Being absolutely clear

When we advocate on their behalf, it is vital to focus on the injustice of ALL the uses that we make of members of other species. We need to ensure that it’s clear that even in the ‘best’ of situations, where every activity is tightly regulated and the letter of the law is observed to the last detail, what we are doing as a species is deeply wrong. Our use of the lives and bodies of others for any purpose is an atrocity. There are no exceptions. It is the acknowledgement of this reality that demands that we become vegan.

It’s important to realise that most people do not want to face this fact and when confronted with it, will struggle mentally to find a compromise position that allows them to continue to feel good about their own actions while demanding the least possible change of behaviour.

When we allow our audience to conclude that the fundamental problem of our use exists when regulations are being breached, where stricter legislation is needed, or where specific species are being harmed, we may inadvertently offer an easy route to that compromise position. We see the results of this compromise when those who are not vegan, campaign for regulatory reform and enforcement, or focus on the plight of individual species or groups with protests and complaints.

The compromise position allows those who are not vegan to feel good that they’re doing ‘something’ while in fact, by not being vegan their own daily activities are resulting in horrors just as devastating for their own victims, as those they are protesting against.

How do I know? I was one of them once. I will be forever grateful for that unknown advocate who made me realise that there is no point in complaining about what others are doing when we ourselves are responsible for something just as bad, if not worse. That is when I became vegan. We can’t save those defenceless individuals who are already in the brutal system of violence and harm that non vegan cash has purchased, but by convincing others to become vegan, we can gradually bring the whole unjust nightmare to a halt.

Our victims are being hatched and milked, confined and mutilated, violated and electric-prodded onto transports. They are screaming in laboratories, defeated and sick with despair in all the hells that our consumer demands have built for them. They are queuing in the slaughterhouses every second of every day.  They want to live and they are depending on us to leave no room for misunderstandings.

It’s not the where, or the when, or the how they are used that’s the problem. It is the fact that they are used at all. It has to stop because it’s wrong.  Be vegan.