On the outside

799:

Here’s the central idea - that the one, generally accepted mainstay of lifestyle, our dependence on animals, is not necessary. To most people it is a preposterous idea. How can we do without animal foods? Or leather? Or pets? Or having animals performing to entertain us?

            But behind this idea, that animals are available to be used by humans, is the free-go, nothing-can-stop-us attitude. It’s the wrongness of that attitude which could stop us, simply because they have no say in the matter. This is the basis of all slavery where the weak can’t fight back; humans, being the dominant species, know that animals are a convenience and not a necessity, and that makes their use unjustifiable.

Following on naturally from this is that we could become the guardians of the animals instead of their oppressors. If we humans have upset the balance of our relationship with them, then vegans seek to redress that balance, by not taking advantage of powerless animals.

Others, who stand up for other great causes, might also disassociate from certain lifestyle habits. And, in consequence, they too might feel marginalised by the stand they take. But the difference is that they enjoy some support from the majority, whereas we enjoy almost none … because we touch on the most popular habit of all, food. We stand at the farthest extreme of minority-view, pointing towards a future beyond the reach of most peoples’ imagination.

By living as vegans, we try to act beyond self-interest, and live and work on behalf of (at any one time) up to fifteen billion abused animals.

Why do we adopt a cross-species empathy? Perhaps because this is a frontier that people in the past have never ventured past. All great causes before this have been human-centred, whereas this one deals with our shared sentience with animals; to hurt animals on the scale we do serves only to hurt our own advancement as a species.

Some of us now define our lives by our non-speciesism. Since most people haven’t ever thought too deeply about this we often receive bewildered looks from them. Perhaps it’s true to say that people do not actually condemn us but think of us as being far too weird to be taken seriously.

Vegans have to be able to handle this. We live on ‘the fringes’. We are the messengers from Outsiderdom. Being socially outcast is unavoidable. But on the up-side, vegans are virtually immune from hubris and are therefore likely to succeed in the end, with what we are saying; we will eventually make sense and animals will be freed as a result of what we say today.