Changing our personal habits

1753: 

Anyone who sees the urgent need to do something about the way we treat food-animals is going to have to ignore what they’ve previously been taught about food - they’ll have to go against tastebud-advice, against the advice of corporations, governments and educators, and turn to themselves 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. We should all be ashamed of the way animals are slaughtered, for the way hens are imprisoned in tiny cages and for the way so many animals are routinely mutilated without anaesthetic. The more I learn the more ashamed I become. I discover that newborn calves are snatched away from their mothers (most calves are shot soon after they’re born), sows are kept restrained in stalls, unable to move, cattle are mutilated (for very practical reasons, of course)  - the list of horrors goes on and on. Each one reflects on the farmers and producers, and the consumers who support all this by buying animal produce.

Now all this might be true enough, but so many of us have been or still are involved, simply by buying animal-based foods, that there’s a mass switch-off; we don’t talk about it because it throws up too many problems.

My taste buds are like yours, they respond to the same foods and yet these same foods weigh heavily on my conscience if they're animal-based. There’s a sort of numbness that comes over me when I try to think of how sentient animals are suffering. I'm glad it puts me off all animal stuff, if only to keep me away from the brutality involved in animal farming. The fact that animals (kept alive only to be eaten) are presently living in terror, and dying the most ugly death anyone could imagine says a lot about how brutal humans are. We say, “It’s outrageous”, 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. The general policy is: minds closed, mouths open, because that's what we're used to doing.

Then the brave speak up, “No longer!” ... but in reality, even if we feel outraged, we don’t think we’d have enough willpower to alter our eating habits so radically, for a principle. Nothing will be powerful enough to convince us to stop. Neither ill health, guilty conscience or issues concerning the environmental impact of animal farming.

If we do make the decision to ‘go-vegan’, we find out eventually that it’s probably 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 do a repair job on ourselves and help liberate the animals at the same time. But this habit-switching is no light matter. If we give up eating meat one day, the next day we’ll be questioning the whole ethical basis of animal farming and nutrition! So what starts out as just a change of diet, now opens up significant changes of attitude and lifestyle.

The obstacles which ironically give us greater awareness

1752: 

The big difficulty facing animal advocates is that the more we learn, the more we want to tell others what we know; but the more we tell, the fewer people want to listen. The more you learn about the abuse of animals, the more you realise how serious is the cruelty.

Most animal welfare organizations focus their attention on the people who perpetrate the cruelty, whereas it's really the millions of consumers who we need to bring around. Customers demand easy availability of products at a low price, which forces the producer to take up the cheapest method of supply, which happens to involve the most cruelty.   

It’s because ordinary people are turning a blind eye, that allows the system to continue. While millions of children are malnourished and millions of animals are being killed, everyone else goes about their business as if nothing bad is happening.

Laying the blame though is futile. It solves nothing. There are always arguments to excuse animal abuse. Ordinary people have their own problems which can’t be neglected. The sheer weight of making a living and paying the bills pushes so many important issues into the background; woe betide anyone failing to pay their rent or mortgage or payments on the car. It’s essential to give the children what they need, to secure their future, to prevent them being trampled on by others who are scrambling for the same sort of safety for their own kids.

People won't look at the impact their lifestyle is having on the world unless they're consciously moving towards a whole new set of values. It’s almost as if change can’t find fertile ground to thrive because the System is so well established. It forces people to go with the flow. And our political leaders can’t be relied upon to show any moral leadership because they’re as compromised as everyone else. Even if we know what should be done, we don’t have the freedom or courage to break away from the way things have always been done.

So, there’s an obvious need for change yet a reluctance to step out in front, to take the first steps towards setting off a chain reaction of change. We might all agree that there’s a need for change, but we're afraid to step too far away from known-reality.

There are many questions for which there are inadequate answers:  Do I believe that my ‘good example’ will encourage others to follow? Does my sowing seeds encourage growth? Do I have faith in others to do the right thing? Should I rely on others, who feel the same way as I do, to stick with their activism? Are our destructive habits and violent attitudes so deeply entrenched that radical change can’t happen? Is change possible? Are our intentions good?

