Transitioning is a struggle

1794: 

We obviously don’t want to condone any level of animal abuse but we should want to allow room to discuss it. Although one can’t justify any animal use on intellectual terms, we need to be able to admit that we’ve all contributed to the present state of affairs, we’ve all used animals in the past.

I can remember myself struggling with this.  I’ll explain this struggle in case anyone can relate to it. My daily habits were governed by what others did, and others mostly didn’t think about animals’ feelings. They just did what they’d always done, what their parents had taught them.  And it was what they passed on to their own children - to simply eat the food they like.

For my part, I consumed foods and confections not just to satisfy my hunger but also for pleasure. I would ask myself, why stop any of this enjoyment for the sake of animals? If I ever wanted to test my compassion I could always show it for fellow humans - there are enough social justice issues to fight for. There are always humans who need help, so I’d have argued that compassion doesn’t HAVE to extend to animals, not the ones we eat anyway.

The problem for me was, as a life-long meat eater, that I didn’t like admitting I might be wrong, especially about my food habits. That would mean too much loss of face as well as too big a change in my lifestyle. I’d been eating the same sorts of food all my life and it would take a lot of undoing, to dispense with animal products. I'd been wearing leather shoes all my life and I couldn't see how I could use any other sort of footwear. But as a young person at the time, I was at least less set in my ways, having had fewer years of guilt about my food and clothing choices. And like so many young people of my age, I wanted to re-examine all the important values imposed on me by my society. My food had been provided by my elders and, since rebelling against the habits of older people felt right to me, a radical diet-change felt like making an independent stand. I remember it felt natural to accuse my elders of being ‘asleep’ on the matter of ‘eating animals’. I wanted to ‘set up camp’ on the other side of the river.

It’s easier to make these radical changes when you're young. It's far harder when older. Then, as now, I thought that being a herbivore was the obvious way to spare animals. I could see that it was a beautiful idea in theory but in practical terms I’d had my doubts. Was it possible? And if I could get over missing all those familiar foods, could I also withstand the opprobrium of my fellow humans, almost all of whom were dedicated omnivores or enthusiastic carnivores. I’d be denigrating the eating habits of nearly everyone I knew, and this wouldn’t win me any friends.

By exposing and explaining and talking about animal abuse in the food industry, I wasn’t surprised to find myself socially dropped by those very same people. And yet I was only trying to be constructive and get to the truth. I only wanted to point out that unthinking humans have the capacity for acting destructively and hypocritically.

Whether people were acting by commission or omission, or acting directly or by proxy, or being up front or clandestine - I wanted all of that discussed. But how? All I could think of doing, to get the ball rolling, was to be rude. And that always descended into mutual abuse, cutting off the possibility of any sort of rational debate.

I often felt helpless to do much about the ‘animal thing’. I was fast becoming aware that human habits and social mores were so strongly set-in, that nothing I could do personally would change things. Everyone thought of themself as a sensitive person. That was the BIG problem. Everybody already knew humans were trashing the environment and doing things against their own ethical standards. By admitting human culpability in one area, it seemed they could ignore the animal issue. And it being such an integral part of human life, the matter of animal use and abuse was the last thing anyone would want to hear about.

So the struggle had, and still has, many strands. There were my own doubts about the safety of plant-based foods, there was the concern that I couldn’t keep it up and, if I could, then not being able to freely speak about it and not get much support, consequently made me feel like an outsider.

But even that is easier to handle when young, and far harder to deal with when older. Now, some forty years later, what is so hard to handle is that people still aren’t being touched by the question of animal cruelty. The Vegan Revolution is not yet due to explode upon our society.