Learning about Animal Rights and Human Bodies

1696: 

Edited by CJ Tointon

We can't necessarily trust what we've been taught. It's not that teachers and parents are liars; it's just that they don't always know the truth and they don't want to be seen as fallible or ill-informed.

Every major issue (particularly issues which impact on our private lives) needs to be reassessed. We need to run them past our own instincts, our own consciences. If we ever get to the point where we are sure (as vegans are about NOT EXPLOITING ANIMALS) we can then apply our sureness to our daily lives. Once we're doing this, we're in a position to pass on our new-found truth to others as a set of precepts which they can test out for themselves. I suppose we all pass on what we believe in, hoping that others will see our logic and hopefully become enthusiastic about what we are saying. In passing information on, however, we have to compete with other disciplines, each of which is vying for the public ear.

It's much easier to pass on an over-simplistic principle (don't eat animals - it's bad for your health) than expound fundamental principles (don't eat animals - it's unethical). If we are talking about the more difficult-to-accept principles; then we need to be particularly inspiring and informative. And if that needs some technique, some research and some self-confidence, it also needs us to not sound too full of ourselves. Above all, we can't afford to have any dodgy habits, double standards or obvious vulnerabilities ourselves. We have to be squeaky clean, especially if we're trying to convince people to give up habits of a lifetime - namely, the use of animals to enhance one's lifestyle.

Because 'Animal Rights' is a rather foreign concept to most people; those of us who aspire to be advocates for animals need to have useful facts at hand for those who want them (like how to prepare meals every day without using animal products). We also need to know how to 'hold back' so as not to overwhelm people with too much information - especially those who are less willing to listen! We need to let them know the essentials without going on and on about it. We aren't trying to push our way into peoples' private worlds after all and we aren't in the business of making value judgments of those who don't agree with us. If someone isn't ready to change their diet or make ethical changes of attitude, we need to be able to accept that if only because there's just no point in trying to persuade the unpersuadable.

For newcomers to Animal Rights and Veganism, there's a lot to investigate, not only about cruelty to animals, but about the nutritional and environmental consequences of animal farming and animal eating. All this new learning may seem like a hard slog and it's our job to emphasise that there are a great many personal rewards to be found in becoming a true vegetarian (i.e. a vegan). We probably show two main characteristics - we respect our physical bodies (we don't poison them) and we are prepared to find out about current practices of animal exploitation. Once people get used to better types of food, they'll no doubt experience greater health and energy benefits. At the same time, they'll start to understand the part vegans play in fighting for a great cause - something most people neglect to address.

By taking up this important cause, we enter a world of great personal satisfaction. Here is something substantial to think about, talk about and feel proud about! It's no small thing to become conscious of the plight of sentient animals and at the same time look after this wonderful 'machinery' we all have - our own bodies and our own consciences.

Changing attitude

1695: 

Despite the die-hard meat-eating of our society there are still many people who have taken up a diet that’s entirely plant-based. And let it be said that animal advocates have done a lot of good work showing people how to prepare plant-based foods. But it’s been piecemeal. There hasn’t been a general shift in attitude in our society. Mass habit-change just hasn’t happened. There isn’t enough empathy for the plight of animals and there’s more than enough temptation to keep diets the way they are, with so much rich and tasty foodstuffs available. Without greater empathy nothing much will change. We might succeed in breaking some of the inertia, our efforts might improve the worst farm conditions, we may even get people to take up healthy vegan diets, and that will be a great step forward but it will be nowhere near enough to make much difference.

         

The problem is deeper, a ‘million years’ deep in fact; the habit of using animals for food is planted so firmly in our psyche, that no simple dietary shift or welfare improvement will ever impact strongly enough on Society’s habits, unless it is accompanied by an expansion of empathy, for both animals and those children who remain largely ignorant about all this.

         

The Animal Rights movement, as distinct from the animal welfare organisations, is all about abolishing of the use of animals to benefit our own lives. We set the example, not to save our own skins but to help our species evolve to greater consciousness. By eating and wearing and using commodities which are NOT from animals, we promote the ending of reliance upon animals. Just as the abolitionists’ attitude towards human rights was about ending human slavery (in the Slavery Abolition Act of almost two hundred years ago), we too need to bring about large-scale attitudinal change with animal liberation.

The liberation movement is facing one main obstacle; people are attached to what they are eating (and what they’re wearing) and they fear the radical loss of access to those food and clothing items. But these are changing times, and people are beginning to realise that we have to DO something if we want to avoid the danger of ‘social meltdown’; our ethics are looking threadbare and the planet itself is teetering on the edge of irreparable damage. We have to get used to giving up things which, up to now, we’ve taken for granted.

If radical change is necessary, we must examine the norm, the bad habits, our common weaknesses. Whether it’s burning fossil fuels (wrecking the planet) or eating dangerous foods (detrimental to health) or being unconcerned about animal gulags, we will have to face all this damage that we’ve caused.

The factors linking all the main issues of our day reflect upon human nature, and particularly our taste for high living and maintaining an animal-dependant lifestyle. It’s not just a matter of meat-eaters giving up meat or vegetarians giving up eggs and cheese. It is for the ‘example-setters’ to show what can be done, by simply changing one single attitude, based on the idea of animals being irreplaceable individuals, just as humans are. By adopting a no-using-animals policy, we recognize them as sovereign beings who should not be seen merely as commodities here for our convenience, or as resources to enhance our lifestyle.

Guiding young people

1694: 

School canteens: places where nearly every student goes to on a regular basis, to pay for what passes for food. Some canteens provide a valuable service and are improving, but all of them have to run as a business – they provide foods which students are used to and will pay for. Mostly, school canteens perpetuate poor food habits. They still offer salty meat dishes, sugary desserts and sweet confections. But there is a move towards providing healthier foods. Salads and fruit dishes are starting to appear on the menu, but animal foods still predominate. Substantial, savoury plant-based dishes are rare; although in fairness, a vegan meal can be ordered in advance at some school canteens.

But generally, young people are not being introduced to healthy eating, let alone being encouraged to avoid the ‘cruelty-foods’. They are not learning much about what they're putting into their bodies or about the health-giving qualities of non-animal-based food. Teachers and parents could be taking the lead ... if it really were their lead. But knowledge is thin, and the nutritionists are reluctant to speak out against animal foods for fear of losing professional credibility. Or worse, for fear of losing their animal-industry sponsorship. No one wants to offend food traditions; meat and dairy choices are prominent on every school's canteen menu. The most recognizable dishes are the best sellers. And if they're popular with students, they’re also cheaper to make, since their highly subsidised animal-ingredients are so readily available. And volunteer canteen staff  may only know how to prepare meat- and dairy-based dishes. Few know how to prepare attractive, main-course, plant-based dishes.

