Nurturing Objections
The mentality of domination and exclusion that necessarily flows from commodifying animals and eating animal foods, and that gives rise to competition, repression of the feminine principle, and the exploitation of the lower classes by the wealthier cattle-owning classes. It operated within the human supremacist frame-work and never challenged the mentality that sees living beings as commodities. Veganism is a call for us to unite in seeing that as long as we oppress other living beings, we will inevitably create and live in a culture of oppression.
The vegan commitment to consciously minimize our cruelty to all animals is so revolutionary in its implications that it is often summarily dismissed because it triggers cognitive dissonance and deep anxiety. We have been so ingrained with the herding mentality since birth that even those of us who consider ourselves to be quite progressive aren’t typically prepared to question the exploitation of animals and humans that we cause by our food choices. Like a ball being held under water, our natural compassion wants to come bobbing up to the surface, so we must continually work to keep it repressed.
Animals as Ethically Trivial
One of these basic objections is that compassion for animals gives them more importance than they merit. With this objection, the dominant herding paradigm trivializes animals, scoffing at vegans for caring about them.
Like us, animals are expressions of infinite, universal love-intelligence; that, like us, they yearn for satisfaction of their drives and desires, and avoid pain and suffering; that, like us, they are profoundly mysterious. If we’ve learned anything at all about animals, it is that we can in no way make them fit into the categories of our limited understanding. When we look at animals in nature it is possible to see competition, struggle, and violence, as many scientists are trained to do, and yet it is also possible to see cooperation and mutual aid… There is deep truth in the old saying that we see things not as they are but as we are.
Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature. Our theories about animals will be seen in the future as quaint balderdash, as we now view the medieval theories of healing through bleeding and leeches and of an earth-centered solar system.
Our understanding is so contaminated by our mentality of objectification that we are killing off animals and destroying species and natural communities at a rate unparalleled in history. When we look deeply we see that understanding brings and awakens love, and that love brings and awakens understanding. If our so-called understanding of animals does not ignite within us a loving urge to allow them to fulfill their lives and purposes, to honor, respect and appreciate them, then it is not true understanding. Our science is in many ways incapable of this authentic understanding, and, because it is also often a vehicle of corporate power, it is best not to rely on it too heavily in our quest for wisdom or healing.
The Myth of Human Predatio
A second objection to veganism raised by the herding culture is that eating animal foods must be natural and right because we’ve been doing it for such a long time.
The fact that we’ve been doing something along time hardly makes it right or appropriate. The same defense of human slavery was used here in the nineteenth century. How will we progress or evolve if we continue to justify outmoded behavior and obsolete beliefs by giving them validity they don’t deserve? War, genocide, murder, rape, and human exploitation have been going on a longtime as well, but we would never dare to use their longevity to justify them.
Today there are masses of conflicting theories as to why we began flesh-eating, and they are all, to some degree, warped by being products of the herding culture itself. Many attribute it partially to our early migrations out of the tropical and subtropical regions into the cooler temperate regions where plant foods weren’t so easily available. Many of the theories are skewed by the invisible assumptions of male researchers who assume that men have always dominated women, hunted large animals, and warred with each other. Even when these theories are shown to be inaccurate, they tend to live on because they fit nicely with the herding culture’s overall paradigm, and they serve the interests of other writers who have similar erroneous theories.
Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don’t need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It’s obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we’ll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.
The Justification of Science
A third objection is that science uses animals in experiments, and if science, which has brought us the technological progress we value so highly, doesn’t question dominating animals, who are we to do so? We can see, though, that scientific theories always reflect the fundamental orientation of the mainstream culture, and that science and culture echo and reproduce each other.
Science shows not so much a gradual accumulation of objectively true knowledge but a series of shifts in the discipline’s underlying paradigms.
