1297:
Anyone who instinctively sees
the urgent need to do something about the way we treat food-animals is going to
have to ignore what they’ve previously been taught about food - they’ll have to
go against their own tastebud-advice, against the advice of corporations,
governments and educators, simply because almost all of them are likely to be
enthusiastic animal-abusers themselves .
The issue of using animals in
the food and clothing industries sits like a lead weight on our collective
conscience - what we do to animals makes monsters of us. I’m ashamed of what I didn’t do, for so
many years. We should all be ashamed of
the way animals are slaughtered, or the way hens are imprisoned in tiny cages
and the way we always pretend not to notice.
The more I learned, the more
ashamed I became, especially when I kept eating the same breakfast, day after
day, having already discovered what it cost certain animals. I'd already found out about newborn calves
being snatched away from their mothers (and shot soon after they’re born) to
allow people like me to have cow’s milk on our corn flakes. I’d already found out about sow stall
restraints. I’d found out about cattle
being mutilated plus a whole list of other horrors. And still I continued to eat my bacon and eggs
and burgers and lamb roasts. Each of the
horrors the animals underwent, I'd learned about, and I knew it reflected badly
on the farmers and food producers. But I was reluctant to take any of the blame,
as a consumer, for giving them my vote by buying their animal produce. I’m only
glad that the second half of my life has been spent trying to undo all those
years of complicity.
Now all this might apply to
you too. There are still so many of us
who have been or still are involved in supporting the animal industries, whilst
we still pretend it doesn’t matter. We
can choose to ignore it all, and no one will notice. We’ll never have to talk about it or be
obliged to address it on any level, since almost everyone else is involved at a
similar level of complicity.
So, this is where we’re stuck.
My taste buds are much the same as
yours. We respond similarly to our
favourite foods. But, now that I’ve
learnt more about what is going on, these ‘horror foods’ weigh more heavily on
my conscience. There’s a sort of
numbness that comes over me when I try to think how sentient animals are
suffering, just so that I can enjoy my meat or my treats. The fact that animals (kept alive only to be
eaten) are presently living in terror, and dying in the most ugly ways
imaginable, should be enough for any of us to act. But alas, we speak the words but don’t walk
the talk. We say “it’s outrageous”,
but we still allow it to happen by allowing our own consumer habits to continue.
By way of some nifty mental gymnastics,
we’re still able to relax around the dinner table and eat what's served up. We keep our minds closed and our mouths open. It’s what we're used to doing, and will
continue to do, until we say, “No longer!”
Perhaps then, we do consider
change. But, when cold hard reality hits, even if we feel outraged, we don’t reckon
we'll have enough willpower to alter our eating habits so radically as to stop
eating ALL animal-based foods, on principle. It’s as if there is no argument powerful
enough to convince us to stop. Neither
ill health nor guilty conscience can stop our 'habit'. Neither will we avoid these products because
of any concern about the environmental impact of animal farming.
But if we do make the
decision to ‘go-vegan’, only then will we find we’ve made the best decision of
our life. It will be the best thing we
could have done for ourselves. By
withdrawing our support from the Animal Industries and freeing ourselves from
the addictive grip of their products, we are doing a major repair job on
ourselves. And simultaneously, we are helping to liberate the enslaved,
'domesticated' animals.
But this habit-switching is
no light matter. If we give up eating
meat one day, the next day we’ll be questioning the whole ethical basis of
animal farming and nutrition! So what
starts out as just a change of diet, now opens up many other significant
changes of attitude.
In my own case, I saw the
advantages of a plant based diet but was fearful of taking the first step. The idea was exciting enough in theory but in
practice it looked scary. But as it
turned out, going vegan was almost like falling in love! The idea of no longer ‘making use of animals’
was so empowering that I found it easily set against the personal doubt about having
enough commitment.
So, to lay it on the line, I
made a list of everything I could think of, to explain to myself exactly what
vegan principle meant to me. It would
mean avoiding thousands of products which I was accustomed to using. And I knew that all this avoiding and
boycotting would mean me having to face up to doing-without, when the
replacement-product wasn’t available.
That is what it came down to.
'Doing-without' was going to be the hard
part; learning to not give in to temptation; facing that particular difficulty
as well as the opprobrium of becoming a social misfit. But all the time, the one thing that I kept
coming back to - my discomfort in all this was nothing compared to the
privations farm animals suffer. Compared
to theirs, any ‘lifestyle difficulty’ I might experience would pale into
insignificance, and would always be hardly worth a mention.
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