Ideally, school teachers (many of whom students already trust) could be teaching their students about healthy foods, introducing young people to a plant-based regimen and telling them about the horrors of life down on Animal Farm; but they probably know as little about nutrition as they do modern-day animal husbandry. And they aren't keen to promote vegetarian foods anyway, since they probably eat meat themselves.

Therefore it’s down to those who have a ‘clean slate’ and the information at hand, to inform kids about animal farming and the dangers of animal protein. But many of us are not teachers or have access to young people. So until there are enough parents and school teachers who are at least practising vegans, kids won't get to know what they need to know, at least not until they are old enough to discover things for themselves. By which time too many bad food habits will have become entrenched.

For children and adults alike, there’s so much ground to cover and so much to learn. Being seduced by, addicted to or craving certain foods, holds most people back from contemplating the possibility of an ethical diet. Apart from animals suffering, it's the young people who're suffering, from a severe lack of responsible and enlightened guidance.

Pitching to the grown ups

1693: 

The Animal Rights movement aims to grant every animal the right to an unenslaved life. It is still a young movement, in the process of formation, and peopled by passionate and good-hearted activists, who no longer use animals either for food or clothing. But these same people, who step away from conventional lifestyle habits, to advocate for ‘the voiceless’, often meet with limited success. They gradually find out what resistance they're up against.

The Movement has made some considerable impact in USA and parts of Europe, but to date it has made less impact in Australia. I like to think we are a more discerning race of people here, uncomfortable about being told what to do and what we should eat; you can’t win-over most Australians with a few slick, fundamentalist arguments. But the thinking-Australian is also savvy enough to know this to be a more far-reaching problem than first meets the eye. Perhaps we here need more time to consider this great issue.

         

But wherever we’re from, we all face the same conundrum - we know how tempting it is to use animals, to eat them and wear them. But we also know that using animal products involves ingrained habits. From earliest childhood we've all been eating them and wearing them. And now that we are better informed, we know that using animals is testing our compassion and empathy, not to mention the small matter of our health. As well, we know the use of these products threatens the ecological health of the planet.

         

As Australian animal advocates, we might need a more sophisticated approach than our colleagues overseas. It isn’t enough that we merely encourage people to take up vegan diets. We have to show our hand more completely, to help people see animals in a different light, in order to empathise with their suffering, and in order to recognise how humans are suffering too, because of the way we treat them.

It’s tricky for those of us in the persuading game. Too much finger wagging makes people turn off. Too soft a voice and we’re ignored. But it’s not our job to tell intelligent and self-willed people what they should or should not be eating or using. We should encourage them to investigate and become their own judge and jury, so they can come to their own conclusions. Independent adults must be allowed to decide for themselves. Young people too must be given the chance to understand what’s going on, so that when they are old enough to decide for themselves, they can make informed decisions. 

Children recruited into animal cruelty

1692:

Those of us who don’t subscribe to the supremacy of economic rationalism, who think all using of animals is wrong, also realise that animal protein is unnecessary. It is often harmful to health, especially in the overindulgent way it is consumed in the West. We also see it as a tragedy for both animals and young people, since each are powerless victims of the human habit of consuming animal-based foods.

Kids can’t fend for themselves. They must do as they’re told and eat what they’re given. Almost every child is misinformed or kept uninformed about how animal-based foods are produced.  Consequently, they come to believe what they are told, by adults, that it is necessary to farm animals for food. They grow up being told little about what life is like for farm animals. In fact most adults also know very little, since everything is kept secret. These days almost no one is encouraged to study animal farming or visit intensive farms or abattoirs.

         

If we, as a society, weren’t ashamed of our treatment of farm animals, we’d allow and encourage students to see it all for themselves, at every stage of the processing of animals for food. Children would be taken to factory farms and processing plants and shown how meat, milk and eggs are produced. Then, when they are old enough, they’d be in a better position to decide for themselves whether they should use food produced from animals. But since that would likely have a serious affect on  the fortunes of the animal-food market, it doesn’t happen!

The economic rationale behind animal cruelty

1691: 

In this present day society, we are guided less by ethics and more by economics. From a need for food-energy comes the idea that high-energy-food comes from animals, and that if we want to enjoy the advantage of this sort of energy, then to produce it our methods must be economically viable. If we accept that, we can move onto the next step, of believing it’s okay for ‘food’ animals to be held captive for their whole life. And better still, to keep them virtually immobilized, to speed-up growth, to minimise the amount of land needed to house them and to maximize their energy-giving properties. The poultry sheds and cattle feedlots are testament to that logic, in that they depend for their economic success on restricting the animal’s bodily movements, to make fattening them more efficient. Nothing else makes economic sense.

The typical intensive system must not be criticized if we want cheap meat, cheap eggs and cheap milk! - hence the tacit public approval for treating animals this way, in exchange for products being available and affordable.

Butchering your friends

1690: 

You might have seen it already, but if you haven't, there's a local newspaper here in Sydney, the North Shore Times - it's front page had a picture of seven teenage girls from Pymble Ladies College standing in front of two steers who they raised, and named Lionel and Lenny. You can see on the girls' faces a beaming smile that would melt your heart. The only trouble is that Lenny and Lionel are no longer alive. In fact, along with a man in the photograph (presumably the butcher) the animals are now just two sad carcasses, each hanging by their legs on hooks. Are these girls being introduced to the butchering trade? I doubt if these girls would be smiling so brightly if they'd had to slaughter their two friends.

Some children can be brainwashed into thinking that animals should be turned into meat. Does that mean they can love them when alive and in a different way still love them, as meat? Does it mean that they can erase from their minds the intervening process at the abattoir? Are these girls expected to imagine their friends being slaughtered 'humanely', without experiencing the killing for themselves?

To let these girls see their friends being killed would be considered by their teachers and parents to be far too disturbing for children. So how suggestible are these girls, and what exactly has been suggested to them? Probably, they've been told that killing animals is essential if they want to continue eating them. That might sound fair enough, but if we follow that line of logic through, we arrive at a point where violence is acceptable when it fulfils a need and presumably in this case, meat is a 'need'. Could we then go one step further and say that sexual intercourse is a valid 'need' for male soldiers. So when they're denied the company of their women folk, it's quite acceptable for them to find women and girls and rape them? It fulfils a need, as meat does, and justifies the violence against the innocent, be they vulnerable animals or vulnerable humans.

