Vicious fighting or friendly stoushing

872: 

For some of us the penny has dropped - we are not just plant-eaters or animal lovers, we are simply more empathetic to the plight of enslaved animals and more aware of the dangers of animal-based foods. That doesn’t necessarily mean we are nice people, but it does mean we’ve seen a pattern emerging; by dropping animal protein and generally cleaning-up our own act, we’ve been able to see the bigger picture.

            The satisfaction I get from seeing that makes me feel grateful, and I suspect my tendency to empathise springs from the gratitude of having that veil lifted. And even if I’m not a nice person, this realisation makes me a less cold-hearted one.

Moving on, past empathy, past compassion, I end up with a defined ‘interest’; this whole subject becomes more fascinating the more I get into it. It helps me understand this human-dominated world and it lets me study more closely the reasoning of people, who seem to me (without me ever letting them know it) quite lost.

But coming right back to the start of all this, to where your average omnivore starts to consider ‘compassion and empathy’ in terms of philosophy, it’s the start of a deeper awareness of other major global issues. And that, in turn, sensitises a person to the rationale behind vegan principle.

It’s not just about the food we eat but about applying ‘vegan principles’ to daily life. It affects us on so many different levels. It might start with shopping for different food items and clothing, and then painfully struggling with cravings and addictions, but as momentum builds, it has the effect of strengthening the mind; it inspires the emergence of responsibility for repairing damage. It even inspires a new identity for our self. So, if you move from animal-eating to eating solely plant-based foods, you begin to think more broadly, and that gives something else a chance to form - a new self-identity.

With less aggro comes less of a determination to be ‘right’, to win arguments at all costs, to avoid quarrelling, all of which are useful character traits for the peaceful defending of animals. Their eventual liberation will come about when we stop trying to apply pressure on people to change, and show that we respect their freedom to change when they are ready.

Whenever we touch on what people should and should not eat, it has the potential for sparking a fight. I’m a coward in a quarrel and try to find another way, any other way. I’m not saying to NOT bravely uphold one’s position, but we should NOT let the expression of our views deteriorate to the point where we’re fighting people over them. Apart from the rights of animals, veganism is also about the overall ethic of non-violence. So, whenever we clash, we lose some valuable ground. There’s a lot to lose if disagreements-of-opinion turn sour: things get sour when they get personal.

It’s true that in Animal Rights you can lose friends by the truckload if you’re confrontational. We can easily build a reputation for being evangelical. By being less aggressive, by being calm and informative and adopting a gentler way of going about things, we can make our point all the more effectively. It’s true that we do have urgent things to say. We know that the omnivore has a defence shield and we need to break through on some level. The question is, do we risk a fight over it? And if a fight breaks out how do we dampen the flames?

Selling your soul for a steak

871: 

I worry about the deaths of beautiful sentient beings, and the traumas we inflict on them whilst they’re alive. The injustice of denying so many a life, where none of them have any say in their own destiny. What are we doing to them? What is each consumer encouraging to be done to them, when they buy animal-based foods. Animal farms comprise rows and rows of sentient beings treated as production units, having no life of their own and simply waiting to die. For them, each day is a living death.

            For these imprisoned animals, life is all suffering, ending in a grisly execution. Even the most sadistic mass murderer couldn’t devise a more cruel fate for any victim, and yet that is the fate of billions of animals, and it seems that that’s acceptable to the humans who benefit from their being thus treated.

If you were a farm animal, you’d not only suffer physical pain but also the mental trauma of utter hopelessness. You’d have been made impotent, denied any meaningful part in the present world or in the building of any sort of future. As a slave, whether you are human or animal, you live in limbo-land, with none of the features one would normally associate with ‘life’, apart from the physical functioning of your own body. It’s as if the soul has its hands tied.

Now, it’s strongly suggested to children, and repeated endlessly to adults, that all this about animals is okay, since animals don’t have souls. But if humans have souls then they won’t be saved by selling out the animals.

