Rushing to the rescue

1822: 

Obviously boycotting animal products isn't easy, especially at first. Our addiction to many products on the market is entrenched. And yet we know, as a species, we're highly adaptive and that change isn't really as hard as we think it might be.

         

Many of us want to be rushing to the rescue. We know this will mean giving up many things we’ve been used to, particularly food. We’d be making a big statement, and for that we need to make the necessary practical changes to our lives, so that we can back up our words. It’s not only our own private food tastes that need to be changed, it’s also the collective mindset shared by almost everyone we know.

What are we most up against? Perhaps in the case of using-animals for human convenience, we face a majority attitude of pitilessness. The lives of domesticated animals tests the pity in us, and if we can’t feel that we’ll do what we’ve always done, what everyone else does. If we do feel enough empathy, however, we know we’ll have to make some difficult, personal lifestyle changes. Hopefully it will take us into a level of altruism that is kinder, 'greener', and of course in line with vegan principles. But this 'vegan' thing, even if it weren't about animals or health, it would still be the most logical and intelligent way to go, spiritually.

By being vegan we are, to some extent, in a state of self control over our food and consumer habits. That in itself is empowering. But there’s a bonus from choosing plant-based foods – they’re energising, they’re an aid to thinking, and give us a perspective that omnivores can’t possibly have, to be able to see how to make repairs.

         

One might be saving forests or saving starving children or saving exploited creatures, but one’s initial drive is always on the need for urgent repair. Of course, we can't start any big, new initiative without first repairing the damage already done to ourselves. So, in the business of saving animals we have to get things sorted out, by being vegan first off. Then, and only then, after making this essential personal repair can other repairs be made possible.

         

But ‘repair’ sounds like such a dull and unrewarding business. Unless we see it as the ‘new creative’. Creativity is perhaps what we need most. This makes ‘doing the right thing’ less of a duty and more of an adventure. And without it, repairs will just be for show, and won’t last. It seems obvious that, to vegans, any small gestures, any non-lasting repairs, would be a waste of time and effort.

Once you ‘go vegan’ you do it for life. If repairing our own attitudes concerning the use of animals weakens and we go back to our old omnivore ways, we’d feel foolish and shallow, as if our ideals had simply been wishful thinking or boasting. Once our attitudes shift (and in accordance with them we become vegan) then there’s no reason, other than weak will, to abandon them.