The shackled omnivore

945: 

It’s hard to shift normal behaviour today,  especially when vegans are dealing with ‘majority views’.  Because,  in the attempt to do some ‘shifting’, one becomes predictable, label-able.

If you meet a judgemental vegan,  you might start to suspect them, suspect their polemic. You’ll want to avoid them like you’d want to avoid a drunk.  For that reason alone,  vegans may have to consider not attempting to be too direct or too predictable with their omnivore friends.  But it doesn’t mean we have to be on our best behaviour.  We’re free to rattle their cages.  And even though we have some friends who’re deaf-eared and hooked on animal foods,  there may also be some who are not. And they’ll see vegan-principle as a possible ‘escape route’,  from the meat-world, and from the violence of the world.

If you’re in this prison (albeit not alone,  since most other people are in the same prison) it might be largely because you’re still condoning,  still eating animals. Wearing their skin on your feet,  eating their muscle tissue, drinking the milk intended for the calf, etc.  By being involved in all this,  one is effectively helping to enslave animals,  and therefore becoming as much ethically shackled as the animals are physically shackled.  

Most people aren’t aware of any sort of escape.  They presume they have to stay where they are,  captive to lifestyle habits.

But many have broken away.  The surprising thing is the difference between the before and after,  the different predictions and fixed-perceptions of what it would be like,  to be ‘going plant-based’.  The before included fear of tastebud revolt and a never-full-enough stomach, but the after comes as something of a surprise. It turns out that most vegans don’t stick with it because they have great willpower but because they start out with a more developed altruistic intention.  And that intention comes from empathy-for-others and leads logically towards boycotting animal products.  

Empathy-types look around and can’t help seeing those things that are not right. They don’t nose around looking for trouble, it’s just that when it’s so bleedin’ obvious, they have to act.

And what do they see? Surely they see a vast host of living, breathing, sentient, ‘domesticated’ animals and hunted wildlife, who have had their freedom taken away, so they can be used as food for the human.

The more we learn about what this has done to humans,  the more urgent is the need to help them rescue their soul, spirit, body and mind.  At present, in every which-way they are screwed. But all that can change by taking one simple step. Boycott.

You can see the destruction and pain everywhere you look, overweight people waddling down the street, bodies lying in hospital beds, bathroom cabinets stuffed full of pills and potions, rich and blood-soaked foods in fridges - it’s in front of our very eyes, every moment of the day and everywhere we look. We see the seeds of ruin in our friends and families, in individuals and in strangers. It affects almost EVERYONE on the planet; the system of turning animals into food is condoned by just about everyone.

However, some of us are determined not to have anything to do with it. We’ve left this particular habit-prison. We’ve left it, escaped it - and all we needed was a heightened altruistic intention. That’s what sparks it off. By developing empathy we see the bigger picture (by way of contrast - the contrast being between our conditions and their conditions). My relatively cushy life must be compared to the daily, ongoing pain endured by billions of animals, whose lives are dedicated to serve us as slaves.