Perhaps we need to turn away from the bigger picture and take a fresh look at home values - to walk before we can run. First up, if there are things to be done, then we must be sure our motivation is strong - personal change needs good motivation to create an alternative, non-damaging lifestyle. If it's there, if it works well for ourselves, then we can promote it. But we shouldn't expect too much too soon - the particular difficulty in promoting Animal Rights is that there are so many competing causes, so many other (more obviously dangerous) issues facing the planet. They seem bigger and blacker than any concern we might have about farm animals. Today there's growing environmental damage being done. We’re wasting trillions of dollars on weapons of war. We see the obscenity of wealthy people eating to excess next door to poor people dying from malnutrition. If three such horrors exist, what room is there left for less-obvious horrors to be tackled? Surely, we say, there's too much else going wrong without adding to the list. We argue that these issues are more important than the enslavement of non-human animals; animal treatment doesn't seem as big a threat to civilisation. It’s like in wartime, when bombs are raining down, when that dominates everyone’s thoughts. And very little else seems to matter as much.

Few people care about the damage being done to our ‘humanity’, by confining and killing and then eating animals, when there are these other issues weighing so heavily on our collective conscience. But surely, all issues are connected by fear and violence. The root cause of violation and violence will only mend when we stop attacking animals, because that same violence must be added to our list, which includes our attacks on the environment and on the most poor people of the world. We can hardly pretend we are a non-violent people when we still attack and use animals.

As soon as we stop participating in the mass killing of animals we open up a new awareness, but it has to start with individuals, doing what they must do without reference to what others are doing. If I can do what I think is the right thing, then other individuals must eventually start to notice and follow suit. It might take a long time, but surely that is 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 so unpopular that it would spell political suicide. The breakthrough has to start at the grass roots level. With individuals.

Crossing the river

1751:

I used to think as an omnivore thinks, even when I came to understand the cruelty involved in animal farming and animal killing. However strong the argument might have been, it would never have persuaded me to act so differently to everyone else. As a young adult and as a child I had always been trying to fit in, not to stand out as being different. Having food in common with others is a great leveler, and not so difficult either when the society in which we live makes it so easy to be ‘not fully informed’ - I had always consumed animal-based foods and confections, not just to satisfy my hunger but also for pleasure.

It was only when I started to find out about the provenance of certain foods that I began to question the ethics of those foods. Suddenly, I found there was a problem facing me. Certain foods were a huge source of satisfaction for me. To give up my favourite foods for the sake of animals posed a problem. I had to ask myself if I was a compassionate person. Surely, if I’d wanted to test my compassion, I’d have to first show it for fellow humans. There are many humans deserving my empathy. I’d have argued that my compassion couldn’t be expected to extend to animals, not the ones we eat anyway. But does this argument stand up? Later, I found that it didn’t, since it directly challenged my participation in ‘normal behaviour’, namely condoning the sort of routine cruelty practised on farm animals.

As a life-long meat eater, my problem came back to this one difficulty. I was reluctance to admit that I might have been wrong all along, about my food habits. To start considering the feelings of animals would have meant too much loss of face and consequently, also, too big a step-down in lifestyle. I’d been eating the same sorts of foods all my life and to do without animal products altogether would impose on my daily habits a lot of un-doing. And if I tried to undo so much, I mightn’t be able to keep it up for the rest of my life.

But wrestling with these problems at the time, as a young person, I could see there was at least some chance to change - I was less set in my ways than the adults around me. I was less troubled by guilt since I’d had fewer years of making my own independent food choices. Until recently, my food had been provided by my elders, and now, the act of rebelling against the habits of the older generation felt appropriate. A radical diet-change was my way of striking out.

Once I'd decided to become vegan, I remember it felt quite natural to accuse my elders of being 'asleep on the job'. I felt the need to atone for what I’d done (and on their behalf for what they’d done and were still doing). I wanted to ‘set up camp’ on the other side of the river. It made me see that by becoming a herbivore I could do my bit to spare animals. I was disassociating from most of the people I knew, outcasting myself, but as I crossed that 'river' I found my erstwhile 'omnivore-thinking' beginning to fade, and that was ultimately satisfying.

Love

1750: 

Vegan philosophy is about clarifying the nature of love, as an energy which drives all creation and maintains all life. And so it follows that humans, with their free will and ability to choose, can bring the power of love into their own consciousness or they can pervert it or ignore it or be oblivious to it.

