Poles apart (from a vegan view)

1013: 

For vegans, we are tormented by thinking about the horror of animal life on the farm.  ‘Our subject’ (Animal Rights) is unlike any other subject.  It isn’t a hobby.  We can’t be casual about. For us it’s a matter of righting perhaps the most terrible wrong ever known to our society – the enslavement and brutal killing of innocent beings, involving billions of them.  If you don’t share our point of view, it’s not something about which we can lightly ‘agree to disagree’.

           

If we are ‘abolitionists’, who think no animals should ever be used, since the record shows that humans are never to be trusted around animals, we come across as being unbelievably radical and confronting.  But, to us, that position is an essential starting point for the development of a non-violence philosophy.

However, if we want to make any headway with the non-vegan majority, if we want to break the common mind-set by appealing to people’s better natures, we must be prepared NOT to succeed, if only because of the sheer numbers of people who subscribe  to the collective mind-set.  Most believe that animals are ‘here for us to use’.

We can make it known where we stand on the matter, we can stick to our own view, but we can’t force that view down peoples’ throats every time we talk to them, or every time animals are mentioned.  Reluctantly, I have to say that we are involved in a waiting game; there isn’t yet enough resolve amongst enough people, to start thinking outside the ‘me’ square.  The hold which animal-based food has on people, to the pleasures of eating them, is so strong that NOTHING, other than personal health concerns, will persuade them away from their favourite foods.  And as for fearing ill health, when people are young and establishing their food routines, they are usually fit enough not to have too many worries concerning food-related health problems.