the same types of food that they’ve always offered. Beliefs about the necessity of animal protein in the diet outweigh any recent warnings about its danger to health, and thus encourage conformity - if we eat what others eat we’ll feel safe and normal! In addition, we’ll be easier to cater for, since animal foods are easy to prepare and are guaranteed to satisfy. Children enjoy food and snacks and confections which taste good, and since they have no way of assessing foods other than by taste, it’s likely they’ll go for what they like! And animal foods are very yummy, and they’re very available, as are most foods that contain animal ingredients.

Kids care little for complex ethical arguments concerning food, even if they understand them. They eat for reasons of immediate satisfaction (as indeed adults do, too). Very often the kids call the shots. It’s often the kids who determine what the family meals consist of. Adult tastes become juvenile-ised, and we end up with a nation of junk food eaters with chronic food-related illnesses, who need expensive medical insurance to defray ever-increasing medical bills. The junk food being eaten is almost always heavily animal-protein based. You might say that the typical family doesn’t stand a chance under the pressure of such heavy promotion of conventional animal-based foods.

            The pressures on a parent to conform to majority eating habits are immense. It’s a brave parent who will change their own diet and then enforce that same change on their children, unless kids’ habits have been established from birth. So they continue to buy meat and dairy foods and, if there are animals at home, plenty of pet food too. [As it happens, it may be possible to raise a cat on a plant-based diet as long as the diet is supplemented with the necessary essential nutrients missing in plant foods. But again, to change this natural carnivore’s diet in mid stream is inadvisable and only really possible if done from birth.] It may well be possible to have the complete household, including companion animals, adequately fed on plant-based food, but it’s rare. Even for vegan households, in which a dog or cat is living, it’s difficult not to buy them meat, and then, if the vegan does that, they are causing the deaths of many other animals that will have to be killed for pet food. 

Competition encouraging cruel husbandry methods

713:

On farms, animal protein is produced by the application of techno scientific methods of animal farming. Such things as genetic engineering and the confining of animals and the use of growth promotants is commonplace. And these questionable advances in animal husbandry have been copied by ‘developing nations’ to win more of the market share.

In an ironic twist of fate, we wealthier nations have now become victims of our own inventiveness - as the poorer countries follow our lead, but with lower labour costs, they’ve been able to undercut production costs; the cheaper their product becomes the more efficient and diabolical our own intensive operations have to become, to keep pace with our competitors. As these ‘developments’ spiral out of control, so the small farmer goes out of business and agribusiness takes over, in order to stay one step ahead of the competition. Today most of the meat, dairy and eggs in supermarkets are produced by large transnational companies, using industrial agriculture methods. Consequently, the animals involved in this food juggernaut are living out ever more horrific existences.

            The consumer accepts low standards of animal welfare, because they want cheap food. And although most people wouldn’t be happy eating food that was knowingly produced cruelly, in their own minds they consider their hands are tied. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation. The only affordable animal products on the market are ever more coming from intensive farming operations. The only alternative, the option of not eating animal products at all, is something most people have never seriously considered. 

Misinforming the public

712:  

Because the dangers of an omnivorous diet are well enough known by our food producers, it could be the very reason why essential information is suppressed, or rather why people are swamped with ‘misinformation’. The Animal Industry is influential in our society; their interest is to make money from producing and selling foods which aren’t optimal to good health. But because they are so well established no one can touch them. Their insistent advertising is so clever that their products always sell well ... and the more the Animal Industries thrive, the more human health deteriorates and Animal Welfare worsens.

            You’d think by now we humans would have wised up. With such advances made in food technology, we should be demanding healthy food, but the animal business is so persuasive that nothing ever changes for the better. Mass production means mass demand, means low costs and a lot of sophisticated scientific ingenuity, which is being used to make foods addictively tasty.

Wealthy people identify themselves by the rich foods they eat and the aspiring classes emulate them. The poorest people eat the cheapest foods available, which are mainly plant-based foods, but whenever their circumstances improve they increase the animal protein content of their diet, and that unfortunately brings them closer to a whole new range of deadly, diet-related diseases. 

Advocating nutrition, for a start

711: 

By pursuing non-violence, in all its manifestations, we have to start by not attacking animals. Plant energy will do the rest for us, giving us optimal energy, and letting us see a whole potential by using that particular energy.

            Firstly, the animal industry must stop producing food. Secondly consumers must stop demanding it. For this to happen, it must be first suggested, thus making it down to vegans to put their case effectively.

But in keeping with our harmlessness we need to advocate in a non-violent manner, without using fear or force. There’s no better way for people to identify with us than by finding our persuasions helpful and not pontificating.

            If we are to put a credible case forward, for switching over to a plant diet, our persuasions need to come in different flavours. Our arguments have to be comprehensive, the alternative to meat and dairy presented attractively, and the foods we’re suggesting need to be tasty and efficacious. Above all, as advocates, we shouldn’t seem to be partisan but fair minded - to show that we’re looking out for people as much as for animals; we must seem to be concerned as much for the safety of human health as for the ethical treatment of animals.

            Whatever we might say about ethics and compassion, it’s as well to never lose sight of the importance of nutrition, for no one is going to ‘take the leap’ if they think it’s dangerous. To avoid putting their lives at risk, most people will stick to what they know best; they’ll follow the accepted scientific advice regarding the foods they’re used to, perhaps cut down here and there but never be too radical with the foods they love to eat.