PS - A copy of this blog has been sent to the Principal of PLC with an accompanying letter

Be normal, eat animals

1689: 

It’s an irrefutable fact that almost every human on the planet eats meat and/or uses animal products! The idea that animals may be used for food, is universally accepted. The habit of using animals for food and many other services is deeply embedded in the human psyche. This Goliath seems unconquerable, and yet the idea of Animal Rights has reached a considerable number of people and inspired them to advocate for these animals; they’ve decided for themselves that they’ll no longer be party to animal exploitation. A recent survey by the Vegetarian Resources Group in USA, shows that 1% are practising vegans, and so it seems that, against all odds, the ‘Rights’ movement is gaining ground. But to reach the majority, who are not as sensitive, who are less empathetic or more animal-food addicted, we ‘advocates’ might need to revise our persuasion-approach. Our near-impossible task is to persuade the majority of practising omnivores, comprising 99% of the population, to think for themselves.

Let’s put it this way, when it comes to food, almost no one is in full control of their own choices. We seem to have a primal urge to conform to majority behaviour. More than anything, people want to be seen as ‘normal’, and don’t want to stand out as being fussy about food or to be thought of as food-wowsers. To underline our ‘regular guy’ image, people believe that what is normal just has to be ethically okay, otherwise everyone would surely reject it. From that belief comes a blind acceptance of a few dangerous beliefs. Firstly, that animals bred for food are NOT like our companion animals at home; they are too dumb to feel things that our dogs and cats feel. Secondly, that since unloved pigs and cows and chickens are brought into this world solely for the use of humans, that they will respect their destiny and humans will deem it  okay to enslave them and brutally kill them. The common belief is that these ‘farm’ animals wouldn’t appreciate having a normal animal life. And, if we believe this then it’s not difficult to build a case for accepting any level of atrocity which might help to keep prices low for their products. All we need to do is treat them like inanimate objects and forget they are in any way sentient. Like us.

Self preservation

1688: 

Most people are unwilling to step so boldly away from convention by taking up a vegan lifestyle, especially if it means giving up their favourite foods. At best, they are afraid of living for the rest of their lives on (and suffering ‘deficiency’ from) a plant-based diet. At worst, they are in ‘atrocity-denial’ - ignoring what's being done to animals by the food industry. Either way, through fear or indifference, they’re playing dangerous mind games with themselves.

Maybe they do realize the truth of what vegans are saying but find that it's inconsistent with their lifestyle. This is psychologically uncomfortable so they do their best to ignore us. They may be afraid of an arising fashion, that if a break-through were made in the public’s acceptance of Animal Rights, it would spell the end of animal farming. That would mean no more meat and none of the thousands of animal-based commodities widely available today. In foreseeing this, people are inclined to vigorously defend their lifestyle and do whatever is necessary to guarantee supplies of their favourite foods. More importantly, they’ll resist everything we are saying about 'the atrocity', which is probably why people pre-emptively shy away from discussing with us anything to do with animals that are used for food.

Subjective Perceptions

1687: 

 Edited by CJ Tointon

Those of us who advocate rights for animals, try every known argument to persuade people to abandon animal-based foods and commodities. We know, however, that things won't change until there's an 'attitude change' - a recognition of what sentience means, what innocence means. There has to be a spiritual revolution!
In the meantime, all vegans can do is present their case - and wait! It's important to be patient, to have a credible 'argument' at our fingertips and to be ready when an opportunity arises or a question is asked. When our 'freedom loving', 'self-willed' omnivore friends require it; we must be able to come up with good arguments and have the facts with which to back them up.

Using well researched facts, we can expose the ugly horrors, appeal to peoples' sense of compassion and explain in detail why animal by-products involve cruelty and damage to health. We can emphasise the greenhouse implications of animal farming.  We can suggest attractive (and inexpensive) non-animal foods and recommend non-animal derived clothing and footwear.

But in the end, it comes down to 'perception'. For me, the smell of frying bacon is disgusting and I just want to get away from it! For those who eat bacon, however, it's a most seductive smell. These arguments - the warmth of wool, the look of leather, the smoke of the BBQ - are very subjective. So are 'ethics'. I regard animals as sovereign, irreplaceable individuals. You might think of them as dumb beasts with no individual personalities, put on this earth for humans to use as they will. Indeed, you might believe that they don't have brains (like ours), don't feel (like we do), don't have our sensitivity and can't foresee their own destiny at the abattoir. How can vegans get over that perception barrier? 

When advocating that animals deserve to be granted 'rights'; perhaps the strongest position vegans can take is that the attachment to animal products is a weakness and like any weakness, humans can find justification for it. But this one clashes with the common instinct for non-violence. Most of us aspire to gentleness. In our daily dealings, we think of ourselves as mostly kind, generous, loving and peaceful (it's rather stupid to be otherwise). We also realise that there's a great deal of violence in our society and we want to disassociate from it. And that's where we hit a brick wall! 

We can't understand the 'schizo' in our own thinking! How can our 'little weaknesses' turn into such extremes of violence when practised by others? We can't (or won't) see how it's all connected. We even have the ability to participate in a common 'violent' practice (eating meat) without feeling any responsibility. In the case of animal use, we justify the way they're badly treated because they are useful to us. It seems we are capable of accepting that 'usefulness' can trump 'ethics'. Instead of protecting them (as we would children or the disabled) we allow them to be exploited in our name. We may not approve of bullying, but it helps to know that they can't fight back - and it's just too tempting to take whatever we can get from them! The ease with which we enslave animals should make us just a little suspicious? It should alert us to be their guardians - not their jailers!

It's temptation that does the damage! The shame of what we do and what we're implicated in, might be great; but we can't get over our attraction to the yummy foods and attractive clothing only made possible by the killing and exploitation of a whole range of animals. We can enjoy animals, love animals, use them and eat them; but that's only possible if we can forget the social injustice of enslaving them in the first place!

Denial

1686: 

By their use of animal foods and by supporting the way animals are treated, most people are in denial. They protect themselves by only-doing-what-others-do. If they practise same-behaviour, then they also turn a blind eye to the suffering of these ‘food animals’. The main obstacle facing animal liberation is that there are so many people still supporting the animal trade; it’s not only ‘most’ people, it’s almost ALL of the world's population. There's safety in numbers; everyone wanting to preserve the status quo, knowing that if the flood gates of dissent were to open even a crack, that there'd be a mass disturbance. People would start to consider the part animals play in our Society; they'd experience a disturbing realisation, that so many goods and services could be put on the politically-incorrect list that life as we know it would be virtually unrecognizable. Food would alter, confections would change, shoes would be different as would a lot of our warm clothing and bed coverings. And if such changes meant an entirely different lifestyle, imagine how attitudes would have to change to keep pace. Only then, when change was unalterable would people be open to what Animal Rightists have to say. 

What? No more meat, or milk, or eggs?

