743:
Anyone who sees the urgent need to do something about
the way we treat food-animals is going to have to ignore what they’ve
previously been taught about food - they’ll have to go against tastebud-advice,
against the advice of corporations, governments and educators, and turn to them-self
for advice.
The
issue of using animals in the food and clothing industries sits like a lead
weight on our collective conscience - what we do to animals makes monsters of
us. We should all be ashamed of the way animals are slaughtered, for the way
hens are imprisoned in tiny cages and for the way so many animals are routinely
mutilated without anaesthetic. The more I learn the more ashamed I become. I
discovered that newborn calves are snatched away from their mothers (most of
which are shot soon after they’re born), sows are kept restrained in stalls,
unable to move, cattle are mutilated (for very practical reasons, of
course) - the list of horrors goes on
and on. Each one reflects on the farmers and producers, and the consumers who
support all this by buying animal produce.
Now
all this might be true enough, but so many of us have been or still are
involved, simply by buying animal-based foods, that there’s a mass switch-off;
we won’t talk about it because it throws up too many problems. This is where
we’re stuck.
My
taste buds are like yours, they respond to the same foods and yet these same
foods weigh heavily on the conscience. There’s a sort of numbness that comes
over me when I try to think of how sentient animals are suffering. The fact
that animals (kept alive only to be eaten) are presently living in terror, and
dying the most ugly death anyone could imagine says a lot about how brutal
humans are. We say, “It’s outrageous”, but we still allow it to happen. By way
of some nifty mental gymnastics we can relax at the dinner table and eat what
we’re given. Minds closed, mouths open. It’s what we are used to doing. Then
the brave speak up, “No longer!” ... but in reality, even if we feel outraged,
we don’t think we’d have enough willpower to alter our eating habits so
radically, for a principle. Nothing will be powerful enough to convince us to
stop. Neither ill health, guilty conscience or issues concerning the
environmental impact of animal farming.
If we do make the decision to ‘go-vegan’,
we find out eventually that it’s probably the best thing we could have done for
ourselves. By withdrawing our support from the Animal Industries and freeing
ourselves from the addictive grip of their products, we do a repair job on
ourselves and help liberate the animals at the same time. But this
habit-switching is no light matter. If we give up eating meat one day, the next
day we’ll be questioning the whole ethical basis of animal farming and
nutrition! So what starts out as just a change of diet, now opens up
significant changes of attitude.
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