This post is less insight into being vegan and more about introspection. Ready? Here goes.
I work in animal welfare and know so many people who would do absolutely anything for their pets. They dedicate their lives to saving homeless animals - often taking countless numbers of cats and dogs into their lives and their families. These people are truly selfless and caring.
But not one of them is vegan.
Not only are they not vegan, they like to joke with me about my "extreme" lifestyle and tell me how much they love their meat and dairy. Where is the disconnect? Where's the comprehension that cows and chickens are living, breathing beings that know how to love and feel pain? What about the fact that pigs have the intelligence of 3 year old human children? And that cows cry in agony when they are separated from their babies (which is the result of a dairy industry that sells the baby male cows for veal)? Is the taste of that burger or that slice of bacon so important to them that they are willing to contribute to an industry built on the suffering of sentient beings - sisters and brothers to those same sentient beings that they've dedicated their careers and much of their lives to saving?
In the groundbreaking book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows, Melanie Joy attempts to answer this very question. She coins the term "carnism" to describe the cultural phenomenon that causes us to love some animals while ignoring (and even contributing to) the suffering of others. I believe that if more people made emotional connections to cows, pigs, chickens and other farm animals, and really experienced their individual personalities, there would be many more vegans. And as Sir Paul McCartney famously said, "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian."
Quite right.
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