Survival and addiction

1449: 

There are two perceptions that always clash.  The omnivore: “What’s worse than vegan food? I can’t stand vegans with their self-righteousness.  They feel superior to anyone who can’t meet their impossible targets.  The vegan: “What’s worse than eating bits of dead animal.  The omnivore's eating habits are so ugly, especially their dominant, meat-eating, cleverest-being-on-the-planet attitude”.

The whole subject of what we eat and why we eat it is a private affair.  It’s no one else’s business, although vegans take on the role of advocating on behalf of the voiceless animals, because they can't speak for themselves.  So, speak we must, I must, if only to counterbalance the overwhelming mindset that says animals are put on Earth for human benefit.  The main job of vegans is to find ways to constructively engage others in dialogue, proposing as carefully as possible the ‘no-touch-animals’ attitude;  it's my belief that humans are not to be trusted around animals because we always take advantage of them.

My main problem, by making this sort of statement, is that I might scare people off, so how I put my words is important.  This tricky subject has to be a non-judgement zone.  For my part, it is to state clearly how I feel without any ‘self’ or self-righteousness creeping into my voice.  “Humans treat these food-animals very badly” – that’s an accepted fact, and I doubt if any omnivore would disagree.  It doesn’t need any colouring, any disapproval in the tone of my voice.  The statement is enough on its own to draw a response.   But to balance things up, I think it helps if we can say something self-denigrating, if only to reinforce a sense of equality between us, so that different views are simply that, so what I say doesn't present an insuperable barrier.  I would attempt to be saying something important, but rather than it sounding like a moral lecture, it’s more effective if I'm able to get just a couple of points across.

For what it’s worth, here’s my view: I don’t think humans hate animals; I don’t think many people are innately violent; I don’t think we have a blood lust; none of us want to be cold-hearted or hard-nosed. There's a potential vegan in every one of us. And at some point in the future the idea of farming animals and eating them or their secretions will be seen to be disgusting. But that is not the culture at present.

Take a sheep farmer or a pastoralist. They live by killing animals, even though they get others to do their killing for them - if they weren’t cold-hearted they couldn’t do what they do to their animals; if they weren’t hardened, they’d be put out of business by their competitors.  But that’s their problem, and it’s not what would concern me, since I would like to see their animal enterprises go belly-up.  My concern is more with the millions of customers of the Animal Industries, who might want to stop using meat and all the other products that come from the animal farm, who might want to find something better.  These are the people who are held back by their own eating habits, their leather shoes and their tacit support of abattoirs.  And these are people who know that once they drop their ‘blood-dependencies’, they will be free to explore a more satisfying purpose-of-existence.

Once the link is broken, between oneself and the ‘hard-nosed’ animal exploiters, one can identify with being a humane human, a helping-guarding type.  Humans are born rescuers, protectors and ‘explorers’.  At heart, many of us are wanna-be farmers.  Never having grown even a radish myself, I still feel a strong primal link to the land, to provide food, to link with Nature and to be non-destructive.

I suspect no one actually likes being part of the animal-destruction business.  There would be few people who enjoy making a living out of betraying an innocent, peace-loving being, by tricking them into believing you care for them only to then put a gun to their heads.

On the other hand, I suspect anyone could be drawn to some form of ethical husbandry - to the provision of basic needs, whilst remaining protective and empathetic to Nature.  That’s why animal farming is inherently ugly and why Animal Rights feels so important as a precept, and why it has to become enshrined in law.