TRIED TO BE VEGETARIAN BUT FAILED..

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 DON'T FORGET TO SEE EARTHLINK ON THE LINK IF NOT SEEN ALREADY!!!

Last week I sat in a brew pub and spoke with a 55-year-old cyclist who was really into fitness. He looked good for his age. When he learned I was a vegan for three years now, he explained to me that he had tried to be a vegetarian for a while and then described the many obstacles that made him defect.
First it was a “perceived” lack of protein. Then it was the discovery of “sustainable, humane” meat labels. Then came the social pressures and awkwardness around friends at dinner. And how about that popular “paleo” notion that our ancestors were great hunters and warriors. Underlying this last reason is the powerful cultural symbol of meat as masculinity and power (if only power over beings far more vulnerable than us). I’d heard these reasons countless times before (but I didn’t say so).
Instead I refocused the discussion on what I see as the big elephant in the closet: the unresolved ethical dilemma over why we kill animals for reasons other than survival. Instead we kill animals today for profit, and we sanction that killing in the name of convenience and satisfying our trivial pleasures. And this was never questioned since it was widely believed that animals did not care whether they lived or died or had an an awareness that their lives mattered to them in the way that our lives matter to us.
But that all changed about 40 years ago when the first animal rights scholars began to assert the case that the new scientific discoveries at the time confirming sentience in animals was nothing short of a game changer and that these scientific breakthroughs must completely change the paradigm, away from our use of animals as mere resources to our own ends.

So to go back to the conversation with the guy at the bar and attempting to confront this big ethical elephant in the closet, I asked him, “Have you ever seen footage inside of a slaughterhouse?” And he replied, “Oh yes, I’ve seen a PBS series about factory farming.” And I said, “No, that’s not exactly what I mean. Have you ever really witnessed the systematic and institutionalized killing of sentient beings?” And he replied, “No, not exactly.”

So I said, “Okay, do me a favor. See the movie Earthlings and see if you can identify yourself and your loved ones as the victims in this film. When you can do so, you will have fully grasped the reality of this experience, and your apathy will turn to empathy. He said, “Okay, I’ll give it a try.”
Who knows if he’ll ever watch Earthlings or ever even remember our conversation.

What I do know is that silence and denial are the greatest barriers to making progress for sentient beings and farmed animals are the most exploited class of animals. So we must never be afraid or hesitant to talk about the atrocities against them. It’s the same with any other form of injustice that is an unfortunate part of the human legacy: sexism, racism, slavery, rape, genocide, worker exploitation, child labor, sex trafficking.
Species is no more a reason to deny justice than is race, religion, sex, or sexual preference. And I firmly believe that one day, perhaps not in my lifetime or in the lifetime of our children, this more expansive view of justice that includes species will prevail.

Our immediate goal should be about making history in the present by choosing NOT to support those that are profiting on the exploitation of animals.