The problem has always been the same for humans - we are led into dodgy behaviour early in our life and then find it difficult to escape these behavioural habits. As young adults, we follow what others do and forgo our own instincts. While young, by swallowing the food others prepare for us, we continue to eat in the same way when we reach adulthood. Just by doing this we perpetuate the mindless violence of our species.

Until we become fully aware of this, how can there ever be any change to the collective consciousness? We think we are superior beings. However, to animals we must appear to be dunderheads who can’t even forage for our own food, as every other animal can do. We only have a certain type of strength and we use it to dominate, enslave and steal; we cannibalize others to provide energy for our own lives. Many humans are intelligent and sensitive but haven’t yet been able to see the nastiness of this particular habit or see through this confidence trick their society is playing on them.

            You might have thought the con was obvious, that no one, when reaching adulthood, would continue to ‘swallow first and think after’. You’d think, in this well-informed age, that we’d all mistrust the authorities enough to be re-examining those ‘core truths’ we’ve been taught, to see if they stood up to scrutiny. But it just doesn’t happen that way. Perhaps it’s never occurred to most people, to question such big things, let alone ‘go vegan’; they haven’t even begun to realise what would happen if they dissociated from social norms and changed their whole way of life accordingly. To them, a voluntary, radical change in lifestyle, ‘going vegan’, would probably equate to serving a life sentence in prison.

It's normal to be vegan

870: 

Watching cruelty being inflicted on farm animals, as painful as that is, it’s something we need to keep looking at. The mind wants to close down, to see it as fiction rather than truth. But the mind can’t be fooled that easily, nor ignored; there’s a noble part of the mind, and it’s these scenes which stop us running away. It nudges us, even cajoles us to look at difficult problems. In this case the mind argues that until the abuse of animals stops, humans can’t move on. And most of us don’t want to be part of the rut mentality.

Apart from food and leading a healthy vegan lifestyle, this is also about breaking away from the conventional mind-set. It’s rebellion, where some of us are making a stand against the arrogance of human domination over every other being on Earth. It’s obvious to all of us, from childhood onwards, that we ‘mighty humans’ have a disproportionate advantage over all other beings. As it turns out, we’ve assumed the role of slave-masters. As human dominators, living in the rich Western world, we are trained to disregard both animals and less-advantaged humans. If we can step onto the more egalitarian road, we’ll see people as equals and never regard animals as inferiors.

If any of us find equality attractive, perhaps it’s because we are grateful for the things we have, not greedy for what we haven’t got enough of. Egalitarianism shows a regard for the disadvantaged, especially if they’re enslaved or exploited. They are something worth fighting for, for the sake of social justice.

The offshoot of this is to make us less pessimistic about the destiny of the planet. Imagine humans being as concerned about the fate of exploited animals as they are about climate change. It might not be so immediately threatening to us, the way animals are being treated, but the biggest danger is in the scale of the problem with animals; it’s threefold. There are so many billions of them in gulags all over the world. Their plight is deliberately hidden. There are seven billion humans committing slow suicide by eating them.

Even if it were only about human health it would be a tragedy, since we are dying at an alarming rate from unnecessary illnesses associated with ingesting animal protein and fat. We are consuming dangerous levels of chemicals fed to the animals that we end up eating. But the greater danger is likely to be self-generated, from the shame of stealing what rightly belongs to the animals.

Why wouldn’t we be ringing alarm bells, and why wouldn’t vegans want to brighten up the lives of their omnivorous friends? All you have to do these days is act normally - be vegan.

Video

869: 

If empathy can inspire us, it can also deplete us. We want to believe that things aren’t so bad and that if we have a little empathy everything will be okay. And when we find it isn’t, we crash. We want to enhance beautiful things and downgrade the ugly things, but that’s too shallow. Empathy needs nurture. You have to rise to the expectations of empathy. It’s like momentum that can slow and fade if not kept pace with. Even as we wring our hands with sympathy for the downtrodden, we still need to follow that feeling through; it needs feeding. It needs great effort and self discipline to keep it focused because there is so much negativity draining its strength. It’s as strong as we care to make it, so the hard work of empathy comes down to self-discipline. If negativity doesn’t weaken it then indifference will.

