I don’t want to have the conversation any
more about whether someone 'should be able to eat their sausages without
being made to feel bad about it'. That sentence in itself is a distraction into the
rights and wrongs of killing, whose meat it is and if people feel bad it might be
their own conscience etc.
But I do not have a bone to pick with these
individuals, people fishing on the shore for a fish for tea, small holders, poorer shoppers who have to buy cheap and nasty and little egg-eating households
who have chickens 'out the back'. People are all on their life journey, mindful
in various ways of their choices and impact.
The problem is when things are scaled up and up and we become removed or anaesthetized to the truth of the food, chemical and farming industries.
It is the SYSTEM that must change. The
system absorbs the sounds of unspeakable suffering in intolerable conditions.
The slavery of millions of lives. And yes they are alive. Each has a face, two
eyes, a heart beat, a life force, sensitive skin, bones that can break, hair
that falls out with stress, they need the colostrum like our babies too. They
need daylight and room to roam. They should be allowed to run for their lives
in free and fair combat or take flight, not ushered via metal crushes and electric prods,
beaten, gassed and knifed. They don’t need the vaccines, the antibiotics, the
separation, the exporting, the abbatoir…they need all those things like a hole
in the head.
So do not give that system any unconscious
support. If it is cheap meat or no meat,
choose no meat. If it is veal or liver pate or not free range or organic put
those things into your equation and stay clear. Veal involves being chained
indoors to produce white muscle-free meat. Pate involves force feeding ducks
with a large syringe until their livers burst. Juxtapose that to the ducks on
the river to whom you would throw the crusts of your bread. Always try and be
kind or at least let other lives be. If it is not free-range it means that the
animals are kept in warehouses all their lives. Chickens need only access
through a vent with 20,000 other birds to a mini outdoor space to be called
free range so don’t fall for every label. If meat is organic, it means that the
animals have not been fed grain that has been laced with pesticide. They are
not grazed on chemically enhanced grass and they have not been given jabs and
other pharmaceutical toxins that never break down in the body and become
accumulated in yours. Bear in mind, antibiotics will no longer work if they are
being used on such a grand scale.
Don’t buy from big companies and don’t kid
yourself that beef from happy cows and pork from happy pigs is a true
story. Let yourself look, consider and
care. Your internal integrity will grow and with it your wellbeing. They say
consumers are the most effective activists. If we don’t buy, they can’t sell it
and the system will be finished. Don’t turn your back on appalling treatment of
anyone.
One man has gone up in my esteem when he
was already a hero. He was a top footballer back in the day but last night I
heard that he was the only one who approached the abusive family man on our
corner. We had all heard the yelping and screams from the dog run where several
children and animals lived. In those days you said nothing but this man went
straight up to the father and said ‘I will clatter if you lay a hand again on your
wife, children or any of those animals.’ This is the energy of change, calling
things out for what they are, refusing to silently participate.
As Aristotle said,
‘Happy is the man who passionately defends
that which he loves’
Come to notice and love all life.