People will latch onto any argument that might persuade them to NOT change too radically.  And so it is that the most convincing reason people continue using animals for food, is that animal protein has a complete combination of all amino acids, whereas vegetable protein has to be more carefully balanced in the diet, not much more but somewhat.

For vegans, there might be a need for Vitamin B₁₂ supplementation, owing to the inability of some of us to metabolise this vital element from a solely plant-based diet, but other than that we can feel safe with plant foods; if we are eating whole foods, then any amount of vegetable protein will do us no harm and be ultimately nutritious.

The same can’t be said of animal protein. With so many varieties and combinations of attractive animal-based foods on the market, people are indulging in as much of them as they can afford. Consequently there’s a danger of over-eating (animal protein) which is associated with high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease. Because the conventional animal-based diets are high in saturated fats and salt and low in fibre, people who indulge in them are doubly at risk.

But the mental pressures of animal-eating can be debilitating too. The foods associated with the conventional diet are getting a reputation these days. Their use is the cause of fear, especially in people of middle to old age. After many years of eating rich foods the fear of life-threatening illness can too often prey on the mind.

Maybe we vegans have to exercise some small amount of care over our diet, but that’s a small price to pay compared to the  dangers associated with a typical omnivorous diet.

Meat and evolution

710:

By cleaning up our own conscience (in the knowledge that a vegan diet is safe), our eating habits can accord with plant-based living, both for healthy pleasure and for reasons of survival.

It has been shown that humans have no reason to keep and kill animals for food, other than for reasons of convenience. In having discovered that, we make a unique step forward; for the first time in history we can say that all animal farming is unnecessary especially because it is unethical. If there is no reason to continue it then we can add the further reason, that the environment would also greatly benefit.

Without having to provide food for all the millions of captive ‘food’ animals, fertile land could produce crops for humans, and deforested lands could be returned to tree cover. In addition, the methane produced by ruminants would be eliminated and waterways would no longer become polluted by effluent run-off.

By lifting these dead weights from ourselves we can better help to restore so much of our world from the damage that previous and present generations have inflicted. By merely changing daily eating habits we can save our planet, and into the bargain save our very souls!

For those who’ve become vegans, there’s a sense of relief. The body feels lighter, the mind sharper and the conscience calmer. But there still exist arguments for not changing, held by people who are still locked into the ‘conventional’ diet.

They will say that animal protein has been used for feeding humans since time out of mind. That we are what we eat! That every advancement of the human brain is down to there being meat in the diet.

            But has the human race ‘advanced’ or been ‘held back’ by its much heralded, meat-fuelled brainpower? Has it achieved everything it can achieve or is it yet to reach its true potential? If we are proud of our amazing artistic and scientific endeavours, then aren’t we also ashamed of our amazing warfare and violence? I doubt if a veggy diet will crush our creativity or deaden our artistic spirit, but I wonder whether, if the world has come this far, that it is still making true progress, enough to justify complaissancy.

            Many ‘thinking people’ today see the writing on the wall; that where humans have used violence, we have always fallen into chaos. If violating animals is normal and the meat diet is normal, then it may be that our diet, and the necessary condoning of animal cruelty, is responsible for our violation of the human body, which in turn is bringing us close to our own self-destruction.

Plant-based diets make everything else possible

709:

Plants are not motile or considered sentient and if humans can live solely from plants, there’s no longer any need to kill animals for food or clothing. That breakthrough allows us to adopt a vegan diet/vegan lifestyle.

For those who become vegan, certain opportunities and responsibilities open up. We are now able to advocate for Animal Rights, whereas before, that option is not possible; non-vegans are always caught up in the ‘animal-attack business’, whereas vegans can campaign for animal liberation. This is a great cause and one that many people might like to take up. A great many people want to see the end of cages and confining pens, but too few want to see the end of all animal use and even fewer are willing to make the sacrifice of no longer using animals for anything in their lives.

            If someone isn’t yet vegan but is moving that way, it bodes well for them and for us all, animals included. But for all others, who must be described as ‘non-vegans’, they are hardened into habits of daily animal consumption, and aren’t yet ready to convinced into giving up meat and milk and all the rest.

Their reasoning may not be based on need, but on want. The taste for flesh and/or animal by-products has become a habit of a lifetime, and has been further entrenched by the ready availability of thousands of popular food products made with animal ingredients. The shops are full of them and at prices we can all afford. This easy availability has given rise to a certain attitude, that we can eat or use whatever we like, because humans have learnt how to manipulate their environment (or so we think).

As we learn more about this whole subject of animal-use, we open up to the question of ethics, which might suggest the possibility of living more harmlessly and more compassionately. And that logically leads to the possibility of living without violating animals at all.

Perhaps, for some, this is taking things a little too far.

            However, for those of us who have gone this far and gone even further, we’ve found it possible to understand the equality between all sentient beings; that we are all sovereign and equally deserving of mutual respect; and that, since we are humans and have so many advantages, we are in the best position to set a good example.

Here are the three main points to think about: firstly that animals needn’t be harmed, secondly that eating animals shouldn’t be allowed and thirdly that animal-derived foods should not be available, since they do so much to damage human health. By avoiding using animals we might want to avoid them for our own sakes, but by doing so we also atone for what others have done to them in the past.