When it comes to animals and food habits there are always commercial interests trying to divert us – “Should I eat that cream cake of not? Shall I have that delicious-looking crab salad?” We’re seduced by the cashmere sweater or the fur wrap or the suede jacket. We want something that we know we shouldn’t want, but we’re not used to denying ourselves things when we see others buying them. Most of us struggle with our ‘little weakness’ even if we know of self-harming consequences, not to mention harm to others in the production of it.

If we’re lacking empathy we need to practice it, to build it up, to do something for the sake of ‘another’. For animal activists, a very specific empathy is required to keep themselves updated. Even for squeamish people like me, we have to force ourselves to watch video footage that shows animal cruelty, since it helps to build empathy and resolve. By watching the atrocities, it encourages us to work hard to help end further atrocities.

It’s important for all of us to realise that cruelty and thoughtlessness are routine in our world, when it comes to animals used in the food and clothing industry. In all societies the treatment of animals is heartless. We humans hurt countless billions of sentient beings for our own convenience. That’s the reality we are dealing with. Even the most intelligent, well-educated people go along with all this, without protest.

This is why empathy is so important, for us to stay in touch with these animals, and maintain an empathetic connection with people who aren’t yet very aware or who don’t care enough.

The evidence is all there, on those difficult-to-watch DVDs. You can watch them, you can go into shock over them, you can be too squeamish to stay watching for too long. I often have to hold my hands over my eyes in a very cowardly way, but then I know when I’ve seen enough, to remind me what is happening behind those closed doors.

It’s not for pleasure I watch this footage but out of respect both for the animal victims and those brave humans who did the filming, often at risk to their own safety. And, of course, it’s important for us to be kept up to date with the latest findings.

I imagine all vegans want to be well-informed, so they’re in the best position to educate others more effectively. But, for my part, I also want to get closer to the mind of the punter, to remember who I’m talking to, and to bear in mind that these are often sensitive people I’m speaking with. I need to keep reminding myself that we’re all at different levels of empathy, and we’re all at different stages in our awareness.

Empathy bonding

868:

As soon as you take up a conscience-driven, empathetic way of thinking, you can see why vegan principles make sense. It isn’t just about vegan food or just about animals on farms, it’s closely connected with other issues too, which require empathy. When it involves the environment or health or human hunger most people can feel some sort of empathy, but usually not so much for food-animals, on farms. This is where it’s so badly needed but so lacking.

Empathy is at the heart of vegan philosophy. Our vegan game plan is empathy-inspired. From an empathy-philosophy, the vegan diet has emerged. At first it throws up what seem to be almost insurmountable problems. It’s too idealistic, too unrealistic, a nice idea but it all sounds impossible. It’s too demanding to live as a vegan for the rest of one’s life.

These perceptions stand as a barrier, which most people wouldn’t attempt to overcome. Which is why our job is to help people work through the practicalities of implementing a vegan lifestyle.

            But in these early days of growing awareness of animal abuse, most talk is about animal welfare – that we may use them, but we should improve their conditions. Advocating abolition - no animal use whatever - is incomprehensible or seen as far too inconvenient. You can say that vegan consciousness is barely born.

The vegan who advocates animal rights has a huge task ahead, to radically affect the thinking of whole populations, who’ve eaten and beaten animals for a million years. Perhaps our greatest contribution isn’t to persuade people to ‘go vegan’, but to ‘grow’ empathy.

Empathy has very anthropocentric associations. Now’s the time to apply it to other species, to elevate animals to the status of sovereign, irreplaceable beings, in the same way we do our fellow humans.

Empathy ‘grows’ us. It matures us. It inspires hard work, particularly when it comes to the David and Goliath task of liberating of animals. And yet that next logical step seems so obvious when seen in terms of social justice.

I can’t rid my mind of this one simple fact: that animals are innocent. They’ve done nothing to deserve such awful punishment. They are sensitive and sentient beings. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t think of them as our brothers and sisters. There’s certainly no reason to hurt them. 

