Consciousness and spirituality means feeling compassion and connected to everything.
So how can we claim to be more moral than our ancestors if we’re so happy to take another life.
There’s a massacre going on casually in all of our backyards and we’re averting our eyes.
There’s cruelty being done to animals on behalf of our stomachs, behind closed doors so that we don’t have to stomach seeing the atrocious acts.
We condemn people publicly on social media when a group kills a dog or skins a cat and hangs it on a wall for fun.
We oppose the Yulin dog meat festival.
We cry for Harambe the gorilla.
We made Cecil the lion’s hunter/murderer so infamous that people refuse to go to his dental practice.
But we pay people behind closed doors to maim and kill cows, pigs and chickens, all because we like the taste.
Before you tell me it’s fine because they were bred to be caged, fattened up, and eaten, know this: If you were born into a cage, I’d stand up for your rights too.
We teach our children to have compassion. To live and let live. To not hurt others and to be caring to all those we come across.
Then we put dead animals on their plate and expect them to ignore it.
There’s Disney movies on the screen as they chew flesh.
We fear the humans stealing Nemo from his home on the reef.
Then we buy them a fish tank.
We all want Creuella Deville to lose her chase to skin the dalmatian puppies for their fur.
Then we buy them mink blankets.
We watch Brother Bear and pray that the hunter doesn’t kill Kenai the bear.
Then we vote that we need a wildlife cull.
We support the chickens in Chicken Run to escape from their prison and their man made destiny to become chicken pies.
Then suggest chicken pie for dinner.
‘But, children, you must eat the animal on your plate. We need it to survive.’
This implicit part of our society is a fallacy.
Nutrients come from the ground and there is no need for an animal to die for us to survive.
There’s protein in all vegetables. Every single one.
Potatoes have as much carbohydrates as you’ll ever need.
Nuts and seeds are loaded with minerals and vitamins.
Green leafy vegetables have all the iron, magnesium and calcium your body craves.
Your bones aren’t going to break. Your muscles aren’t going to invert.
You don’t have to impregnate a cow; take her milk when she begins to lactate; remove her baby when she gives birth; rename the baby, veal; sell the baby to be eaten; and finally drink the milk that she made for her baby – to avoid wasting away.
What makes us think that as adults it’s ‘natural’ to breast feed from another species?
A baby cow is born 30 kilograms and within 10 months of milk is between 200 and 300 kilograms.
What do you think this fluid, designed to make a fellow mammal gain tenfold the size, is doing to your body?
Do you really think that soy milk – made from soy beans and water – has more hormones in it than this baby cow growth fluid?
The cattle population across the world eats enough grain, oats and soy to feed a human population of 8.7 billion humans.
That is the food of 8.7 billion humans that no human gets to eat.
And that’s only cows; not ducks; hens; turkeys, goats; pigs or horses.
We’re destroying 2 football fields of rainforest per second to make crop land to feed these animals.
Yet there’s roughly 100 million children in developing countries right now that are under weight. 3.1 million children will die this year due to malnutrition.
21,000 people die today because of starvation, and we’ll feed a worlds worth of cereals to animals because it makes some businesses richer.
Eat your vegetables. Eat a wide variety of different colors and textures, it reflects what nutrients they’re made of.
But if you wouldn’t be okay with someone eating your dog because you’re aware that it has a personality and it’s own sentience, then you should have a think about whether you should be paying people to do it to other animals for you.
To stop eating animals is to concede that you’re aware that each animal has it’s own life.
It’s to stand up and say we’re not entitled to take that life.
It’s about justice. You don’t have to be a huge animal lover to acknowledge that they feel pain and distress and don’t want to be killed and eaten.
It’s about realizing that all life is special. That somewhere in our mind there’s a spark of consciousness that science cannot yet explain.
That at your birth you were given a life that you didn’t ask for, but you hope others will respect enough to not think they can own, or take advantage of.
The only way you can change the world is to change your own consciousness.
Author: Vicky Smith and Danny Hansen
Vic, from England, and Dan, from Australia. We are a loving couple, mid twenties, travelling central and south America and setting ourselves up to start a self sustainable community on the east coast of Australia in the next few years.
We’re here to make friends and learn things.
Cheers!