1678: 

For those people who find giving up animal products difficult to contemplate there is a dilemma. To stop eating meat but continuing eating cheese doesn’t mean we lead a cruelty-free life. The thousands of products on the market, making use of milk and eggs, perpetuates the dairy and egg industry. And a cruel business it is, for the animals concerned. Imagine a biscuit – one of the ‘essential’ ingredients is egg, laid by a caged bird (biscuit manufacturers don’t use free-range eggs!). If there’s milk involved in the recipe that won’t be a plant-based milk but milk from the cow. And she has her milk mechanically sucked out of her udder, milk which should be feeding her calf (the calf usually having to be got rid of). That very simply is the situation for all egg-milk producers. Lacto-ovo vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they do far more for farm animals than their meat-eating friends. But because not all exploited animals are reared for meat, it is debatable as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately has his/her life brutally terminated at the abattoir. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat, they each live in confinement and each die a terrible death. The milk or egg producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.

The killing process we never get to see

1684:

Humans enjoy eating animals and animal by-products. We wear their skins and skin coverings. We experiment with them to test the safety of drugs and cosmetics. We downplay empathy for animals and emphasise the need for a more cold-hearted, pragmatic attitude. Perhaps we regard animals as the spoils of a war. This is, after all, a war being waged against them, and they are our trophies. We eat and exploit animals as a celebration of our status as the ‘dominant’ species.

         

Animal-based foods are eaten at almost every meal. We have a ‘couldn’t-care-less’ attitude about these animals, and this won’t change until we see how ugly the whole system is and what we are buying into.

         

We need to remind ourselves what actually happens to the animals we are about to eat. Lobsters and crabs are boiled alive, fish are slowly suffocated or crushed under the weight of other caught fish, chickens are hung upside down by their legs, and carried on conveyors, one behind the other, to have their throats cut by revolving blades. Cattle have a bolt fired into their foreheads before they have their throats cut and are bled to death. Pigs have electrified tongs clamped to their heads to immobilize them before being knifed. Male chicks are thrown live into mincing machines because they are useless to the egg-laying industry, and so it goes on.

         

The way in which we kill and mutilate animals is cruel by any standard and yet the consumer accepts this as part of the essential food that they must have. The supermarket trolley, filled with styrofoam packets of the muscle tissue of killed animals, are a familiar sight in the supermarket. (We never get to see the whole of a dead animal, unless with fish, where often their whole bodies can be seen, dead, laid on ice and gutted. As gruesome as the sight of a dead fish might be, it’s such a familiar sight that the customer doesn’t turn a hair).

         

The way these animals are caught or killed at abattoirs is not often witnessed, the customer only sees the body of the dead animal when it has been cut up and packaged, by which time it bears no resemblance at all to the whole animal. We never get to see the animal in the process of dying; the animal is either fully alive or fully dead. That’s a long way from being personally involved in the complete process. It’s a very long way from fulfilling our hunting instinct which involved stalking, killing, skinning and butchering.

         

Today we eat animals that have been caught or imprisoned by other people and then killed and butchered by others too. We’re not too fussy how it all happens, just as long as we don’t have to know too much about it. If we use animals for food or clothing we comply with an industry that cares nothing about the feelings of the animals they use; they simply coral, breed, fatten and execute them for us. Our hands are clean, our consciences numbed.

Killing in the wild & Angling

1683: 

Once upon a time people were more in touch with how animal foods came to them. Long before ‘food animals’ were held in captivity they were hunted, and without the use of high-powered rifles and four wheel drive vehicles. Back then hunting might have been essential for survival, but now it isn’t. There is a kangaroo meat industry providing income in rural areas but mostly wild animal hunting is done for pleasure. Some Australian governments are even encouraging this ‘sport’ in National Parks, allowing people to shoot at ‘feral’ animals, causing terrible injuries to the animals themselves and putting the park at risk for human visitors.

In our local harbour park, there are often a line of rods propped against the sea wall, dangerous for passing fish, dangerous as the barbed hooks on fishing lines are flicked backwards into the path of other park users who get too near. This is angling for recreation. Meanwhile commercial fishing harms whole fish populations. The fishing industry is denuding the oceans of fish with trawl nets hundreds of meters in length, dredging up both target fish and many other non-target sea creatures which are either badly injured when caught and dragged to the surface in the nets or which die in the process. Ecologically the damage to the sea environment by large-scale fishing is well known, but little is being done about it. The reason being that most of the human population eats fish; we have a vested interest in the continuation of commercial fishing.

On a smaller scale, the very popular pastime of angling is anything but benign. Our next door neighbour hangs his fishing rod over the sea wall to relax from his stressful job, as a chef. He’s an intelligent, kind man and probably never thinks for a moment that the fish he catches are sentient creatures who share with us very similar pain receptors and nervous systems. He may not realize or want to know that the fish he hooks, once landed will slowly suffocate to death over a period of twenty or so minutes.

         

He (like thousands of others) fishes for fun, unconcerned about how a fish may feel when a barbed hook pierces its mouth and is hauled out of the water and left to die a slow death. As a chef he’s dealing with animals all the time, but his ‘working-animals’ are already dead. He doesn’t have to make any connection between the living creature and the body parts he uses. He simply cooks what his customers ask for (which is mostly meat, sea foods and rich dairy concoctions) without any thought of animals suffering or dying. We become immured to the dying process, so it's likely that most people who go fishing care nothing for the creatures they ‘catch’. It doesn’t occur to them that they are causing such suffering to the fish.

Cognitive Dissonance

1682: 

Edited by CJ Tointon

These days, the burning question for vegans is: "Why are so few people becoming vegan?" We find it difficult to understand. It's disappointing. It highlights two specific forces of human life: the need to make life easier and the need to aspire to do what is noble (however difficult that may be). We can live for pleasure, but we should also live to develop the self.

We all defend our 'self' concept. We build values to suit it. We might see ourselves as logical, fair-minded, kind and intelligent; but to live our values requires self discipline. It affects our daily lifestyle and the choices we make - shopping in particular. We choose what food and clothing to buy with every intention of bringing a positive effect into our lives. But when we buy food and clothing derived from animals, it not only impacts negatively on them, it impacts negatively on us. In order to maintain a benign self-image and keep our positive values, we have to find ways to disassociate ourselves from the abuse of animals. 

A 'value' can't be 'un-valued' to suit circumstances. This is hypocrisy and means we have double standards or an inconsistency. According to theory, humans strive for internal consistency and become psychologically uncomfortable when they experience inconsistency (dissonance). Vegans expose this double standard by asking the question: "If you say you love animals, why do you kill them and eat them?" On the one hand you are just serving the 'wants' of your stomach. On the other, you are attempting to uphold your ethical values. With such a contradiction, attempts should be made to reduce dissonance by bringing cognitions and actions in-line with one another.

When we come up against opposing 'animal welfare' beliefs, we are faced with certain options. We can stop eating and using animals (as vegans do). We can justify our actions (somewhat) by doing 'good works' elsewhere to balance things up. Or we can try to ignore or deny any information that conflicts with our existing beliefs.

