Defending Change

1659: 

When I get bogged down in discussions about the rights and wrongs of using animals for food, I find the fall-back position is “the cruelty of it all” - that's the most persuasive argument. Animal cruelty is always ugly, and surely the systemic use of cruelty-to-animals is the one convention most people would want to be trying to move away from.

         

So, starting from the ‘no-more-cruelty’ position, vegans suggest that we all think about how we put our money into the pockets of those people who do ugly things to animals. If we stop making the rich richer by buying nothing that's animal-based from them, and if enough people do that, these animal-abusers won't get any richer. Or at least, the people in those businesses will be encouraged to move into a more humane business.

         

It’s our finest hour when we convince people to spend their money more wisely by no longer, ever, buying crap products and unethical stuff. But, to convince?

         

In a supermarket survey I did a few years ago, covering about seven and a half thousand individual shelf items, three thousand of them were either wholly from animals or contained animal ingredients.

         

By breaking the ‘animal’ cycle, we can allow another cycle to begin. Going vegan is the start of both a personal turn-around as well as a more widespread world recovery programme. If we don't break with old habits, if we continue buying items with animal derivatives, we ally ourselves with some of the most destructive forces on the planet. If we remain as omnivores, we are refusing to see that veganism can make a difference. It’s rather as if we’re saying to our self that the idea is too way out, that it’s never going to catch on, that it's rigid and socially isolating. And then, searching for more justification for not changing, we say that ‘Going Vegan’ looks too bleak. Inevitably that sort of not-worth-doing-belief makes everyone feel powerless, which is just how the powerful want us to feel.

         

To get this knot of defeatism untied, we need to imagine overcoming the odds. These odds seem, at first glance, so stacked against us that we almost feel ridiculous for being optimistic about Animal Rights. Again, that's just what 'they' want - psychologically, the intention is to make us lose hope that any change can occur.