Un-relationship

1850:

Objects may not appear to be living and breathing beings like us but perhaps their purpose is to show us what being is really all about; it’s as if they sometimes ‘respond’ to our feelings for them, as if they ‘read’ our feelings. Like the planet itself, changing its climate in response to our profligate use of fossil fuels.

We need to address dysfunctional, inherited attitudes which are not producing mutual benefit. The most damaging of these is likely to concern the way we use animals, with our belief in the safety of having a ‘non-relationship’, as we do with the animal we are about to eat.

Our contact with certain animals, our cruelty towards them, is to our mutual disadvantage. It starts out badly and ends up badly. Humans and animals – we’re deluded enough to think we’ve discovered a bargain, where it’s all advantage on our side and minimum disadvantage to us. Later, too late usually, we find things don’t work out quite as well as we thought they would. Here we have a lop-sided situation, the too strong against the too weak – helpless animals, their lives ruined by us, and we-humans-with-intellect, hungry for advantage. In this case, where humans are using and abusing animals, we have the disadvantage of the ultimately ugly act of enslaving, killing and consuming - it creeps up slowly and strikes us down just when we’re not expecting it. It comes in two forms, shame and illness. Which one strikes us down is unimportant – but vegans suggest avoiding the whole messy business of conducting non-relationships. That’s a conceptual framework we just don’t need any longer. Why try getting away with it - adding to the imbalance - when you don’t have to?