Vegetarians face this very predicament when they try to deny the cruelty associated with milk production. Our society makes heavy use of milk. We drink it, make butter, cheese and yoghurt from it. We have it in our tea and coffee and on our breakfast cereal and we find it as an ingredient in literally hundreds of popular food products. So when vegetarians learn about the cruelty of the dairy industry, they try to justify their use of milk products. In so doing, they experience cognitive dissonance. The attempt to resolve this might lead to a phenomenon known as 'adaptive preference formation'. When the idea of becoming vegan seems unattainable, it is criticised; thus highlighting the struggle between our real self and our concept of self and how we would ideally like to be and think. 

Another aspect of this affects some vegans who believe that being vegan protects them from illness. Eating poor quality plant-based food, whilst being ethical, doesn't necessarily protect us from ill health. The food might be filling, tasty and easy to digest, but sometimes it's full of sugar or salt or fat or it's processed and therefore lifeless. If one has invested in a 'vegan position', one may not like to hear any criticism of such an ethical diet. 

Denial of information is most pronounced where cruelty or danger is worst. The shearing of sheep brings warmth to the human; but exposes the animal (from whom we stole the wool) to cold. For our own values to remain consistent, we must believe that the sheep doesn't suffer when having no protective covering. But it's rather like us walking about the hillsides at night, in the cold, in our underpants! We may think the leather of our shoes is merely 'what's left over from a carcass used primarily for meat', but it's an all too easy belief that wouldn't stand up to much scrutiny.

Perhaps the cruellest farming practices are linked with that most useful food item - the egg. Here we find the greatest contradiction of values, where decision-making is most severely put to the test. Here's where the greatest of food attractions (the traditional breakfast egg or the egg ingredients of the light, fluffy cakes we like to eat) clashes with the most insidious cruelty connected with the egg industry. The birds who produce most of our eggs live in conditions of unbreathable air and filth. They are so cramped that they are unable to move. They're no longer regarded as living beings, but as egg-producing-machines. Everything that the noble bird had (apart from her biological egg-laying function) has been stripped from her; leaving her with no identity and no quality of life. So when we choose an 'eggy' breakfast or eat a delicious cake, we doom the hen to the anguish of acute claustrophobia and an inevitable terrifying execution when she stops laying. For those whose choice is to still eat egg products, the cognition of that choice brings with it a dissonance which is impossible to resolve. 

Wild animals used for food

1681: 

In my local supermarket, at the meat counter, I see that there are some ‘wild’ products - notably kangaroo meat. They stock various cuts of kangaroo including fillets, steaks, minced meat and 'kanga bangas'  (kangaroo sausages). While some kangaroo is sold for human consumption it is mainly sold as dog meat.        

People don’t really want to know what happens to these animals when they are being hunted. The kangaroo here in Australia is a wild creature. It is not farmed because it can’t be domesticated or fenced in or made docile in captivity, so the teams of hunters go out at night, and in the glare of spotlights the kangaroos are shot at. Their young, too small to be useful, are clubbed to death or left alive for predators to kill. Perhaps the killing of these animals supplements the income of farmers but I suspect there’s some pleasure involved in the ‘sport’ of kangaroo-shooting.

By-products that are used for food

1680: 

Where is your cut-off point? Unless you feel a strong enough empathic connection with the dairy cow or the egg-laying hen, it’s likely you’ll make a decision to keep using animal by-products. If you feel strongly about liberating animals in general, all forms of animal abuse must be tackled.

Because people have most difficulty in giving up dairy products, they don’t look at the ethics of milk production. It’s because of that reluctance that Animal Rights can’t get a foothold. Unless a by-product boycott is established, no amount 'no-meat-eating' will free farm animals.

In the end it all comes down to denouncing all animal use, not just some of it.

Milk and eggs are a big part of daily life, along with cheese, butter, cream, yoghurt, cake, and a vast array of confectionary. Animal by-products are regarded as benign, as if anything so useful or so delicious could ever be tainted, and yet ethically, and also nutritionally, these products are dangerous. The animals who produce them suffer as do the humans who ingest them. Certainly, behind the production of both milk and eggs is an ugly system of animal abuse.

Dairy products particularly are hard to ignore because they’ve insinuated themselves into so many foods and confections. For example, if you read the ingredients label on almost any commercial cake or biscuit, you’ll find that ‘milk products’ (and/or ‘egg products’) have been used. I once counted over two hundred supermarket food items which contained milk or egg. I suspect that most people would not be prepared to deny themselves that many food items for ethical reasons.

Today we may be well informed, but temptation is great. "A silent battle rages for self-control in a world of endless temptation" (Jessica Irvine). Few people boycott dairy products or egg ingredients because of the way cows and hens are treated. Most times we purposely remain uninformed; we choose to remain ignorant to avoid the inconvenience of ruling out certain favourite food items. 

Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarianism

1679: 

Edited by CJ Tointon

Here's a quote from the first vegan publication back in the 1940's: "Lacto-Vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh eating and a truly humane, civilised diet … we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the full journey".

Vegetarianism is often as far as many people will go. They don't wish to look any deeper in case they find out more than they bargained for. They don't want to put 'milk and egg production' in the same category of cruelty as they do 'meat'. If they did, they should logically determine that they would have to become vegan!  Milk is a product derived from animal cruelty. It is also a dangerously misrepresented substance. It's promoted as being a good source of calcium, whereas in reality, it has the opposite effect. It leaches calcium from the bones. And it's a processed food, which means it's pasteurised and homogenised. These processes further alter milk's chemistry and actually increase its detrimental acidifying effects.

But milk is a problem on another level. It's ubiquitous. It turns up as an ingredient in many popular food items. It's likely that users of milk will not want to know any details about the animal cruelty involved in its production. They stick with the line: "If cows weren't milked they'd die" and they ignore the rest of the story. 

The biological details of milk production go something like this:  A cow's biology determines the quantity of milk she produces. Whilst there's normally very little milk being produced; this alters when the cow becomes pregnant - she makes lots of it! Once impregnated and after giving birth to a calf, her mammary glands go into overdrive. This is just what the 'dairy farmer' wants. A male calf, however, is regarded as a dispensable item after having served his main purpose in utero and he's killed just after birth to allow the huge quantities of his mother's milk to be diverted - for human consumption! Sometimes a female calf will be 'trained' to replace her mother as a milking cow. With continuous impregnation (calf bearing), subsequent loss of her calves plus constant milking, she is soon exhausted and her milk yield becomes so low as to make her no longer economically viable. She will live only ten of her normally twenty years before being sent off for slaughter. That's the thanks she gets for producing vast quantities of milk for the farmers and their milk-drinking customers! It's an ugly story that omnivores often don't want to hear.

