A plea to shoppers

Today there are millions of individuals in the death trucks, packed in crates, queuing in slaughterhouses. For each one who waits, quaking, a pulse throbs warm and strong under soft skin while a heart pounds with anxiety. They listen to those who have gone before, hear their panic, the high-pitched screams of horror and of agony. They smell the metallic tang of blood, the warm stench of entrails, the slaughterhouse miasma of unspeakable horror.

Desperately huddling together as they seek reassurance, each will ultimately face the terror alone. Each will fight with every last ounce of their young strength but their battle will be futile; suspended, each warm pulse spurting brightly through the gash made by our blades while that strength falters and dies; lifeblood pooling, sliding into drains and channels.

They have no defence against our brute force and technology, no hope of reaching a species determined to ignore their sobs and pleas; to regard them as nothing more than resources, commodities, ingredients.

We cannot save them. Their conception and their measured existence was planned according to a supply schedule; their executions will go ahead, for one reason only; because of the demands of consumers. That smiling shopper, trolley filled with breast milk and with cheese, with eggs and with dismembered flesh, humming tunelessly as they browse the aisles; that ordinary person who could have been you or could once have been me, pondering how to serve up this dead and dismal chunk of shrink-wrapped flesh for the family meal.

That shopper ordered the slaughterhouse bloodbath. That shopper demanded the misery of their victims’ existence as commodities. That shopper bought a nightmare so they could have that flesh, breast milk and eggs to put in their shopping trolley. That shopper paid the wage of every hand that carved through the lives and flesh of those bewildered and horrified innocents.

Only by being vegan can we stop being that shopper. We are the only hope of those who will face that slaughterhouse queue in the future. They really have no one else. We owe them veganism and absolutely nothing less. Only by refusing to be that shopper, by ending consumer demand for death, can there be any prospect of a world without slaughterhouse queues.

Be vegan. Today.