Plant-based diets make everything else possible

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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.