The obstacles which ironically give us greater awareness

1752: 

The big difficulty facing animal advocates is that the more we learn, the more we want to tell others what we know; but the more we tell, the fewer people want to listen. The more you learn about the abuse of animals, the more you realise how serious is the cruelty.

Most animal welfare organizations focus their attention on the people who perpetrate the cruelty, whereas it's really the millions of consumers who we need to bring around. Customers demand easy availability of products at a low price, which forces the producer to take up the cheapest method of supply, which happens to involve the most cruelty.   

It’s because ordinary people are turning a blind eye, that allows the system to continue. While millions of children are malnourished and millions of animals are being killed, everyone else goes about their business as if nothing bad is happening.

Laying the blame though is futile. It solves nothing. There are always arguments to excuse animal abuse. Ordinary people have their own problems which can’t be neglected. The sheer weight of making a living and paying the bills pushes so many important issues into the background; woe betide anyone failing to pay their rent or mortgage or payments on the car. It’s essential to give the children what they need, to secure their future, to prevent them being trampled on by others who are scrambling for the same sort of safety for their own kids.

People won't look at the impact their lifestyle is having on the world unless they're consciously moving towards a whole new set of values. It’s almost as if change can’t find fertile ground to thrive because the System is so well established. It forces people to go with the flow. And our political leaders can’t be relied upon to show any moral leadership because they’re as compromised as everyone else. Even if we know what should be done, we don’t have the freedom or courage to break away from the way things have always been done.

So, there’s an obvious need for change yet a reluctance to step out in front, to take the first steps towards setting off a chain reaction of change. We might all agree that there’s a need for change, but we're afraid to step too far away from known-reality.

There are many questions for which there are inadequate answers:  Do I believe that my ‘good example’ will encourage others to follow? Does my sowing seeds encourage growth? Do I have faith in others to do the right thing? Should I rely on others, who feel the same way as I do, to stick with their activism? Are our destructive habits and violent attitudes so deeply entrenched that radical change can’t happen? Is change possible? Are our intentions good?

Perhaps we need to turn away from the bigger picture and take a fresh look at home values - to walk before we can run. First up, if there are things to be done, then we must be sure our motivation is strong - personal change needs good motivation to create an alternative, non-damaging lifestyle. If it's there, if it works well for ourselves, then we can promote it. But we shouldn't expect too much too soon - the particular difficulty in promoting Animal Rights is that there are so many competing causes, so many other (more obviously dangerous) issues facing the planet. They seem bigger and blacker than any concern we might have about farm animals. Today there's growing environmental damage being done. We’re wasting trillions of dollars on weapons of war. We see the obscenity of wealthy people eating to excess next door to poor people dying from malnutrition. If three such horrors exist, what room is there left for less-obvious horrors to be tackled? Surely, we say, there's too much else going wrong without adding to the list. We argue that these issues are more important than the enslavement of non-human animals; animal treatment doesn't seem as big a threat to civilisation. It’s like in wartime, when bombs are raining down, when that dominates everyone’s thoughts. And very little else seems to matter as much.

Few people care about the damage being done to our ‘humanity’, by confining and killing and then eating animals, when there are these other issues weighing so heavily on our collective conscience. But surely, all issues are connected by fear and violence. The root cause of violation and violence will only mend when we stop attacking animals, because that same violence must be added to our list, which includes our attacks on the environment and on the most poor people of the world. We can hardly pretend we are a non-violent people when we still attack and use animals.

As soon as we stop participating in the mass killing of animals we open up a new awareness, but it has to start with individuals, doing what they must do without reference to what others are doing. If I can do what I think is the right thing, then other individuals must eventually start to notice and follow suit. It might take a long time, but surely that is the way the ball starts rolling. I doubt if any government will act on behalf of ‘the animals’, since to ban the killing of animals would be so unpopular that it would spell political suicide. The breakthrough has to start at the grass roots level. With individuals.