1958:
When I get bogged down in
discussions about the rights and wrongs of using animals for food, I find the
fall-back position is “the cruelty of it all”. It’s the ‘yuk’ factor, the
ugliness, the conventions we’re trying to move away from.
So, starting from the
‘no-more-cruelty’ position, I’d suggest we look at the transfer of our dollars
to the pockets of those people who are doing all the ugly stuff to animals. If we
stop making the rich richer by buying nothing from them, and if enough of us do
that, the rich will go out of business. (Ideally, alongside our boycott, we
could be doing something towards finding a way to encourage the people in those
businesses to move into more humane businesses).
It’s our finest hour when we
convince people to spend their money more wisely by no longer, ever, buying crap
products and unethical stuff.
In a supermarket survey
covering about seven and a half thousand individual items of choice (shelf
products), three thousand of them were either partly or wholly from animals.
By breaking the ‘animal’ cycle,
another better cycle takes over. Going vegan begins both a personal turn-around
as well as a world recovery programme.
By not breaking with old
habits, by continuing shopping for items with animal derivatives, we ally
ourselves with some of the biggest destroyers on the planet.
By remaining omnivore, we
refuse to see that veganism can make a difference. It’s as if we’re saying to
our self that the idea is too way out, that it’s never going to catch on. That
it’s too rigid, it’s isolating, and ‘going vegan’ looks too bleak. Inevitably
that sort of defeatist, not-worth-doing belief makes everyone feel powerless,
which is just how the powerful animal slave traders want us to feel.
To get this knot of defeatism
untied, we need to imagine overcoming the odds, odds which, at first glance,
seem so stacked against us, which seem to be making anyone feel ridiculous for
feeling optimistic about Animal Rights.
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