On the subject of Animal Rights ...

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This subject causes indignation and embarrassment to most omnivores. They don’t like responding to it. But some do, and eventually they become vegans themselves. Then, like any born-again convert, once they’ve been vegan for a while, they try to start a revolution. Despite the success or failure of converting others, to their surprise they find this subject is hot; it has the capacity to stir something deep. They discover that most people, when confronted by a vegan, feel very affronted.

            So, it’s useful to remember that, excluding those very few ‘from-birth’ vegans, all of us have, at some stage, been omnivores. Present day vegans are apt to forget the transitional stages they went through and become very intolerant of anyone who can’t change overnight; it’s only fair to remember that once upon a time, we each had our own ‘good reasons’ for resisting. We weren’t moved by even the most well-honed ‘arguments based on compassion’ and resented suggestions that, as animal-eaters, we were fans of the exploiters.

            Two main things need to be remembered here, that as soon as one is vegan one wants to convince others to be the same, and as soon as this happens we want to over-simplify the depth of resistance others have; we look for a strategy to make ourselves feel productive. And then, what I think happens is that this need to be ‘playing a meaningful role’ in the ‘liberation of animals’ translates to protesting cruelty. But that’s often as far as it goes. It never moves towards a deeper understanding of why the resistance to veganism is so strong.

            The fact is that, whether we feel useful to The Cause or not, it should be about the animals and not be about winning any kudos for ourselves; this involvement in The Animal Rights Movement is not about ‘me’ but about them, and it’s easy for that main aim to get lost in the wash of activities which might make us feel good.

            However much cruelty to animals we reduce, however many vegans emerge, this isn’t necessarily even scratching the surface of the main problem, which is people’s need to identify themselves with the norm (the predominant collective consciousness). What jolts a person out of their need to conform and lands them in the rebel camp might be different for each individual, but once the idea of conformity to social eating patterns is questioned, there’s a start to a self-improvement attitude-change. It involves not only becoming vegan but also in becoming gentler in almost everything we attempt to do. And that isn’t quite so straight forward because it sets up a contradiction: we feel less aggressive towards those who aren’t yet thinking the way we think, but that seems to reduce our effectiveness and that, in turn, makes our role seem less significant; it’s almost as if we are deliberately slowing down something that we want to see speeded up.