I suspect many so-called 'Animal Welfare' Organisations don't want to hear this story either, since it would oblige them to speak out against the dairy industry. To keep their membership happy (and retain their integrity) they prefer to concentrate on 'factory farming' and the 'evils of meat eating'. They promote vegetarianism in order to win substantial support from the general public, but rarely speak out against the broader welfare issues. They fear losing the support of milk drinkers and egg eaters and the users of the many thousands of commercial foodstuffs loaded with these products. 

What? No more meat, or milk, or eggs?

1678: 

For those people who find giving up animal products difficult to contemplate there is a dilemma. To stop eating meat but continuing eating cheese doesn’t mean we lead a cruelty-free life. The thousands of products on the market, making use of milk and eggs, perpetuates the dairy and egg industry. And a cruel business it is, for the animals concerned. Imagine a biscuit – one of the ‘essential’ ingredients is egg, laid by a caged bird (biscuit manufacturers don’t use free-range eggs!). If there’s milk involved in the recipe that won’t be a plant-based milk but milk from the cow. And she has her milk mechanically sucked out of her udder, milk which should be feeding her calf (the calf usually having to be got rid of). That very simply is the situation for all egg-milk producers. Lacto-ovo vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they do far more for farm animals than their meat-eating friends. But because not all exploited animals are reared for meat, it is debatable as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately has his/her life brutally terminated at the abattoir. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat, they each live in confinement and each die a terrible death. The milk or egg producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.

The start of a slow change

1677: 

In 1944 the first Vegan publication put it this way. “The great impediment to man’s moral development may be that he is a parasite on lower forms of animal life”. Since the 1940’s, when some people started to eat solely from plant-based foods - without becoming ill - there was, for the first time in human history, a safe release from our dependency on animals, for food. A vegan regime was shown to be nutritionally healthy. From then on, we were able to look ahead to better times to come. At last there was a safe possibility, to eat from plants and dress ourselves in non-animal clothing; from the fifties with the development of synthetic materials to supplement plant-based fabrics we could avoid the leather and wool and silk. Soon after, there came onto the market plant-based foods like soy milk and textured vegetable protein, in the form of good-to-eat products which could replace meats and dairy products. From then on we could see a time when the use of animal products would be totally unnecessary; we could look ahead to a very different world where meat, dairy, eggs, leather and wool would be seen as inhumane and unsustainable products from a less enlightened era.

Computers as Liberators

1676: 

We pick up information from all over the place, but these days mainly from the Net. Let’s say you’re worried about there being something missing in the food you’re eating these days. What if you generally felt ill or heavy or queasy all the time? Let’s say you have ‘conventional eating habits’ and then, suddenly, you stumble over a web site or some information that suggests a radical change. It occurs to you to try something a bit different.

         

Let’s say you’re used to those mild but annoying stomach aches and that it might be ‘guilt-gut’, and you know you get it from eating rubbish food and animal-based foods. So, you’re determined to try something different, keeping your meals safely plant-based. Of course, you mightn’t know at the time that a vegan diet will solve this problem for you, but once you try it, once you’re into ‘clean plant food’, you find your ‘machinery’ running smoother. What then? You aren’t stupid, you know the old conventional animal-based foods and fast foods are there waiting in the wings, ready to take over again. Their taste still attracts. You know they could seduce you back. You also know the new regime of foods will lead onto other things. You’re torn between immediate satisfaction and re-educating taste buds for the sake of your own long term benefit.

If you’re moving towards veganism you might have been reading up on it, getting familiar with food ideas, filling your head with positive sounding information. And yet, still, you’re quaking in your shoes. But you decide to take the plunge - eat a whole week of vegan food. You find you’ve got a stomach full of powerful food. “At last!” Now you feel optimistic. You say to yourself, “If only I can keep this up”.

Avoiding tempting animal foods, eating only plant-based - the very simplicity of the idea is intriguing. As you move into veganism, you see how pessimistic the old food regime makes you feel, as if you’ve given up, as if the food you’ve been eating not only clogs up your system but blocks your escape. The old meat and dairy diet is like a prison, like a great constipater. And you wonder why it has taken so long for the penny to drop. Perhaps you regret all the damage that second-rate food has done to you, and also how complicit you’ve been in your conventional eating habit and involvement in the animal abuse thing. You see, at last, what those weird vegans have been on about for so long. You begin to feel thankful that your ‘information machine’ has introduced you to a whole new world, a whole better way of viewing your life.

         

Computers, ah yes, they make us feel lucky to be alive today. They provide a conduit between ourselves and what is going on beyond, what has happened in the past and what is about to happen in the future.

Computers let us escape

1675: 

Some of the new information we need, if we’re going to eat an exclusively vegan diet, includes where we get hold of important and essential nutrition/‘foods’ – we need to know where protein is found, how to ensure safe levels of vitamin B12, who sells tasty burgers, and what chocolate isn’t laced with ‘contaminants’, etc. These start-up tips make things go safely and smoothly, but the deeper we get into ethical veganism the more urgent it is that our little cravings for the wrong things don’t interfere too much. The sooner we can make things comfortable for ourselves, the sooner our addictive associations with particular items of food will fade away. And then, once we drop our old misinformed beliefs (particularly in the healthiness of meat and dairy products) we’re home and hosed.

These days we're awash with on-line information. Computers are like home laboratories allowing us to put thoughts into safe practice. A computer is like a fuelled-up Ferrari with a set of keys – straight away, as you start up, you get the feeling that we have a great machine that works well, and that the information we can find is generally pretty solid.

Information that comes to us already in workable forms, as workable as our manufactured Ferrari, lets us move fast, fast enough to escape. And when you think of all the poor guidance most of us have had to put up with through our early years, the misinformation, the speciesism and anthropocentrism, then escape has surely got to be our first priority. Held in custody, as kids often are, without any power, without any means of escaping, drives many children and young people to see their lives as if behind prison bars. (Note the comparison between animals on prison-farms). Since, when young, we are effectively trapped both by our lack-of-confidence and lack of life experience, we can’t see how to escape. Unless we experiment. Which is now made all the safer and easier by way of information accessibility.

Let’s not forget what we’ve been in the past - experimental victims, dosed with misinformation, to make us move slowly, think slowly and bend to the norms of the unthinking majority. And then along comes the on-line world. Just ACCESS, to information. How on Earth it all happened so fast, and whoever puts all this wonderful stuff on the Net, I don't know. Why did they do such altruistic things? It’s beyond me, and yet it makes me feel deeply grateful. It's liberating. But, all the more so because it disturbs governments and worries The Authorities.

