More about bridge building and less about shocking facts

760:

If Animal Rights hasn’t touched enough people, it’s time to re-consider our approach. I’m into easing up on giving people ‘shocking-facts’. I’d rather concentrate a bit more on bridge-building. I say that not because the truth needs hiding but because we need to reform our approach.

Back in the 1980’s when the horrors of modern animal farming first came to light everyone was shocked, but soon enough it was ‘business as usual’. In 2013 things, down-on-the-farm, are worse and the horrors more widespread - there are more species of animal being abused and more individual animals being subjected to cruelty and indifference.

The brainchild of modern factory farming, in the 1940s, hit upon confining the movement of ‘moving animals’. It was a brilliant, if diabolical, idea – to treat animals as if they were simply production machines. The phrase ‘hens in cages’ came to represent the extent to which humans could beat and get the most out of Nature, despite the fact that the cage came to symbolise the extent of animal cruelty that would still be acceptable to the customer. So, where from there?

The facts have not frightened, inspired or induced people to boycott cruelly-produced, animal-based commodities. And that says something fundamental about human nature and how big a job vegans have in trying to reshape it.  

This is how it seems to me: Yes, people are genuinely shocked when they hear about cruelty. Yes, people shake their heads in disbelief. No, people will NOT boycott animal products and ruin the quality of their life.

It is true that being vegan reduces choices in the supermarket food department by about 40%. (In a survey I once did, in a supermarket, out of 7000 shelf choices some 4000 contained animal ingredients, all of which a vegan would boycott). You might be firmly against hens in cages but the question is whether you are ready to drop your favourite biscuits because they contain caged-hens’ eggs.

It seems that we humans are not yet willing to change the habits of a lifetime, unless we’re in personal health danger. We say, “Be kind to animals”, but that’s where it stops. It doesn’t extend to farm animals. And that’s inexplicable in the light of the fact that animal products are NOT essential to good nutrition.

For vegans, that is the point from which our whole ‘different lifestyle’ begins, and from that stems my suspicion, that humans are not to be trusted around animals, since we have such a rich history of abusing them. We dominate the animals, efficiently and in a cold-as-steel way, which is why animal advocates start from a ‘rights’ point of view and not one of ‘welfare reform’. I, like other vegans, only promote a no-use-animal policy.

This view, however, is a long way from how the majority of people see things. But here’s the funny thing. I often hear people say, “I agree with you … and that’s why I only eat free range”. The question is, should I point out to them that ALL farm animals are executed cruelly, and that these ‘free’ hens die in exactly the same way as battery-cage hens? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. The facts of life and death in modern animal husbandry need to be known about, but building bridges towards understanding might be more useful than rubbing salt into those old guilt-wounds. If I utter the word ‘battery-hen’, people think I’m only talking about how we produce ‘eggs’, while I’m really talking about the animal herself. She is only part of a much vaster picture of animal exploitation.

At some stage in human history, every omnivore will either be so sick from eating high-protein and high-fat animal-based foods or the animals they eat will be so sick that they pass on their pathology to the people who eat them. At some stage, people will be forced to come to terms with the need to eat solely plant-based-foods. Which in turn will allow them to consider what we know today as ‘vegan principle’. As it turns out, they may find the finding-out interesting and eventually the most valuable discovery of their lives. But in the meantime that is not how it all looks; at present any information a vegan might impart will only ever seem like a propaganda rave.