Paradigms are the internal patterns through which we structure knowledge and experience and make sense of the world, and these paradigms are learned. In school, while we are learning content on the surface level (e.g., facts and ideas about biology, history, or mathematics), we are also learning on a paradigmatic level through the form of the educational process itself. It is invisible learning, conveyed through educational structures like giving tests, having students compete with each other, dividing knowledge into discrete subjects, using animals for dissection, giving teachers authority over students, and so forth. It is through this paradigmatic learning that the culture reproduces itself. The fundamental paradigm of our culture and science toward nature, which is of quantification and commodification, is learned in this way.
Science easily and clearly demonstrates that plant-based diets are far healthier and more sustainable than animal-based diets, and that animals experience a full range of feelings, including physical and psychological anguish when confined and treated cruelly. However, the old paradigm is protected by those who control funding to scientific institutions. Scientific studies tend to “prove” conclusions that support the corporate agenda. With corporations now providing massive research funding to universities, and with the government’s industry-serving orientation, it is easy for the country’s two largest industries—food and medicine—to produce a steady stream of well-publicized articles, books, public relations pieces, and scientific studies all distracting attention from the role of animal foods in disease etiology, or proclaiming that animal foods contain vital nutrients.
Behind these two huge industries lurks the banking industry, which has invested billions of dollars to finance the high-tech meat-medical complex, and requires a reliable and ample flood of demand for both animal foods and for medical treatment. Veganism is profoundly dangerous to both of these, and to this economic empire’s status quo. There is thus enormous pressure within the research community to resist movement toward the evolution of higher awareness and compassion that is embodied in vegan ideals.
Einstein was both correct and prescient when he wrote, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Disconnected from the direct intuitive knowing of our interconnectedness with others, science can amplify our mental delusion of separateness and bring us quickly to self-destruction.
The Justification of Religion
Our religious institutions often preach that we’re spiritual beings and animals are not, that we have souls and they don’t, that it’s all right to eat them because we’ve been given dominion over them. While these objections reflect the orientation of the herding culture in which they originated, biblical scholars point out that the Hebrew word translated as “dominion” in Genesis has the connotation of stewardship and would certainly never imply or condone the extremes of exploitation, confinement, neglect, and torture to which animals are routinely subjected today for our use. The Bible has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, and the religious institutions that are seen as our culture’s primary vehicles for moral and ethical guidance, have, like science, almost unquestioningly adopted the herding paradigm that considers animals mere property objects.
The vegan ideals of mercy and justice for animals have been articulated for centuries, often from within the religious establishment, and it is fascinating and instructive to see how these voices have been almost completely silenced or marginalized by the herding culture.
There are many Buddhists who use a somewhat similar justification for eating animal foods. Although Gautama Buddha clearly forbade the eating of animal flesh, there are Buddhists who say that he allowed us to eat animals who were not killed specifically for us. The chicken in the market or the cheeseburger in the restaurant was not ordered specifically for us; it’s already there. This obviously does not apply to our situation, however, for as soon as we order the chicken or cheeseburger, the inventory in the market or restaurant is depleted and the next morning, because of our purchase, an order will be placed for another dead chicken or another cheeseburger, and animals will be transported and killed to provide it—specifically because of us.
Another standard “religious” objection to being concerned about the animals we harm for food is to deny them the souls we grant ourselves. The mentality of domination is invariably a mentality of exclusion and, like the consumption of animals, reaches even into the New Age movement.
It harks back to the era of slavery in the United States, when religious leaders, Bibles in hand, used similar wording to proclaim that black people had no individual souls, that they were more like animals than soul-endowed white people. It harks back also to Thomas Aquinas who, a thousand years ago, proclaimed that neither animals nor women had souls. Though blacks and women were eventually granted souls, it appears that those in power decide who have souls, for their own purposes. Voltaire wisely said, “If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities.”
Culture is the product of conversations, and our conversations are still dominated by the ideas and assumptions of the exploitive herding paradigm we were all fed as children. To stop the atrocities, we must awaken from the absurd belief that animals are insentient, trivial, soulless property objects and challenge our religious institutions to extend ethical protection to animals. This of course will mean challenging the meals at the center of social and religious life and the atrocities “hidden in plain sight” within those meals.