The Net gathers together like-minds. There are no megaphones involved. There are no cheap propaganda leaflets. Just a lot of people working for the greater good of providing better information. It makes me realise that we’re entering into an altruistic age, with the sort of altruism which is fun-altruism, even self-benefitting altruism. What's happening is the empowering of altruism. Today’s information blasts its way through the sludge, so that we can pursue new attitudes in the virtual realm. Via our computers we can see what’s ‘out there’, and then we can ‘come home’ and find out if any of it works. And if so, we can then put it into practice. And that spells 'escape'. 

Experimentation and observation

1674:

Some of us have considered becoming vegan; some have tried it; gradually numbers are growing. Take up is slow. It’s slow at first and then, as it merges more strongly with the spirit of this new age, it will almost certainly start to move rapidly.

How quickly this happens depends on where we are now. With veganism, the speed at which this idea sparks a cultural change will be determined by our own faith in that idea, starting with our initial association with vegan food. It’s unusual not to have the popular animal products in ones diet, but there’s a lightness and high octane feel about the energy you get from plant-based foods. You can only appreciate that once you’re using them solely.

Once we’re comfortable with the food side of veganism, and feel optimistic about it; once we start feeling less ill all the time (by now eating decent food); once we link mental clarity with our connection with this single idea, then we can re-educate ourselves and go on to help re-educate others.

When the really interesting experiments take place, when the majority of people start to experiment with a vegan lifestyle, they’ll know immediately that they’re investing in their own future and that of the planet. Repair and sustainability will have come out of a new learning.  And that comes about via information.

This will be looked back on as the Information Age. Unlike a couple of decades ago where searching out information was hard work, now the information we need is easily accessible and it’s free. And it stands well clear of the blatant misinformation of the past. We can look back now and see all the misperceptions we’ve swallowed! Eat meat – be strong, etc. We’d become rather like vivisected, experimental, laboratory creatures who’ve been dosed with misinformation, and then observed and, of course, profited from. 

Imagination polishing the mirror

1673:

For those with imagination (who are also attracted to ‘isms’) vegan-ism isn’t a bad ‘ism’ to have. But we have to face both what is tempting and what is daunting about it. It’s no good pretending that it’s a bed of roses. There’s a perception out there, of veganism, that it’s a mixture of pleasure and non-pleasure.

Most of us don’t ‘do-unpleasant’, not readily anyway. We may be motivated, but not that motivated. There are plenty of 'isms' today and most of them famous for being self-punishing (today we see punishment as an all-purpose cleanser!) but this ‘ism’ has some significant saving graces.

The main thing about veganism is that there’s consistency and a certain stability in it. It’s ultimately optimistic. It gives us some achievable hope. It’s like glimpsing a golden future. So why would we walk away from it? Surely out of a sense of curiosity alone we'd poke it, to see if it’s really alive for us? And if so, what then?

Imagine: Here we find this idea, lying at the side of the road. If we poke it and it moves, do we walk on by or stay with it? If we stick around long enough, it will likely affect us, enough to move us to trial it and test it. After which, if we begin to feel a sense of satisfaction, something of it will pass into us.

As soon as we start to identify with the idea, it's likely we'll want to hit the boards with it; we can’t help showing it off, not to boast about it but to attempt to unlock people’s perceptions of it.

In the ‘doing’ and the ‘showing’, we can’t help but be affected, and what begins to shine from our daily routines becomes apparent. ‘It’ starts to show. We can’t help it being obvious - it comes out in the way we speak and how we start to live and think.

The bottom line

1672: 

The idea of veganism may easily enter the imagination but if it seems impossible, too painful or too daunting, then it’s likely that one might consider it as a small raindrop landing on a duck’s back –we’ll shake off that raindrop since no one wants any more discomfort to enter their lives.

Even if one had to contemplate a vegan lifestyle and had read books about it, it might still remain beyond the pale, since why would we voluntarily opt for living ‘vegan’ if the pleasure of it wasn't obvious?

If you can't contemplate the idea of ‘being vegan’, you can never be much help to the animals concerned, because if you’re not vegan it follows that you’re still eating them. How could you or indeed the animals ever trust you to be their spokesperson? You’d be quite the traitor if you were still helping to kill them whilst trying to save them. 

Farm animals for 'the eating’

1671: 

The most abused animals are the ‘food animals’. They're the ones who most need defending. We’ve chosen to exploit their vulnerability, by eating their bodies and their secretions and making them into our slaves. If an animal can be put to use by the human it will be. The animals are powerless to stop it. Only those of us who do NOT use animals are in any position to defend them, and even then the law, custom and tradition stand in our way.

What if the animals could speak? What would they say about our devices of mutilation or the caging of hens or cows being milked by machinery or the many other horrors they’re subjected to on farms and abattoirs? If their lives are being destroyed so too is their world. What would they say about denuded forests and the latest frightening changes to the climate? They’d condemn our species and never be able to get to the end of the list of our crimes against the natural world.

         

It’s just as well they’re voiceless. But it’s sad that they have been put in contact with the human omnivores who are solely responsible for this sadness. Our acts of sabotaging animals happen in the clinical, mechanised abattoirs or on farms. Whether the animals are killed for their carcass or they have their lives ended when their production of their appointed by-products diminishes, they are always put to death when keeping them alive no longer makes economic sense.

The heartlessness of keeping and killing animals has been part of human history for a very long time, but perhaps it has always impacted on the more tender hearted person, who has tried to disassociate themselves from it all. It comes to this: some are unmoved by an innocent animal suffering, and others are sickened.

This is well illustrated in the following extract from Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy - The killing of the pig:

It was thick snow, and the pig-killer was over-due. It seemed he was not coming and the pig had to be killed that day since Jude and Arabella had run out of  barleymeal mixture the day before. The pig had been starving since then. Jude says to his wife Arabella, “What - he has been starving?”

            “Yes. We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the innerds. What ignorance, not to know that!”

            “That accounts for his crying so. Poor creature!”

            “Well - you must do the sticking - there’s no help for it. It must be done”.

            He went out to the sty ... and placed the stool in front, with the knives and ropes at hand. A robin peered down at the preparations from the nearest tree, and not liking the sinister look of the scene, flew away ... Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to repeated cries of rage. ...they hoisted the victim onto the stool, legs upward, and while Jude held him Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to keep him from struggling.

            The animal’s note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the cry of despair; long drawn, slow and hopeless.

            “Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do!” said Jude. “A creature I have fed with my own hands.”

            “Don’t be such a tender-hearted fool! There’s the sticking-knife - the one with the point. Now whatever you do, don’t stick un too deep.”

            “I’ll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the chief thing.”

            “You must not!” she cried. “The meat must be well bled, and to do that he must die slow. We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat is red and bloody! Just touch the vein, that’s all. I was brought up to it, and I know. Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long. He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least.”

“He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may look,” said Jude determinedly. Scraping the bristles from the pig’s upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat; then plunged in the knife with all his might.

