So, if you are a vegetarian for ethical reasons, chances are you have been exposed to the horrors of factory farmed dairy cows and hens at some point. In the age of internet access and message boards, it's unlikely that anyone participating can escape discussions that include these facts. Yet, there remains a significant number of self-proclaimed ethical vegetarians online (who have been "vegetarians" for years) that continue to consume dairy and eggs. Somehow the compassion stops short -and whatever factor triggered their initial objection to slaughtering animals for flesh, is put aside in order to ignore the suffering and slaughter of milk and egg-producing animals.
I find that very strange.
Because once I understood that dairy cows and egg-laying hens suffer in much worse conditions for longer periods of time, only to be slaughtered when they are no longer "productive", any social obstacles, inconvenience, habits and addictions became immediately irrelevant. There was no way I was going to be part of a system that tortured and killed animals. Period. That was my moral baseline, without compromise for any perceived personal inconvenience.
Now I'm not saying there isn't a natural rationalization defense that kicks in for most people who have been brainwashed from birth to accept "societal norms", when faced with contrary information. But once you work through that, and discover what you're supporting when you purchase dairy and eggs, I can't see how people can continue justifying their decisions - when they proclaim to be against harming or killing animals for food.
I think it's great that some people consume much less animal products than they once did. But what I don't understand is when that is as far as their compassion will go. What stops most people from progressing to the total elimination of animal products? Why do they stop midway?
Whenever people try to hide their animal-product meals from me, perhaps mentioning that just my witnessing their behavior makes them feel guilty, I remind them that it has nothing to do with me - that it's between them, and the animals. The animals are the only ones they have to answer to. If they can't convince animals they should willingly suffer and die for their tastebuds, they shouldn't be paying someone to torture and kill them on their behalf.
It really is that simple. And "vegetarians", especially, should get that.
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"Whenever people try to hide their animal-product meals from me, perhaps mentioning that just my witnessing their behavior makes them feel guilty, I remind them that it has nothing to do with me - that it's between them, and the animals. The animals are the only ones they have to answer to."
Excellent.
Ok, when you mention the internet, you've got me there. I didn't have a computer when I went vegan and there was an internet then (or something like it in DOS where some message boards existed in green type), but mostly only the very nerdy traversed it. Ok, maybe I was just behind the times. Even after I became vegan I lived for years in broken down places without real furniture, a computer, or a tv. So I was a late comer to all of this.
It's true that now you don't have to wait for PeTA to send you mailng after mailing with horrible pictures of hens. You can just log on and get bombarded with links to videos.
Which maybe means that some people view vegetarianism as a middle ground. They think being vegan is "extreme" and "very difficult" but they figure they can handle being vegetarian.
Every now and then I run into someone who honestly just doesn't care. One young woman said she was only vegetarian for health reasons and she was thinking about cutting back on cheese, for health reasons. When I mentioned the suffering of cows and veal calves she said "that's sad, but I really just don't care that much about cows and I love cheese so much." Still I think it's worth it to keep bringing it up to people. Maybe it eventually sinks in.
We do sometimes see people do truly horrible things and excuse them by saying they were just going along with their friends. Maybe in this same way someone might feel terrible when they watch an AR video but still eat cheeseburgers with their friends. Like "well Joe is doing it, so it can't be that bad."
I don't know. I think you're right--it's much harder to claim ignorance now than it once was. Except for willful ignorance, that's at epidemic levels.
Vegetarianism is such a strange middle-ground, isn't it? I was vegetarian for about four years before I went vegan. I was vegetarian mainly for animal reasons -- I didn't have any articulated theories on the topic, I just felt more at peace with the world in general as a vegetarian. However, even though I knew a couple of vegans who were perfectly happy, I didn't really consider becoming vegan. I told myself that, even though cows, calves and chickens died in the production of milk and eggs, that it was philosophically okay to eat those because the production of milk and eggs doesn't inherently require the death of animals. I guess I had some Platonic ideal of the production of milk and eggs that, in my mind, justified my food choices...even though I knew the Platonic ideal was not what happened in real life. It was, obviously, a convoluted way to avoid giving up cheese, ice cream, and other things that I liked.
It was the PETA website's horrible pictures of egg and milk production that made me realize that my position was absolutely untenable.
That's a good point, Jen. That the animals didn't die, during the "production" of milk or eggs, does seem to be a key difference for some people. As if the search for information about the circumstances of the animals ends there, for some reason.
As I think Neva mentioned previously, it really is about education, and that you have to keep hammering the facts home so the issue of animals not immediately dying becomes a moot point.
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