Don’t stand on ceremony, just help yourself

843: 

Animal guardians (vegans) are persistent, because we’re in it for life. But also because we keep asking the same unanswerable question: “How can such terrible things be done to animals, and people not react?” As our incredulity grows into outrage and then on into anger, we can feel a sort of power flowing through us. But sadly, there’s nowhere for it to go. It’s like lightening that doesn’t make contact with the ground. It doesn’t connect. For all our outrage, protesting and arguing, we notice nothing positive happens. The crazy, cruel things just keep on happening.

Humans know no other way of living that doesn’t include attacking and eating animals. Most people are dependent on abattoir products. Sad as that is, regrettably we animal activists have to get used to this just as the animals themselves have had to get used to it.

I suppose the animals have always been exploited by humans because it’s easy. They don’t fight back. And even if the idea of attacking animals doesn’t sit well with us, we don’t have to face up to the act itself. There will always be someone to do the caging and killing for us. It’s likely the people employed to do these nasty jobs, especially the killing at abattoirs, are those who can’t find employment elsewhere.

The awful reality, of routinely attacking animals, stands like a brick wall to human progress. For all the great discoveries a man or woman might make, if they are complicit with this, then they aren’t really progressing at all; humanity can’t move on until we acknowledge the possibility that life without the eating of animal-based foods is possible. It’s preferable on all counts. It’s beneficial to the human body, to the otherwise enslaved animals and it’s a shift from violence to non-violence. Any progress on granting animals the right to be safe from human attack can only come when vegan principles are observed.

Animals’ bodies and their secretions seem to be regarded as ‘for the taking’, like pears from a pear tree or minerals from the ground - it seems that if something can be taken, humans will take it. That attitude does us no credit and to see it as acceptable and unremarkable causes vegans to be not so much angry as incredulous.