The Harmlessness Principle

1849:

What’s it like being an animal? We’ll never know, but I think we can learn a lot by observing them. Those we know best, dogs and cats, have an energy which is attractive, care-free, intimate, often friendly, and without ambition. Mind you, they’re fed and housed rent free in their human incarceration hotel.

In contrast, what’s it like being human? Without a sugar-daddy, we must learn how to survive. And today, we survive, not by hunting for food but hunting for a social place (to earn the money to buy the food, etc). Survival in this difficult human world means we must accomplish things. In order to accomplish we need possessions, qualifications and money. When successful, we often become something other than what we are – we adopt an unfriendly attitude where friendliness would not be beneficial. The habit of it forms ‘in business’ and becomes acceptable: money talk is deadly serious with no room for anything else. Success, ‘getting ahead’, ambition, career, dreams-within-reach - when and if it happens to you, you are almost mesmerised by the ‘specialness’ it makes you feel about yourself. The society you identify with, you hope will make you feel special too. A lot of effort is put into impressing others, in a social-climbing sort of way.

But this same society, you discover, sanctions something frightening. This society uses the power of each human brain to dominate everything else, including other sentient animals. Our superiority-as-human, felt by just about every living soul on the planet, is underlined whenever we use animals, whether we are snuggling under eider downs, eating them, experimenting on them, imprisoning them or murdering them. The human simply disregards the sovereignty of animals in order to take from them – this is the central creed of the people whose minds vegans are trying to change.

The human species has developed knowledge in the use of animals, and subsequently misuses that knowledge. As a consequence of that misuse, things have turned very ugly. We’ve become so caught up in our own advancement in one sphere that, for many centuries, we’ve almost totally ignored the significance of enslavement. These days we enslave those who have no power at all, so there can be no come-back. What can a sheep do to us?

But as happens in Nature so also must happen with human design. Everything finds an eventual balance. From gaining all the advantages of violence and hardness of heart, humans don’t realise that there must come some balance - it would seem only fair that, in return for us killing them, the animals are killing us, slowly – their carcasses and by products are destroying human health and may well be the cause of the human species dying out. But as society becomes more obviously gross, so the reaction away from that grossness might be transforming. And that is the plus of increasing consciousness.

We only need another attitude to the one we live by today – violence and animal-based products – and that’s spelled out in the simplest way imaginable, in the harmlessness principle on which veganism is based.