Because ‘love’ is such an abstract concept, it’s difficult to grasp its significance in our practical daily lives. It can be as dangerous as it is useful. If we want to ‘do’ love, perhaps it’s best to remember that by its very nature, love isn’t partial; it’s either unconditionally applied and applicable to all things we encounter, or it can be manipulated into an unstable look-alike. If we choose to respect ‘love’, we can join things up with it, to make things more comprehensible. But if we drop a link of this connecting chain (as we do when we hurt animals or damage a river or go to war) then there are consequences.

Our survival isn’t dependant on animals, unless by loving them we find a way to move beyond our violent human nature.

On this subject of animal rights, it seems absurd that we could still go on hurting and killing (and these days demonically torturing) animals, when for the past seventy odd years we’ve known well enough that we need do nothing of the sort for any reason whatsoever. If we ignore the fact that we no longer need to kill them or milk them or wear them in order to survive, then the power of love won’t work for us. In fact it will work against our best interests, just as any mutated or unstable element will if we introduce it into our lives. The more so when we’re using our sophisticated intellect to try to get the best of all opportunities. 

I’m sure there are communities around the world who must kill animals to survive, since for them there is nothing else available for them to eat or wear. I’m sure there are communities to whom it has never occurred that humans can survive without using animals. But our Western societies are otherwise informed. For us who know better, there can only be deceit and hypocrisy involved, when it comes to condoning the abuse of animals by continuing to buy abattoir products. Even those who eschew meat but still drink milk and eat eggs and otherwise use the by-products of animals, they ought to know the consequences of their own double standards. If love is the great power driving everything, then surely we are showing scant regard for love when we use products of violence. If we use products that come to us via the ugly dairy farming of cows or the slaughtering of spent hens or the shearing of sheep or from enslaving animals in any other way, we must know that there are negative consequences for us and of course for the animals themselves.

Animals, whether wild or domesticated, have committed no crime and deserve no punishment. To ‘waste’ (murder) them is both a waste of energy and a waste of love. For love to work, it must be comprehensively applied. It is nothing to do with 'love' when we are hurting animals simply to serve the short term convenience of ourselves. 

Slogans and plain speaking

1749:

We don't need slogans like “Meat is Murder”; it’s a statement that’s true enough but what we’re really saying is “YOU are a murderer if you eat meat and”, by implication, “I am NOT”. Slogans are usually hackneyed (not our own original thoughts) and are often aggressively intoned and sound like an attack. Slogans are used like sharp weapons, the use of which we believe will shock people into change. As soon as we utter a slogan we deliver a judgement, and then the shutters come down. The defensive counter-judgement is lobbed back, like, “What bitter bastards you vegans are!”, and that effectively closes down any meaningful dialogue. 

Obviously, my being vegan, I don’t want to condone any sort of animal abuse, but I do want to allow enough elbow room for the subject to be discussed. So, let me suggest some basic arguments and you can assess how they stand up.

One can’t justify animal-use intellectually because there are just too many ugly aspects to the way they’re treated, and too many good arguments for boycotting animal-based commodities. But we need to look at things from the omnivore’s perspective, if we want to get a handle on the problem of communicating this difficult subject.

If a person is struggling with our ideas it’s because they are weighing our arguments against their own daily habits. And these deeply embedded habits are confirmed by what others around them do. Mostly, others don’t think about animals’ feelings; they do what they’ve always done and what their parents taught them to do and what they teach their own children to do; they simply eat the food they like to eat. They either haven’t realized there's an ethical component to some foods or they've blotted it out. When we've eaten animal-based foods all our lives, it’s difficult to accept that it can be wrong, since humans have been eating them since history began. Such a fundamental food source isn’t easily caste aside. And since these foods are so heavily woven into the fabric of our social life, to do without them might seem to threaten the very stability of our social interactions with others.

So when a vegan comes along and shouts, “Meat is murder”, it’s ineffective We might think that what we're saying is true, and truth is powerful, and powerful statements bring a change of attitude. But I don't think it works that way. It's shoddy communication.

Slogans shouldn’t be confused with plain speaking.

Counterproductive approaches from high moral ground

1748: 

Just as children need to grow out of their temper-tantrum stage so do adults need to grow out of their animal-killing stage; it’s ugly, it’s violent and it’s unnecessary. And from the long-term-health angle, eating food from animals is probably the most dangerous thing we could do to ourselves.

