chapter twelve SOME OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

“We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. . . . It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it.” - Albert Schweitzer

“Animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than blacks were made for whites or women for men.” - Alice Walker

“And now a third, a Brazen people rise, Unlike the former, men of monstrous size. On the crude flesh of beasts, they feed alone, Savage their nature, and their hearts of stone.” - Hesiod, 8th Century b.c.e.

Nurturing Objections

The ideas presented in this book, though not complicated or particularly difficult to understand, have long been invisible and almost impossible to articulate because they directly contradict the hidden assumptions of our herding culture. Their ramifications, if contemplated, discussed, and acted upon, are enormously subversive to the status quo. Even other subversive social theories that are rarely seen in schools or the media.such as Marxism.don’t begin to address the deeper issue we are discussing: 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- (capital-) owning classes. Marx’s “Workers of the world, unite!” never questioned the underlying ethic of dominating animals and nature, and hence was not truly revolutionary. It operated within the human supremacist framework 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. Class struggle is a result of the herding culture’s mentality of domination and exclusion, and is just part of the misery that is inevitably connected with eating animal foods.

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. The way we keep the ball of kindness and intelligence submerged is not only by practicing disconnecting but also by the practice of nurturing some culturally induced objections to eating a plant-based diet, which we repeat to ourselves if the ball starts rising.

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 while their fellow human beings suffer from poverty, the breakdown of the family, war, drug addiction, terrorism, pollution, and so forth. This objection is merely a restatement of the herding culture’s fundamental supremacist orientation that legitimizes the domination of animals. It is based in an attitude that animals don’t matter, that their suffering at our hands is not an issue, and that they are somehow superfluous or expendable. If we can get our minds and hearts somehow outside the box constructed by our culturally defining core practice of enslaving and killing animals for food, which traps our thinking and feeling within the narrow confines of the dominator herding mentality, we will begin to see, feel, and understand what animals actually are.

We will see that, 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, as Kropotkin1 and other scientists have discovered. Further, it is possible to see celebration, joy, humor, love, caring, and the wondrous interplay and expression of an absolutely infinite complexity of life forms. There is deep truth in the old saying that we see things not as they are but as we are.

We have not begun to scratch the surface of understanding animals. How can we know what it is to swim as whales, at home in the ocean depths and migrating thousands of miles, speaking in underwater songs and breathing together in conscious harmony, or to fly in a flock of sandpipers, whirling in an effortless synchronicity, fifty birds as one, or to burrow as prairie dogs, creating complex underground communities with virtually endless chambers, passageways, and interactions? 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 Predation

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 first response to this objection is to question its basic validity. We know as individuals that it is often counterproductive and crippling if we carry into adulthood the same strategies and beliefs we used as children. The fact that we’ve been doing something a long 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 long time as well, but we would never dare to use their longevity to justify them. That we would do so to justify the enslavement, exploitation, murder, rape, and extinction of animals is telling, but completely specious. It undermines our healthy yearning to grow in wisdom and to strive to build a society that is more free, peaceful, and sustainable.

The second response to this objection is to question its veracity. What is a “long time”? The ten thousand years we’ve been herding and commodifying animals and the twenty to sixty thousand years we’ve been hunting large animals2 are very short compared to the three hundred thousand years homo sapiens has been here and the seven to ten million years that hominids have been here. Our closest living relatives, supposedly sharing ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of our DNA, are gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. The powerful and gentle gorillas eat a totally plant-based diet, as do bonobos, and chimpanzees eat a primarily plant-based diet. Our own ancient forebears were probably similar, given our physiology, and according to fossil evidence of such early humans as Australopithecus, plant foods made up virtually all of their diet.3 The problem has been that our culture has fostered its own “man the predator” mythology, based on and justifying our eating of animals, propagating the erroneous notion that, as Swiss zoologist C. Guggisberg wrote in 1970, “man has been a predator and ruthless killer for as long as he has existed.”4 This same lie, that “man is a beast of prey” (Oswald Spengler), has been repeated so much that we believe it and perpetuate it. Jim Mason explains:

Deeply ingrained in our culture, then, are some very strong values that favor killing and consuming animals for food. How could they not have affected studies of human diet, food collection, and evolution?

Surely our own culture’s meat-eater values have been a factor in the exaggeration of the hunter role in human evolution in the same way that its patriarchal values have been a factor in the exaggeration of the male role in evolution. Indeed, both of these cultural biases worked well together in promoting the man-the-mighty-hunter model of human evolution. Hunting, as men’s work, was highly valued by anthropology’s mostly male investigators. And since hunting provided meat, it was doubly valued by meat-eating investigators.

