Brave

1576: Posted Sunday 20th December

To stand up for animals you have to be vegan, and to be vegan you have to be brave. Not grim, not bitter, not angry, just quietly brave. No tickets on yourself, no sense of being better than anyone else, just calmly brave. Being vegan is not for the faint hearted.

         

Often vegans have to say “no”. No to meat, no I won’t go with you to the zoo, no to a simple ice cream on a hot day. To us it’s straightforward why we say no. But to others we may seem anti-social, as if we don’t want to join in, as if we’re stand-offish. Being vegan is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot, socially. Soon enough we get a reputation. And if we do get invited round to dinner it’s likely we say “no”, because of the problems it will cause.

         

Whenever I do mix and my ‘vegan status’ is known, it’s apparent that people say things to me they don’t always mean. I hear them tell me they admire what I stand for. “Well done” and “I wish I could do it myself”, but beneath their praise their alarm bells ring – “Avoid this one, he’s a tree-hugger” (or whatever they see me as). After a while, I’ve noticed that dinner invitations dry up. Why would anyone want a vegan to come round for dinner? Imagine the problems of cooking special dishes for a vegan who doesn’t appreciate the effort or worse, who tries to discuss with others at the table ‘the principles behind a plant-based diet’. “Booorring”

         

By standing up for animals, very often I’ll be going it alone. No friends to back me up, and I can’t expect cows and chickens to give me much encouragement. It’s all got to come from within myself. I have to be able to withstand people’s lack of sympathy but also the market’s lack of suitable replacement products. Food and clothing depend so heavily on the Animal Industries that alternatives often don’t exist. So I have to search for products and pay more for them too, because there is such a small market demand for them.

         

On top of all this, I need to support the efforts of other vegans who are trying to raise public awareness. And that’s a problem. The pressures of society are so great that just to be vegan is hard enough without needing to be supportive of other vegans. But it is essential – I may be on top of my diet (and clothing choices) but we all need the sort of help that can only come from fellow vegans. The energy I get from my vegan mates helps me keep up the pressure of being an animal advocate.

         

There is little discussion here in Australia about the necessity of moving away from animal use. Animal activism is generally concentrated on the worst abuses of animals on factory farms and in vivisection laboratories. It doesn’t address the wider problem of fundamental attitude change. And yet if this were established, if it became the fashion to boycott anything coming out of the animal industries, we’d see everything else follow on from that. Once vegan principle is established in the hearts and minds of the consumer, the markets would accommodate that - the abattoirs would close and the animals farms would go bust, the animal labs would be defunded and the zoos would be shut down. We’d even be less inclined to acquire pets, become less needy for companion animals and therefore help to dry up the pet trade and the pet-meat trade. But at present we have a very piecemeal approach to the whole problem. There are still too few people willing to rally to the call for a thorough uprooting of animal exploitation. And so, true to human form, things stay much the same.