Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
There's an Elephant in the Room blog
October
2018
Every day behind the scenes of our non-vegan ‘choices’ are the clanking chains, the tormented screams of the damned, and very much more besides. There is more horror than a lifetime of Halloweens encapsulated within every single non vegan choice.
Here comes Halloween again, with putrefying corpses, clanking chains and
the tormented screams of the damned. Adults and children alike, scream and
giggle with spooky delight, their nervous shivers of horror heightened by
icy frissons of fear and chilly unease while ghouls and the unquiet dead
leave their mouldering graves and strike fear into all.
But wait. Why should anyone need to confine this thrill of excitement to a
single night of the year, when we can have it every single day and night,
throughout the year? All it takes is a slight shift in perception and it’s
all there waiting for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Just think on
this…
All day every day, defenceless and terrified creatures whose only desperate
wish is to live unharmed, are trucked on transports and in crates to the
slaughterhouses that ‘prepare’ them for our shopping trolleys. Every week of
the year over a billion terrified innocents, their legs scarcely able to
hold them for fear, are manhandled and goaded into pens and lines, to wait
in gut-churning horror for their turn with the chains and the blades and the
saws.
Because they are sentient, as we are, they know only too well the peril of
their plight, blood pounding in terrified hearts as they listen to the high
pitched screaming; screaming so desperate as to be almost soundless with the
sickening pain of their bleeding, their seared and scalded, electrified
flesh, screams distorted by the gurgling of blood in hacked throats, screams
of mind-numbing terror, screams wrenched from the panicking hearts of their
friends, of their family, as the grating torment of their agony weaves a
cacophony in counterpoint to the dismembering saws and machines.
There is the sound of despair, of liquid terror gushing and spurting down
legs that are quaking too hard to stand. There is the clamour of frantic
pleading, of whimpering, of sobbing, of hooves on metal walkways, feet
kicking and scrabbling for purchase, struggling to go back, to get away, to
hide, to be anywhere but in this place that smells of death and blood; this
place that smells of hell.
Yes, every day behind the scenes of our non-vegan ‘choices’ are the clanking
chains, the tormented screams of the damned, and very much more besides.
There is more horror than a lifetime of Halloweens encapsulated within every
single non vegan choice. And for what? The putrefying body parts, the
fluids, the breast milk and the eggs that are marketed to us as ‘fresh’.
They are indeed fresh – from Hell.
So when we are not vegan, we are paying to have Halloween, not the phoney
consumer extravaganza but the real horror of Halloween, inflicted on
defenceless innocents every day. To savour the spooky thrill, all we need to
do is simply walk through the mortuary aisles of any supermarket. The chill
in the air, the smell of death, the miasma of putrefaction – it’s there all
the time. All we need to do is close our eyes and breathe deep, to find
ourselves there in that slaughterhouse.
And on the day the ‘thrill’ just gets too much to bear, we do have a choice.
We can make the decision to stop paying for the torment of innocents and can
say, ‘Not in my name’.
That’s the day we become vegan. Be vegan. Today.
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