Coal and cars and cows

979: 

Think of all the advances humans have made over the centuries; everything we’ve so far achieved has grown out of ‘ideas’.  Great ideas, exploding into the imagination and being implemented.  Some work and benefit us.  But sometimes, ideas work only for a certain time and then end up doing more harm than good.   Like cars and cows and coal.

By the time an idea has been perfected, and is set into the mass habit pattern, it’s hard to shift.  ‘We’ might see that its time has come, but those people whose livelihoods depend on the mass-habit, have built walls of protection around it.  They virtually control what we do, and ‘we’, the vast majority of people, can’t be free of them.  Take coal, for example, it was the wonder energy producer, revolutionising the industrial production of goods and fuelling transport, but now it pollutes and is a major contributor to climate change.  But we can’t drop it.  The production of electricity would be so badly affected, not to mention the money made from mining and exporting it. We’ve become totally dependent on it.  Coal is a good idea gone sour.  Similarly with the internal combustion engine.  It was such an asset at first but, a century down the track, billions of cars are contributing to the death of our planet.  You might agree about the damage but you’re not going to give up your car, are you? It’s the same with meat and animal protein, which is causing so much ill health.

A combination of these ‘out-of-control’ problems makes the future look grim.  The belief that ‘things will never change’ makes us all afraid and pessimistic.  More so because we know that each of us is still cranking up the machine, too obstinate or too impotent to stop our own consumerism, let alone inspire change in others.  I might be willing to make some personal sacrifice but I’m reluctant to take the lead, because it will only be an act of pointless self-sacrifice.  Sell the car, give up meat.  Very brave, very noble, but will it eventually make me feel resentful?

           

What runs through my head when I’m thinking about this idea of giving up things on principle?  I don’t want to make my living conditions any more uncomfortable than they already are.  And whilst I know this is selfish, I’d rather wait for you to change first.  You change and then I have every intention of following.

Most people follow fashions, they don’t lead them, and in a world where people are so easily manipulated, the lack of principled rebellion against convention has become a dangerous habit in itself. 

How can some people do what most of us could never do?

978: 

I can imagine how some smart bloke dreamed up an idea for making more money out of the animals he owned.  He looked at his chickens pecking about the yard and wondered if he could reduce his feed bill and the untidiness of his farm yard by caging these animals, keeping them immobilised and automating their feeding and the collection of their eggs.  It would increase his profits no end.  By intensifying his operation, the farm would become like a factory, his animals automated like machinery; it would be done at the expense of his animals, whose feelings don’t count.

So brazen was this crossing of the boundary, between animal care and animal contempt, that it gave rise to what we now know as ‘Animal Rights’ - their right to a life. This is a movement that has been growing for the past forty years, aiming to have the rights of all animals, including farm animals, written into law, to prevent the worst atrocities and eventually to make it illegal to abuse any animal. Only today I heard that, here in Australia’s Capital Territory, they have passed a law to prohibit the use of cages for commercial egg production, the de-beaking of chickens and the use of sow stalls and farrowing crates for pigs.

But the full protection of animals will probably be a long time coming.  If human exploitation of animals has taken millennia to arrive at today’s worst excesses, then it’s likely to take quite a while for the less outrageous abuse to end, mainly because of the lack of public support, stemming from the widespread addiction to animal products by almost the entire human population of the planet.

The consumer wants the food (and other commodities) made from imprisoned or dead animals, and at the lowest price possible.  The producers have to treat their animals badly to make a profit, to stay in business.  They have to run intensive operations involving huge numbers of animals. And since intensive and closely confined animal populations are prone to epidemics, more and more drugs have to be pumped into their animals to prevent mass outbreaks of disease in these huge flocks and herds.  And these drugs and chemicals, being ingested by animal-eating humans, bring about more and more illness.  Then of course, there’s pollution from animal waste adding to the problem.  The stranglehold of the market determines how permanent these situations are becoming and how inevitably worse they must become. I guess it will go on until we reach a critical point, where consumers come to their senses and follow the advice of vegans - to boycott the lot of it, meat, animal products and all animal-derived commodities.

We have to believe that the human, who is the destroyer, must also be the creator - the same brain that creates the cage, and all the problems ensuing from it, can also create the solution.  When humans eventually realise how lucky we are to have brains to get us out of our scrapes, only then will we move towards a true transformation of our species.

Personally experiencing difficulties

977: 

In my own case I saw the advantages of a plant based diet but feared taking the first step, and for good reason. You don’t have to be Einstein to see where all this is going to lead to.  The nobility of the idea was exciting in theory, but the practical implications were scary.  I could see all the weaponry I was going to have to use, to get me by.  I saw the difficulty of it and started to build my defences.