            “ ‘Od damn it all!” she cried, “That ever I should say it! You’ve over-stuck un! And I telling you all the time - ”

            “Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature.”

            ... However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done. The blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she had desired. The dying animal’s cry assumed its third and final tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who seemed his only friends.

            “Make un stop that!” said Arabella. “Such a noise will bring somebody or other up here, and I don’t want people to know we are doing it ourselves. Picking up the knife from the ground whereupon Jude had flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe. The pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming through the hole.

            “That’s better,” she said.

            “It is a hateful business!” said he.“Pigs must be killed.”

1670: 

What went wrong

I suppose things started to get completely out of hand 70 years ago, during the Second World War. The farmers, politicians and consumers started to lose their moral compass by taking things to a new, demonic level. They exponentially increased a number of horrors - horrible pollution, horrible violence and horrible attitudes.

Having been brought up after ‘the War’, but more particularly after 'The Bomb', I was amongst the first new generation to feel differently afraid - we were in the 'atomic age'. A single hit, and many millions of lives would be lost very quickly. Suddenly there was a chance of total planetary annihilation. And yet it was thought by many that the bomb was the ultimate defence from being attacked. This was a very risky investment in violence, supposedly to ensure safety. 

This marked a great ethical leap backwards. It wasn't just 'the bomb' but the fear of food shortages, which coincided with the arrival of the first factory farm. With the bomb and the cage, each stimulated by war and privation, came what to some appeared to be a new sense of security. The bomb brought safety from war, the factory farmed animal brought safety from hunger. After the war there was food aplenty. And during the ‘cold war’ that followed there were many tests to perfect the atom bomb.

Now, seventy years later, if we have little hope for the future it may be because, then, science was allowed to rage unchecked. Now, we can see that we’ve applied what science has taught us to the point where we simply can no longer imagine a peaceful future. How many people actually focus on the future when doing things? Even more crazily, how many of us are beginning to ask the ugliest, most defeatist question of all: “Do we really deserve a future?”

Here’s where we stray into the absurd, for it’s not actually about what we deserve but what other species deserve, what the planet itself deserves. It concerns ‘bystanders’ suffering because we humans are knocking down the forests, caging animals and causing climate change. If we are intent on continuing being destructive, our life here is over and this place should be left empty of humans for the pleasure of the innocent ones and the well-being of Earth. 

1669:

 Violence

Edited by CJ Tointon

If someone physically assaults you - that's violence. Violence is not usually associated with eating a hamburger, however. But the killing of the animal for the 'meat' in a hamburger, is certainly violent.

The violence to farm animals comes in stages. There's the breeding process (rape by insemination),  the forced incarceration of these animals in cages or behind barbed wire, then the brutal industrial-style execution. This is how humans treat animals! They manipulate their lives and eventually put them to death - by way of violence. Animals are powerless to avoid human attack. They lose their will to resist and only submit in order not to starve or receive further 'punishment'.

It seems that humans will do anything to ensure their own survival and satisfy their need to eat for pleasure. If that involves animal foods, then it must, by definition, involve violence. It seems like a free ride on the face of it. There are no repercussions since the animals can't fight back! The food taken from animal bodies seems to be reliable, satisfying to eat and supposedly 'strengthening'. The animal-eating diet reinforces the feeling of power and human supremacy. And it all comes by way of using extreme physical force.

Humans rely on violence to get a 'quick fix'. It's a habit that appears to work; which is surely why we're so reluctant to give it up. We accept its use against animals to not only provide us with food, but clothing materials too. We shear the sheep of its coat (and let it endure the cold nights and sunburnt days without its body covering) to provide US with warmth. The skin of another animal is turned into shoes, the fur of another into coats; whilst silk shirts come at the expense of a thousand boiled alive silk worms! 

The consumer sees none of this firsthand, so doesn't feel pity for any of the animals kept hidden behind closed doors. As consumers, we're removed from the lives and deaths of these sentient beings. We accept their 'produce' and pretend to know nothing about their treatment. Since most people 'do it'; there seems no one left to make us realise what we're really involved in.

Our acceptance of violence depends upon its normalisation. Our own violence is made to seem lesser by the depiction of greater violence being played out elsewhere. We detach from our own involvement, by making violence seem an almost ordinary and unremarkable feature of daily life. We are familiarised with violence from an early age by reading children's' stories. This continues on into adulthood where it's easy to find violence depicted in movies and on television. The fictional representation of violence is almost impossible to avoid. But most of us enjoy these dramas! It's entertaining! Detective stories which deal with murder,  torture, abduction and sexual assault are the most popular television shows. Much of the enjoyment comes from knowing that our own acts of violence are less than what we see played out on TV. It's salacious and arousing and appeals to our taste of deriving pleasure from others' misfortunes.

These violent television dramas gradually introduce us not just to crime, but to the aggressive interaction between the good guys (cops) and the bad guys (criminals). The good guys are exonerated from being seen as 'violent' on the basis that they have to deal effectively with even tougher guys. The strong characters are brave and pragmatic in contrast to the morally corrupt or mentally imbalanced 'baddies'. The sub-text promotes toughness and standing up for 'right' and 'truth' - something we viewers can positively identify with.

But violence has a way of not knowing where to stop! It's ever thirsty for more extreme examples, more horrifying crimes, more excitement in the struggle between good and evil. And once we are thoroughly convinced that violence has a place in our world (defending ourselves, bringing evil-doers to justice) then we can begin to accept that good violence is valid. It can be linked to safety and strength and a justification for the animal foods we eat and enjoy. As it is with the violence of fictional dramas, so it is with our need for ever more exotic gastronomic thrills; which happen to be ever more harmful to the animals who are put to death to satisfy our needs.

I was watching an old Western movie the other day. Huge herds of cattle were being driven hundreds of miles across the parched plains of America to bring 'fresh meat' to a town that hadn't had proper food (so-called) for a long time. Everyone was going crazy for the want of beefsteak! They thought they'd recover their strength and feel better as soon as they'd eaten what they yearned for - dead animal flesh! That was all the justification they needed for bringing these sentient beings to a violent end.

It's not so surprising that the human brain has developed in the way it has; drawing ever greater advantage to itself at the expense of everything else. However, this same brain could be used to undo the self-interest motive and turn it in another direction. Because of the scale of this sort of change, however, we know it won't come about overnight. It might have to take place over several generations. To start the ball rolling would mean a wholly different sort of motive - wanting to do something now that would only take effect long after any of us are still alive. Can we (or would we) be prepared to make a radical change to our eating habits for the benefit of far-off generations? 

Is it preposterous to think we could adjust 'human nature' to promote a less human-centred driving force than self-interest? Such a change of attitude would surely be based upon a determination to rid our lives of violence, lessen our taste for entertainments involving violence and avoid the use of force in our interactions with each other.