Why I am Scared to Talk About Veganism
Lucy Cunningham
There is a reason that I haven’t yet written directly about veganism, or why I am vegan, or my beliefs. There is a part of me that does not want to write this, the other part of me itching to release what I have wanted to for a long time.
I watched a video a while ago, where I realised that to be vegan isn’t just eating the correct food but also conveying the message of veganism, being an activist. At the same time as stressing how important this is, it highlighted to me that as a vegan, there is such a fine line between saying the right and wrong thing. This scared me, I knew that every argument I made for veganism posed the risk of deterring people instead of enlightening them. When your heart is so invested in something, it can seem less daunting to be silent than to just speak up. I often find myself getting heated in a debate about veganism, speaking from my heart and not my head, only thinking of the cause and not the method, saying the wrong things through fury and passion instead of understanding.
At times I do wish I could go ahead and lose my temper at those who are ignorant, people who are just like me before something clicked in my head. Most of the time I’m so angry at the world, but I choose silence because shouting at someone will never result in them understanding, only furthering their reluctance to listen. This is why a big part of me is fearful to post this. Because I wrote the following ramblings at a time where I had become distraught after seeing a picture on instagram. It was of cows in a field, a sign in front of it claiming that that the place beside it served home-raised, delicious steak, clearly the cows that were being raised in naivety right behind the signpost.
The following is perhaps more on the side of speaking from fury than clarity, but in a way I think it’s time that I give insight into how strongly I believe in this, that veganism is everything that is important. That it needs to be spoken about with the passion on par with how catastrophic a system is running right under our noses , that I need to speak about it, no matter how ridiculous it may come across.
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There was a time when the suffragists and their peaceful tactics resulted in too little. There was too much injustice going on to take such a mild approach. It had to take the recklessness of the words and actions of suffragettes to actually make a difference, for people to actually drop what they were doing and LISTEN. Being peaceful is sometimes not enough, when a matter so important is at hand. To me, what we are doing to the planet and to millions of animals each day is an important enough issue for me to take that step, and speak a little louder, to release myself from the backseat, and let loose everything from my mind and in my heart. Maybe it is time to stop worrying about deterring people and to worry only about voicing what truly matters.
A past me would have seen the following words and parallels as extreme, but looking back I wish I could have seen things with an open mind, and just tried to understand. I hope you can do the same too.
A lot of the time I cry. A lot of the time I am thrown suddenly into rage, into tears, at what people view as mundane. My reaction can seem extreme for someone who hasn’t understood the truth yet. They might say they know the truth, but fail to look past that, and fail to make the emotional connection. Of the suffering animal and the dinner meal.
We weep still, and commemorate over those victims of war, oppression and genocide. Genocide; the most horrific concept humans have fathomed, that is hard to think of, that makes our guts toss and turn, not being able to accept that this could ever happen. That we could kill people just for being different, for the feeling of power and control, for pleasure and just because we just want to. Yet, every day, a meat eater, actively partakes in the circle of demand, for what is nothing short of the definition of genocide.
Whether genocide applies only to humans in your eyes, or not, the systematic massacre of thousands of breathing, loving, feeling animals, who are mothers and children, bears the only difference that they cannot verbally express their screams to be saved, their urge to survive and their absolute resistance and terror to dying.
Seeing a pet animal, say a puppy, being beaten on the street, our bodies would be thrown in sheer human impulse to go and save that animal from dying. At the same time, we would go home from the ordeal to fry up a bacon roll, some part of ourselves simply not understanding that we have been involved in the demand for an animal, that feels the same as a dog, to be killed. All for the taste. Nothing else.
Rage emerges inside me when this link is so clearly obvious it makes me beg that people connect the dots. That they put two and two together and realise that our burger is the beautiful animal in the field with flowing black eyelashes, a scratchy nose and a baby in her tummy. That she soon will have her baby stolen from her to be slaughtered and she will soon follow. And that this is because we bought burger meat off the shelf last week, a space that needs to be replaced by another slab of dead animal the next week.
I get filled with rage when someone turns their nose up at trying a vegan food. They say “ew, if it’s vegan I’m not trying it”, “I’d rather have the ‘real’ thing thanks” as if the lack of calf breastmilk, blood and flesh makes something intolerable to eat. The more natural it is, the worse it gets for someone made to believe that meat is simply ‘the circle of life’.
When I bring up the topic of meat-eating, when I mention that I have sadness that animals are being murdered, someone scoffs, as if it is of no relevance or matter to the world. As if the thought of innocent beings, howling for their lives, slit at the throats and being left upside down to drain from blood shouldn’t make me sad, that it is ridiculous to bring it up again!
I am filled with rage when I think of how far the world is coming in terms of progressive-thinking, about the equality of all sexes, of all genders of all races, of everybody. But how so many fail to see animals as living things too. How they contradict themselves when they see the worst possible act of any human as murder. A crime to do to another human, but lunch when to an animal.
This is not a case of animals ‘not understanding what is happening to them’, ‘but it is tradition and just the circle of life’, ‘it is okay because they kill them in a humane way’. This is a black and white case, with absolutely no shades of grey, of inexplicit murder. Of animals whose minds are programmed like all of us, to nurture their babies, to reproduce, to survive. Who are being killed. There is no excuse anymore. We don’t need meat to survive.
How hard is it to just not eat animals? How hard is it to not drink the liquid they produce for their babies to grow? How hard is it to not kill? How hard is it to just care?
It’s not hard at all.