But as it happened, going vegan was almost like falling in love! Quite a surprise, mainly to do with my capability.  It was the cloud passing in front of the sun and passing on, the eureka moment of my brand of truth - seeing quite clearly that there was no need to make any use of animals. It’s like living on a main road and getting used to the fumes, not realising that fresh air actually exists; liberating animals is simply a way of strengthening ourselves.  And following from that, I now had a purpose which fitted me like a glove, it made sense to go beyond myself towards ‘the other’; exciting theory - the challenge of committing to something bigger than myself.

I made a list of everything I could think of which I’d no longer be using - I’d be avoiding hundreds of products I was attracted to. I’d be either having to do without them or having to find replacements for them, and when nothing was available, facing the fact that I wouldn’t be giving in to temptation. A relatively small price to pay for my empathy for ‘the other’.

My life was going to be difficult, but nothing compared to what farm animals are going through.  By comparison, my ‘lifestyle difficulties’ would pale into insignificance, so a little sacrifice on my part would be hardly worth a mention.  Is hardly worth a mention.

What we are used to doing

976:

Protest.  Outrage.  “No longer!” we say.  But, in reality, even if we feel outraged, we don’t think we’d have enough willpower to alter our eating habits radically.  According to principle.  Nothing will be powerful enough to convince us to stop.  Neither ill health, guilt, conscience or environmental impact of animal farming.

If it reaches critical mass, the worry of it making us make the decision to ‘go-vegan’, we know that it will mean having to turn our back on everyone and everything.  Later, after it’s all over, we’ve done it and settled it, only then do we find out it was the best thing we could have done for ourselves.

By withdrawing our support from the Animal Industries and freeing ourselves from the addictive grip of their products, we fix the ache that’s been in us.  Plus we add another nail in the coffin of the Animal Industry and in so doing help to liberate the gulag-ed animals.

But this habit switching is no light matter.  If we give up eating meat one day, then it follows next day that we’ll be questioning the whole ethical basis of animal farming and the laws of conventional nutrition.  So what might have started out as a change of diet, now opens up a whole new world of thinking, a whole significant change of attitude.

The human who couldn’t change personal habits

975:       

Anyone who instinctively sees an urgent need to do something about the way we treat food-animals is up against it; we have to ignore what’s previously been taught about food, go against tastebud-advice, against the advice of corporations, governments and educators, and turn to themself for advice.

The issue of using animals in the food and clothing industries sits like a lead weight on our collective conscience - what we do to animals makes monsters of us.  I’m ashamed of being a human, for what I did for so many years. I didn’t care about animals being slaughtered.  I didn’t care about hens being imprisoned in tiny cages.  But the more I learned the more critical became the situation inside my head.  I discovered that newborn calves are snatched away from their mothers (and shot soon after they’re born).  I found out that sows are kept restrained in stalls, and cattle are mutilated without pain killers, always for very practical reasons, of course.  The list of horrors goes on and on.  Each one reflects on the farmers, the producers and the consumers who support all this.  We consumers especially, who buy the animal produce.

           

Now all this might be true enough, but nearly every one of us is involved.  We can switch off.  No one will notice.  We don’t have to talk about it.  Or think about it if we don’t want to.  This is where we’re stuck.  This is why we’re stuck, and can’t move forward.

           

We’re stuck because we’re all the same in so many ways.  My taste buds are like everyone else’s.  I respond to my favourite foods as you do.  If I’m more sensitive then, these same foods weigh heavily on my conscience.  It hurts me only because a sort of numbness comes over me when I try to think about it.  How sentient animals are suffering.

The fact is that animals are born and kept alive only to be eaten.  They’re held in prisons and live in terror, and die the most ugly death you could imagine.  And we sensitive ones comment on all this.  We say, “it’s outrageous”, but then carry on eating them all the same.  We object, but we still allow it to happen.  By way of some nifty mental gymnastics we can relax at the dinner table and eat what we’re given.  Minds closed, mouths open. 

Stopping Violence Starting With Animals

974:

