Daggy judgements

1256: 

What should my attitude be towards you, as a meat eater?  If I seem to show antipathy towards you, it’s guaranteed things will go badly wrong between us.  You’ll probably neither like me nor what I’m saying, you probably won’t trust me and you’ll want to catch me out.

When I’m starting out (talking Animal Rights) I should fix up this trust thing before I open my mouth.  I need to assess where you stand, and see if this is a volatile subject for you.  I need to listen, so that you'll know if I’m a good all round listener, a proper listener, not just someone pretending to be interested, waiting for my turn to counter attack.  Here's the point where you or I will know if we'll be jumping down one another’s throats.

I won't want to put you on high alert, so at first, whatever I'm thinking (about your point of view) I’ll be trying to hide it.  But something is sure to give me away.  And that will put an end to any chance I might have had, to 'dialogue' with you.

Here's where I can so easily go wrong, and blow my cover. I'll give myself away too easily, because I so badly want to make you wrong and make me right.  This probably is my need for revenge, my need to make you feel guilty, saying to myself, “There’s nothing else I can do to stop you doing what you do, but to impose my judgement on you”.  But to you, that wouldn’t make sense, since what you do is quite legal, and you know well enough that, “Everyone’s ‘exploiting animals’ in one way or another, so why pick on me?”

On this subject of ‘the use of animals’, these two opposite judgements always will exist.  Vegans, in search of any powerful argument to back up our judgements, lose sight of what we are supposed to be aiming for - by making justifiable moral judgements, we do judge, but in doing so we lose compassion as well as good sense.  Like, when we hear about the latest coronary heart-disease statistics being associated with consuming large amounts of saturated fats (mainly from meat), it might serve our arguments well, but we fall into the most obvious trap - we appear to have no compassion for the fellow human.  When we don’t express concern for those with heart disease we seem callous, and then our very motives seem dodgy.  We seem untrustworthy.  Our judgement looks uglier than the thing we are judging.