Involvement

1854:

Most people today are involved in a live-now-pay-later culture, believing that debts incurred will never have to be paid back. As with money so with every other material advantage - we accumulate useful stuff and don’t care about the damage caused in getting it or wasting it when we no longer want it. We celebrate the abundance of things because there seems to be so much for the taking. We believe there’s nothing to pay back because it’s all free - the air, the water, the soil, the flora, the fauna - we take it all for granted and throw away what we don’t want. We either live high on the hog or we aspire to it. Our wastefulness and narcissism imprints on each succeeding generation, until we come to today, when we hardly notice that our ‘smash and grab’ attitude is out of control. We no longer pass on to the young a sense of responsibility and frugality, instead we show them that life can be lived almost entirely for pleasure.

         

Probably we think that the greatest pleasure comes at the expense of exploiting animals. There are rich pickings here. The supply of animal products has become endless, although there’s been a hidden price to pay - animal farmers have had to inflict ever greater cruelty on animals, to keep costs down, to keep prices low in response to fierce competition.

         

Our society lays-to-waste on a grand scale - throughout the animal-eating world, vast numbers of defenceless animals are massacred (at a rate of 1500 deaths per second), and we do it because we can, because they can’t fight back, because the customer wants cheap food, and because there are always unethical operators willing to undercut less-unethical operators. It’s a fact that all omnivores are caught up in this, and vegans quite deliberately aren’t.