As animal activists, our aim is to get that message across, but in order to do that we have to set the stage. We first need to be seen as people who love animals and people alike. Once that is established, then we can deliver the bottom line - the need for an attitude-change in the way animals are regarded. Despite the traditional dependency on them and the mind-set most people have about this, if any changes are going to permanent ones, they must be voluntary. We need to encourage attitude change without using force or getting steamed-up with people.

Because nearly everyone is indirectly involved in exploiting animals, evidenced by the shoes they wear and the food they eat, shaming them into change will never work. If we try that on our friends we'll lose them. Our attempts to persuade and argue our case rest upon the sort of example we set, not only as vegans but as non-judgmental people. Even though our arguments seem difficult to handle, the words we use to explain them must be kind. As much as we might want to persuade others, we should be just as keen to show we're interested in self examination, so that we never come across as better-than. The trick is to show that one is no stranger to inconsistency, having ourselves been reluctant to make the very changes we now advocate others make. We don't need to say anything like, “I’m vegan, how about you?”, because apart from that being boastful, it's clumsy and separating. Whatever we have to say, it doesn’t need to be said too directly. People can pick up the message without it being spelt out too heavily; they are likely to be sensitive to overtones in the voice and body language. To be a good communicator, perhaps we should show that we are sensitive to the difficulty of change, especially when we’re with hostile or uninterested listeners.

We shouldn’t try to moralise, despite our knowing that the attack on animals is a moral matter. We should instead try to be equalizers; our being vegan only means we're at a different stage of awareness, that's all.

Making Way for the Future

1747: 

Edited by CJ Tointon

A nonviolent society is an attractive and possible idea to people who have taken the plunge and gotten rid of animal-based foods. To people who haven't, the idea is a nonstarter - if only because they are willing to accept violence against animals. Nonviolence is a attitude demonstrated daily by the one habit where choice is entirely personal - choosing one's food. Here in the West, in 'developed' countries where choice is free to almost everyone, an animal boycott is possible. If vegans can do it and live well by it, then anyone can do it.

What stops a person becoming vegan? At one level it might be a lack of understanding and trust in a plant-based diet. At another level it's not knowing about the methods used in modern animal husbandry and slaughtering. At yet another level it might come down to a lack of concern for the animals from which so much of our food comes. Today there's no reason why we can't know about the first two levels, since there's enough information available to convince us that vegan diets are safe and that animal farming is cruel. But no amount of knowledge can guarantee empathy. The greatest tragedy of our age is that most humans don't feel strongly enough about non-humans to deny themselves the convenience and pleasure of using animals for food and clothing and vivisection. For almost every human on the planet, complaisance and self-indulgence prevent the idea of a non-violent society from taking hold. Almost every human thinks he/she can ignore the values set down by vegan principle, even when they know it represents an ultimately intelligent and compassionate path.

Vegans are still few in number. It might seem laughable that we could sway people to radically change their attitudes to animals enough to no longer want to eat them, let alone give up their by-products, let alone resist the temptation to wear animal skins and fleeces. Our task of persuading people to think otherwise might seem almost impossible ... almost but not quite.

Half a century ago, just about everyone was omnivorous, but since then many people have changed their attitude towards animal-use. In some parts of the world up to 1% of the population has become vegan. Recently, the increase in that percentage has been relatively rapid, mainly amongst the younger twenties generation.

If there is to be enough people wanting this change to come about, enough to affect the food market and the leather and wool market, it will probably come about as a result of a combination of fashion awareness, animal empathy, a concern for public health, a concern for the future of the planet and as an atonement for the centuries of cruelty and damage done to animals by humans.

A general disillusion with the benefits of materiality brings us towards spiritual values which will inevitably bring change and great social kudos for being vegan. Perhaps from today's perspective, this is hardly imaginable. Today, we might have the highest principles and be as politically correct as possible, but if this matter of 'animal use' hasn't been properly resolved, we will be prevented from any convincing level of self development.

Most of us lay great store on being able to say something good about ourselves - anything to make us seem less superficial. To be able to say that we are vegan without even mentioning the reason for it, shows that we have willpower, imagination, love and enough self-discipline to adopt an extra dimension to our life. By taking on this challenge, by disregarding the temptation-power of so many animal-based foods and commodities, we will surely stand that much taller in our own eyes. One's refusal to be manipulated by the vested interests of the food and clothing industries, denotes a strength of character most of us would value greatly.