A small world on a grand scale

867: 

We all live in a global village now, having family-like associations with fellow humans, wherever they are, and with other beings too. This is the age of relationship-awareness. It comes about through increased empathy.

We now have easy access to information. We can social-network, to find out how others are thinking. We are taking on big issues. We’re upping our empathy for non-human species, for environment and for victims of social injustice. There’s a heightening of sensitivity and, in accordance, a changing of lifestyle habits.

In every way, what we’re seeing today is a heightening of empathy and sensitivity. By being vegan, thinking vegan and supporting things outside our anthropocentric interest zone, it’s good for the soul; in other words, it’s a good feeling being empathetic. It’s what a parent can feel when protecting a child who is weak or inexperienced.

In this Western world there is none weaker than domesticated animals. Billions of them are standing there right now, on hard concrete floors or in wire mesh cages, instead of freely roaming across the earth and forest floor. And billions more, fish, no longer swimming free. Humans have manipulated the free-ranging of animals on a massive scale, and degraded the land and oceans beyond recovery. The social injustice of that is mind boggling. That’s why Animal Rights is such a great cause to be involved with.

Great energy, the substance of our future

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Veganism, non-violent attitude, eating satisfaction, ‘being vegan’, they’re all highly self-benefiting. But best not to get too cocky with it, telling people, “I’m vegan, you know”. It’s sometimes better to let them find that out for themselves. And we don’t really need others’ admiration or understanding anyway, because it’s not likely to be forthcoming. And that’s as good a reason as any, for not expecting it. The fact is that most people’s reactions to our being vegan stem from a grudging jealousy for what we seem to have achieved (a certain undefinable self-confidence, is it?), and the self discipline we seem to bring to our lives. But again, that mustn’t matter to us; a non-vegan can’t possibly know how it feels. They have to live ‘outside’ simply because of what they eat and wear and use each day. They remain unaware of what it’s like to be a part of such a noble cause (concerning the ending of animal enslavement). Nor would they know, in one particular way, how expanded a mind could become, or how energised bodies can be. I can’t speak too highly of plant foods and their properties, combined with the head-space that animal-empathy brings.

For my own part, by ‘going’ vegan, I experienced an energy I’d never experienced before. It comes with the food I suppose, or is it from a newly empowered conscience. I don’t know how it works, but it’s a very valuable thing to have – clean energy. It occurs to me that if it’s so easy to tap into, why doesn’t everyone do it? Perhaps the side attractions of food, clothing, social conformities, etc, are so seductive and habit forming, there’s not enough reason to employ that energy. But how short-sighted that is, since this particular energy is crucial to personal growth. Taking on vegan principle, applying it to our lives, winning rights for animals, all this requires that particular energy. It’s needed in bucket loads for ‘advocacy’ work, since we face huge odds against us. People are reluctant to give up violence, whether towards each other, to animals, or to the planet itself; they would rather not change, for fear of the many things they would have to deny themselves.

But for those who are living according to vegan principles, we need a powerful source of energy to plough through the collective resistance. We need its encouragement, energy being the one big reward for giving up so many delicious but toxic animal foods, and always having to be so very different from everyone else. By being a herbivore we optimise the fuel we use. We draw the best energy from the best source. When feeding three times a day, we ingest high octane fuel, and what plant-based-food-energy does for us on a physical level it does for the mind too. I believe plant food makes us think quicker and more bravely too.

I like to think that a vegan is a free-ranging, freedom-loving, conscience-clearing individual, who looks at broader issues and isn’t too partisan in favour of any one cause. Having broken through this one great barrier in order to empathise with animals, we’re able to see how all the other big issues of the day have common roots, each pointing to a coming-together in the future. There’s a common foundation of consciousness, as it effects environment, animals, kids, education and health, all of which are great causes worth fighting for, for the moulding of the future. Because vegans have a clear view of how ‘vegan principle’ points to non-violence, we then see with more altruistic eyes. By developing a sense of empathy we take the emphasis off the self-serving ‘me’ and carry it across to ‘the other’.  Vegan principle empathises with the interests of others, especially with the interests of the weak; the ‘weak’ inherits the future.