How to avoid mental health issues – part one

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Let’s say that billions of people know what they are doing, whenever they eat animal products. They know what goes on behind the scenes, what has to happen before the eggs or milk or meat arrive in the shops; they’d be very naive or ill-informed if they didn’t. But then, let’s say that, nonetheless, they continue eating them. Why don’t they stop? The question could be put another way: why would they want to?

Let’s now imagine something which is probably not even true yet - that there is as many as one percent of our community who are vegan or who are moving that way. It’s a tiny fraction of the population and a considerable number, nevertheless, who have begun to see their world in a substantially different way to the other 99%.

To this minority, animals aren’t seen as mere objects because, unlike inanimate objects, they accept that animals have a sense of their own identity and can, on an individual level, feel emotion and fear danger, just as we can. We can assume they don’t want to suffer, and that they aren’t happy about being the slaves of humans.

So, how can anyone ignore that? And how did we come to accept that we do what we do to them? And how did we lose our connection with them, and start to misuse them to the extent that, today, we are factory-farming them?

These questions must hang in the air, while we look at the way humans have gradually changed the way they’ve been getting their ‘animal’ foods; we’ve gone from hunter-gatherer of wild animals to jailers and captive breeders.

By deciding to separate ourselves from animals, we’ve made a ‘disconnect’ – we’ve gone from predator to jailer. Somewhere along the line we’ve said, “Why should we go to all the trouble and uncertainty of hunting animals when they can be held captive and made to breed, especially since we can breed docility into them and make them completely submissive to our will?”

If an animal can be brought to this state of being then why care about their feelings? Do their feelings matter?.

Vegans believe that animals are ‘individuals’, no less than any companion animal at home. If people want to believe that animals are incapable of feeling, or that they’re not individuals, then one must ask how we came to see them that way. Perhaps it’s likely that we’ve manipulated our value system in a most fundamental way; by needing to feel secure about our food supplies, we’ve had to warp one of our most important values (compassion) in order to suit our need to guarantee this particular food source.

When we sup with the Devil we sell our soul in exchange for short-term personal benefit; it’s a classic corruption of power that holds good for a short time (in evolutionary terms) and yet erodes the very foundation of our species. We take for granted the gifts we’ve been given - our ethics have been compromised and our health has been compromised to the point where we have become addicted to a source of food that we now can no longer do without. Along with that food comes all the ugliness imaginable. In a nutshell, we have created the diabolical cage and all the cruelty of the abattoir, and can no longer contemplate human life without these two ‘institutions’. By depending on animals and taking our dependency to the point where we have enslaved them, we have lost the very strength we wanted to attain in the first place.