There's An Elephant In the Room
September 2016
How often do we hear it said, ‘I hardly eat any meat’, or ‘I only take a drop of milk in tea’? It is as if we consider that the level of misery that we demand as consumers can be scaled down by such reductions.
How often do we hear it said, ‘I hardly eat any meat’, or ‘I only take a drop of milk in tea’? It is as if we consider that the level of misery that we demand as consumers can be scaled down by such reductions.
This view occurs because we refuse to see our victims as individuals. Yet for the individual whose pitiful life was cut short in gore and screaming for us to have that piece of their desecrated flesh that we seek to downplay, the world ended a few days earlier and never again will they wake on a new day of hope. Their horror and their fear, their desperate struggles against the hard hands with their knives and saws, were no less for our trivialising. Their despair was not in any way lessened as the electric prods forced their faltering steps onto the kill floor.
For that ‘drop of milk’ that we smilingly seek to excuse as a trivial indulgence, a mother was pinioned and violated. For nine months, her womb nurtured her growing child while every day her swelling, mothering body was hooked up to our mechanical suction pumps. And when her time of labour came, as with any other mother, she knew the wrenching, draining, convulsions of her child’s birth; she cried out, bearing down as nature’s tides gripped her body in her toil, and her pain was no less that it would have been had she known of all those members of our species who ‘only take a drop in tea’.
Her anguish, her frantic fear as her infant was taken from her were in no way diminished by the frequency of our use, or the quantity we, as individuals, take. Her loss, her anguish and her degradation were devastating. Her infant’s sobs of fear and bewilderment, his futile whimpers for his mother’s milk and warmth were not in any way consoled by our trivialising. His death will be agonising and he will be more afraid that we can even imagine.
For it is not how much or how little we use our victims that is the issue.
It is not how often or how seldom we use our victims that is the issue.
It is not how ‘nicely’ we treat our victims that is the issue.
The issue is that we have victims at all. The issue is that this is unnecessary. The issue is that until we accept that these victims are not ours to use, this outrage will continue and whilst we may seek to excuse ourselves with a smile and a shrug, we truly cannot detach ourselves from the very real and inevitable consequences of our consumer choices.
When we refuse to participate in this nightmare for another moment, is the point at which we decide to become vegan. Please make that moment today.
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