Selling your soul for a steak

871: 

I worry about the deaths of beautiful sentient beings, and the traumas we inflict on them whilst they’re alive. The injustice of denying so many a life, where none of them have any say in their own destiny. What are we doing to them? What is each consumer encouraging to be done to them, when they buy animal-based foods. Animal farms comprise rows and rows of sentient beings treated as production units, having no life of their own and simply waiting to die. For them, each day is a living death.

            For these imprisoned animals, life is all suffering, ending in a grisly execution. Even the most sadistic mass murderer couldn’t devise a more cruel fate for any victim, and yet that is the fate of billions of animals, and it seems that that’s acceptable to the humans who benefit from their being thus treated.

If you were a farm animal, you’d not only suffer physical pain but also the mental trauma of utter hopelessness. You’d have been made impotent, denied any meaningful part in the present world or in the building of any sort of future. As a slave, whether you are human or animal, you live in limbo-land, with none of the features one would normally associate with ‘life’, apart from the physical functioning of your own body. It’s as if the soul has its hands tied.

Now, it’s strongly suggested to children, and repeated endlessly to adults, that all this about animals is okay, since animals don’t have souls. But if humans have souls then they won’t be saved by selling out the animals.

The problem has always been the same for humans - we are led into dodgy behaviour early in our life and then find it difficult to escape these behavioural habits. As young adults, we follow what others do and forgo our own instincts. While young, by swallowing the food others prepare for us, we continue to eat in the same way when we reach adulthood. Just by doing this we perpetuate the mindless violence of our species.

Until we become fully aware of this, how can there ever be any change to the collective consciousness? We think we are superior beings. However, to animals we must appear to be dunderheads who can’t even forage for our own food, as every other animal can do. We only have a certain type of strength and we use it to dominate, enslave and steal; we cannibalize others to provide energy for our own lives. Many humans are intelligent and sensitive but haven’t yet been able to see the nastiness of this particular habit or see through this confidence trick their society is playing on them.

            You might have thought the con was obvious, that no one, when reaching adulthood, would continue to ‘swallow first and think after’. You’d think, in this well-informed age, that we’d all mistrust the authorities enough to be re-examining those ‘core truths’ we’ve been taught, to see if they stood up to scrutiny. But it just doesn’t happen that way. Perhaps it’s never occurred to most people, to question such big things, let alone ‘go vegan’; they haven’t even begun to realise what would happen if they dissociated from social norms and changed their whole way of life accordingly. To them, a voluntary, radical change in lifestyle, ‘going vegan’, would probably equate to serving a life sentence in prison.