As omnivores, we may resent vegans for reminding us of the suffering we cause, for we’d rather be comfortable and keep all the ugliness hidden, but our comfort has nothing to do with justice or with authentic inner peace. It is the comfort of blocking out and disconnecting, and it comes with a terrible price. We may rationalize our meals by saying that we always thank the animal’s spirit for offering her body to nourish us. If someone were to lock us up, torture us, steal our children, and then stab us to death, would we acquiesce as long as they thanked our spirit? Disconnecting and desensitizing in comfort is not the same as inner peace, which is the fruit of awareness and of living in alignment with the understanding that comes from this awareness.
Other Objections
Our minds, having been indoctrinated by the herding culture, may still resist with some of these gems: plants feel pain too; vegetarianism is also violent, because the big grain-harvesting combines kill little mice and voles; what would we do with all the cows if nobody ate them? Animals eat other animals so why can’t we? I don’t like to be so strict and narrow-minded; I just like to eat normally; I wouldn’t want to be “holier than thou” like most vegans/vegetarians are; I don’t like somebody telling me what to eat.
First, as for the plants, mice, and voles, if we truly care about them so much, we need only recall that eighty percent of all grain grown in the U.S. is fed to animals to produce flesh, eggs, and dairy foods; switching to a plant-based diet actually saves plants as well as the small creatures who live in the fields. Hundreds of millions of acres of verdant forests and wildlife habitat have been and continue to be destroyed in order to grow the corn, soybeans, and other plants we feed the billions of animals we eat every year. Millions of acres of tropical rain forests are being devastated to provide cheap beef for American fast food outlets as well. If we really care about plants and animals, going vegan is an excellent way to help ecosystems, habitats, and animal populations recover.
Second, as we gradually stop breeding cows, the prairies, mountains, and arid regions of our country, which have been ravaged by cattle, especially in the West, will slowly be able to recover, and streams, aquifers, flora, birds, fish, prairie dogs, elk, coyotes, antelope, and other native wildlife will be able to repopulate, bringing stressed and depleted ecosystems back to life and into celebration again.
Third, while it is true that some animals eat other animals, animals with herbivore physiologies don’t, nor do they drink the milk intended for other species. It’s telling that we use this rationalization in this case, but not in relation to other animal behaviors that we prefer not to emulate, such as the practice by the males of some animal species of killing and eating their own young. The range of animal behaviors is huge and mysterious, and we could justify almost any conceivable human behavior by finding it in some animals, but we certainly wouldn’t do so. As for the other objections, if every time we wanted to eat some animal flesh, we had to hold the terrified animal in our hands, look her in the eye, and stab her with a knife, we would find these rationalizations evaporating quickly. Finally, the last objection is especially ironic; we’ve all been told what to eat our entire lives, and that’s the only reason we eat animal foods.
Another common objection to switching to plant-based meals: that it is just too difficult, inconvenient, or unappetizing to do so. This nearly universal objection of the herding paradigm ignores the difficulty and inconvenience we impose on animals, starving and disadvantaged people, and future generations by eating animal foods. It also ignores the connections between eating animal foods and the intractable problems of pollution, terrorism, drug addiction, chronic disease, and so forth that were discussed earlier. Slave owners used the same objection to justify commodifying human beings and, short of a war, were unwilling to give up the convenience of enslaving people. Just how difficult, inconvenient, and unappetizing must the suffering we sow and reap today become before it motivates us to transform our paradigm and change our behavior?
While becoming a vegan may appear easy enough, why then is it not more common in our culture, especially among the millions of us who consider ourselves deeply committed to spiritual growth, social justice, world peace, religious freedom, and raising consciousness? Taking responsibility for the violence we are causing others and ourselves through our actions, words, and thoughts is never as easy as blaming others for the violence in our world. Judging by the generally small numbers who have actually gone vegan in our culture, it appears that this commitment requires a certain breakthrough that has been generally elusive because of the mentality of domination and exclusion we’ve all been steeped in since birth. There is something about veganism that is not easy, but the difficulty is not inherent in veganism, but in our culture.