Something that keeps happening, I guess to get a reaction (this blog post) is when someone says “but it would be so much nicer with meat…”.
I get it, literally 5 months ago I was a bigger meat eater and cheese lover than most. You don’t have to constantly remind me that meat is “tasty” I couldn’t care less. I didn’t give up dairy & meat because of taste.
Going vegan is about taking an ethical stance. By educating yourself, connecting the dots and having enough compassion to put yourself in the victim shoes (the animal), you realise how messed up their existence and ultimate demise is.
Let’s take an innocent pig for example. Recently I became an uncle and my beautiful niece loves Peppa Pig and so it seems all animals. She like pretty much all kids are animal lovers. They see ALL animals like you used to, innocent, cute and adorable. Rather than food.
If you put a baby pig in the cot with my niece and a avocado. She’s not going to strangle the piglet to death and then eat its dead corpse. She’s going to eat the avocado and cuddle the piglet. She would choose life over death. You can choose to eat life (plants) than death (animals).
At some point my niece like all children will be taught by “society” through clever marketing from huge industrialised bodies, cultural norms and laziness that killing a select few animals (pigs, turkeys, chickens, etc.) is fine. Society forgets all about these animals, we become disconnected to what these animals have to endure. We forget that these compassionate harmless animals feel pain, emotions and a sense of reality like you or I. Bacon will become bacon, rather than meat of an innocent dead pig. My niece, will unfortunately become ignorant to where that meat actually comes from and what happens to the pig. As we enter society, we become the abusers and these animals become the abused.
Supply and demand, means 85% + farms in the UK are factory farms. The life that pig will experience will ultimately be miserable, a life you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. It won’t get to experience the great outdoors, it will sleep on concrete in freezing temperatures, cramped into tiny conditions, exposed to disease and cannibalism. Look at the stats of Danish pig farms. One in ten sows will be found dead in their pigsty. While another 50% are quickly discarded due to failing fertility (28%), bad mother characteristics (25%), age (20%), sickness and injuires (14%), lack of heat (7%), logistics (5%) and unwanted behaviour (1%).
For the pigs that do manage to survive these horrendous conditions, they will live a slightly longer life but ultimately end up screaming for their life as they are pushed into gas chambers and choke to death. Their lifeless bodies are then chopped up into tiny pieces, and cleverly marketed to the general public in nicely packaged bacon containers. You will then eat your bacon sandwich with no regard to the animal that was killed for your sensory pleasure. No regard to the life that they had to endure so you can have a bit of taste. No regard to your own health when you feed yourself all that saturated fat and cholesterol. No regard to the environment that is slowly being destroyed in part due to animal agriculture. All for what? A bit of taste?!
So, when someone says “it would be much tastier with meat” I don’t care. I’m thinking about the victim rather than 5 minutes of sensory pleasure. Taste is nothing compared to the life and eventual murder of an innocent animal. An animal that is purposely brought into this would, enslaved, abused and then killed for “taste”.
Moreover, these animals are not exactly inferior. And even if they were, that’s still no excuse to enslave and kill them. Pigs for example are far more intelligent that “mans best friend” dogs. They experience life, they enjoy belly rubs, sunbathing, the sun on their skin and…. life.
Watch how these animals are treated in factory farms. Look at the conditions, look their eyes. You will see fear, sadness and pain. These animals don’t get to enjoy life like we do. They are treated with utter contempt the moment they are born, and then murdered WAY before their actual life expectancy. And with the supply and demand increasing (obesity also, diabetes, heart disease and cancer also) the treatment and conditions of these animals is getting worse and worse. Animal welfare comes after profit in the majority of these farms.
All that suffering for a bacon sandwich.
So when you see something healthy, maybe some pasta or a sald. Do your body, the environment and most importantly the animal a HUGE favour and not add meat to it. Unless, you simply don’t care about any of that stuff.