There is a particular difficulty with Animal Rights.  It isn’t directly about improving life for ourselves and it doesn’t seem to create big waves or impress our friends.  It is noticeably different to all other great causes.  In fact, it’s the Cinderella of all causes.  For most people today, there are other more immediate issues to be concerned with.  People feel a threat to themselves and the planet and are specifically concerned with climate change.  If that’s not the number one issue, then it’s war or hunger or pollution.  Each major issue seems more dangerous, bigger and blacker than concern for farm animals.  It drives people crazy to think of the potential we have to solve some of these problems, if only we weren’t wasting trillions of dollars on weapons of war.  It drives us crazy to see the rich squander their good fortune by eating to excess and becoming obese, when there are millions of children dying from malnutrition.  We feel crazy by the obscenity of it all.  With all these major horrors, surely there's no room for any more?  We have enough urgent, heart-breaking issues to deal with, so let’s deal with them first before we worry about eating bacon for breakfast! We can argue that there’s one common attitude driving all of these problems.  It’s neatly symbolised by the way the enslavement of non-human animals is not touching people’s hearts.  It should.  It could.  But it doesn’t, because it isn’t seen as an ‘indicator of threat to our civilisation’.  Rarely do people stop and consider that the one core value - humanity - is what characterises the potential of our species.  We don’t see the damage being done to our very core, and therefore we allow a barbaric and totally unnecessary behaviour to go unchecked.  We continue to confine and kill and eat the most peaceful and gentle of animals, whilst diverting all of our attention towards the other issues.  Only the most obvious symptoms of human decline weigh on the collective mind.  We only consider the damage caused by the problems, not why these problems have arisen.  We are too busy trying to handle the problems and patch them up to worry about faults in the fabric of human nature. It’s not so much that we're hungry for violence, it just ends up that way.  We neglect our problems and they get out of hand.  Then we panic and turn in on ourselves to protect ourselves, leaving a trail of violence and violation behind us. Unless we go to the root cause of our problems (health, resource distribution, warfare, pollution, etc) we will never be able to stop the problems worsening.  It’s suggested that we look at the root causes of violation and violence by starting with what we bring into our homes.  Just a short distance from where you are reading this, there’s probably a refrigerator containing animal-derived-food evidence.  In the living room perhaps there’s a leather-bound chair.  On your feet, leather shoes, in your wardrobe, woollen clothes - all evidence of humans-attacking-animals. It follows that once we can attack an innocent animal, we can go on to make an attack on our environment.  By making war on animals, we stop ourselves from seeing the plight of poor people or how dangerous it is to make war on our neighbours or how stupid it is to dump rubbish in our rivers.  It’s absurd to be in favour of non-violence if one still attacks and uses animals!  It’s equally absurd to keep one eye fully open seeing more clearly whilst keeping the other one tightly shut, thus stopping us from seeing something else equally disturbing. As soon as we stop participating in the mass killing of animals, we open up to a new awareness.  It has to start with individuals, doing what they know is right, without reference to what others are doing. 
If I do what I think is the right thing, then other individuals must eventually start to notice and follow suit (hopefully).  It might seem like slow-tactics, but surely that’s the way the ball starts rolling.  I doubt if any government will act on behalf of ‘the animals’, since to ban the killing of animals would be political suicide.  The breakthrough has to start at the grass roots level, with individuals.

Ed: CJ

Acting to stop violence

973: 

The ordinary person has his or her own problems that they can’t afford to neglect, concerning so many things - woe betide anyone who fails to earn enough money to pay their rent or mortgage.  And it’s essential to give children what they need, to secure their future, to prevent them being trampled by all the others who are struggling up the ladder.  If we don’t help ourselves no one else will - our political leaders can’t be relied upon for help or leadership.  They’re probably as nonplussed as we are.  If they’re doing anything at all they’re feathering their own nests.

There’s an obvious need for change.  Perhaps we see that many of our troubles can be traced back to violence and selfish concern but we can only focus on problems closer to home.  We can’t change the world. We can’t improve things for malnourished children.  We can’t alter our society’s food regime or close abattoirs.  What can an individual do to make a difference?  There’s a reluctance to step out in front, to take the first steps towards change, change that will set off a chain reaction.  We’re reluctant to stretch ourselves, to reach out, in case nothing happens.

On the one hand, I want change for my own benefit, on the other hand I want change for the greater good too.  I have a mix of noble and selfish needs.  The greatest fear is to be stepping too far away from reality and thereby failing all round.  And yet I know it’s up to me to repair what I see is crying out for repair.  It’s up to me to not doubt my own power to make a difference.  I say to myself, my ‘good example’ will encourage others to follow. I need to be sowing seeds and encouraging growth.  I need to be developing faith in others’ wanting-to-do-the-right-thing, for the greater good.  On the one hand the destructive nature of humans, our violent past, our constant insecurity, they are so deeply entrenched.  But on the other hand, we can see how dramatically some things have changed for the better, that radical change is possible and that most people’s intentions are good.

Where does all this get us?  Perhaps these are questions-without-answers, but simply by addressing them we can set ourselves in a direction that is helpful; some do’s and don’ts.

Don’t lose motivation and don’t take part in destructive behaviour. Do take on a non-damaging lifestyle.  Don’t give up too easily.  Do act attractively.  End the day feeling proud of having consciously taken one step forward.  That will surely generate motivation to continue.