No Tolerance for Cruelty
Just as the abolitionists had an
agenda to see an end to human slavery or the suffragettes had an agenda to
see that women get the right to vote and are treated as equals, there is a
vegan/animal rights agenda to see that non-humans are
free from exploitation and abuse.
It's not that we expect to give
animals �human rights� or the literal right to vote (people seem to have a
hard enough time with those hanging chads), but their interests should be
considered whenever our actions affect them. At the very least our fellow
animals deserve to be free from forced insemination, mutilation, and
concentration-camp-like confinement throughout life and in the cattle-cars
on their way to an early, horrific death at the slaughterhouse.
To those who say �I respect your
decision to eat vegan. Now it�s time for you to respect the rest of our
rights to eat what we want!!!� This situation is similar to an
abolitionist being told by a slave owner that he respects the right not to
have slaves, so the abolitionist should respect the right to keep people
enslaved.
Veganism is in no way comparable to a
religion, any more than abolitionism or the women�s rights movement were
religions.
In both of those cases, as with
veganism/animal rights, the proponents of those progressive causes were
desperately trying to convince people that it is wrong to consider others
as mere property. And as with those other movements, people involved with
wanting to end the property status of animals adhere to many different
religions or none at all.
Most vegans are keenly aware that we
all evolved from the same animal origins and realize that we have more
similarities than differences. And as far as the idea that vegans want to
see everyone convert to veganism--well, ultimately that�s true, in the
same way that abolitionists wanted everyone to free their slaves or
suffragettes wanted everyone to see that women deserved equal rights.
Some say that we should have
tolerance for those who choose to eat meat in the same way that they have
tolerance for us choosing not to eat meat. But it should be obvious that
there is a major difference between tolerating the consumption of food
that is the result of animal suffering, and tolerating the food choices of
those who do not consume sentient beings.
Intolerant is what the Japanese
accused non-whaling nations of being towards them and their �right� to
harpoon, butcher and eat whales and dolphins. The Koreans who literally
torture dogs to death and boil cats alive in the belief that doing so
makes them taste better and/or improves their medicinal value, call you
intolerant when you oppose their cruel customs. Some Europeans have
accused animal advocates of intolerance for working to end their practice
of force-feeding geese and ducks for fois grais, or to ban the slaughter
of horses for human consumption.
In this country people like to think
that the animals they buy in restaurants or in cellophane packaging have
been treated well and killed humanely, because after all, this is a
civilized country. Unfortunately, animals forced to live on factory farms
would not think of our culture as civilized any more than dogs and cats
would in Korea, or dolphins off the coast of Japan, or ducks, geese and
horses in France.
The fact is you can�t house and
slaughter 350,000,000 turkeys and 9,000.000.000 pigs, cows, chickens,
sheep and other animals per year in a manner that would even remotely pass
for humane.
No one should be expected to tolerate
cruelty to animals who are capable of suffering any more than they should
be expected to tolerate cruelty to humans. To quote songwriter Kenny
Logins, �When we allow ourselves to feel our feelings, what should be
intolerable becomes intolerable.�
Jim Robertson