The hunter-creation myth also helps a meat-eating society with a very troublesome problem. People, generally, are more than a little uncomfortable with killing animals for food. Most would probably not be willing to kill an animal themselves, except in dire circumstances. Even northern hunting peoples surrounded their hunting and butchering activities with ritual.much of it, as we shall see, to ease anxiety and discomfort.5

Anthropologists Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, in their recent groundbreaking synthesis of fossil evidence and primatology, explain that early humans did not have teeth that could eat meat and were not predatory hunters. They argue that the views of “man the hunter” and of our ancestors as “bloodthirsty brutes” are based on three things: “perverted Western views of modern humans, the Christian concept of original sin, and ... just plain sloppy science” (ellipses in original).6

We must question our culture’s underlying assumptions, and understand how these assumptions perpetuate themselves. No one knows exactly why we humans began killing and eating animals. According to Plutarch, writing nearly two thousand years ago,

The primitive people who first ate meat likely did so out of extreme privation. People in those days were reduced to eating mud, bark, grass sprouts, and roots. Finding acorns and buckeyes would have been cause for celebration. If these people could only speak to us today they would undoubtedly tell us how fortunate we are to have such an abundance of delicious vegetable foods at our finger-tips; and how fortunate that we can fill our stomachs without polluting ourselves with flesh. They would be perplexed by the lust that leads people to eat meat in these times of plenty. They would ask, “Don’t you think the good earth can sustain you? Aren’t you ashamed to mix the wholesome produce of the earth with blood and flesh?”7

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.

A good example is Peter D’Adamo and his popular Eat Right for Your Type books, which encourage eating animal foods based on blood type. D’Adamo claims that type O people are best suited to eating animal flesh, because type O is allegedly the oldest blood type.8 His books are based on completely outdated anthropological research that postulated the earliest humans (allegedly blood type O) were more carnivorous. D’Adamo ignores the more recent research that shows the early “hunter-gatherers” were much more gatherers than hunters. The mass culture, raised on the stereotype of macho cavemen dragging women around by the hair and eating mastodons for lunch, eagerly believes D’Adamo because his books argue that most people, being of the “older” blood types, “need” meat and just won’t do well on a vegan diet. The theory has obvious mass appeal, since forty to sixty percent of our population is blood-type O, but is grossly inaccurate: there are many happy, healthy type O vegans, and blood type has nothing to do with the basic herbivore design of our bodies or with the cruelty inflicted on animals for food. Because it dovetails so well with our herding culture’s basic view of reality, though, the books sell well and provide some of us an erroneous justification to continue our omnivorous mealtime traditions. The same could be said for the “high-protein” and “low-carbohydrate” diets that are so predictably popular, as well as the “high-iron” or “high-calcium” diets that promote eating animal foods. It’s well established that plant-based diets give us ample calcium, iron, and protein, without the damaging effects of the cruelty, adrenalin, cholesterol, saturated fat, and toxins endemic to animal foods.

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.

We’re in an auspicious position today, because the industrialized nations of the world, which eat the highest percentage of animal foods and are generally in the north, have food distribution systems that bring plant-based foods to all their inhabitants, regardless of their climate and topography. Fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, and even soy milk, tofu, tempeh, and so forth, are available in markets everywhere. There are very few people today who must eat animal foods for geographic reasons. It is the height of irony that eating a diet based on animal foods, which are complicated, wasteful, cruel, and expensive to produce, is seen as simple in our culture, and that eating a vegan diet based on plant foods, which are simple, efficient, inexpensive, and free of cruelty to produce, is seen as complicated and difficult. Nevertheless, the truth is slowly coming to light, and the pressures within the old paradigm are building as more of us refuse to see animals as objects to be eaten or used for our purposes.

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. As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated in his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientific paradigms, like cultural paradigms, resist change. The history of science shows not so much a gradual accumulation of objectively true knowledge (which can hardly be said to exist because of the way context determines meaning and truth) 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, though it is being increasingly challenged by paradigms of a higher order, like the vegan and spiritual paradigms of compassion for all beings and the interconnectedness of all life. We are now beginning to see the tension between these paradigms reflected in all our cultural institutions.

Kuhn emphasized that theories and findings that challenge the prevailing scientific paradigms typically come from researchers who are either young or from outside disciplines, and who are thus more free to think outside the conventional paradigmatic boxes. The response from those within the dominant paradigm is first to ignore and deny the new paradigm, and then, if it gets stronger, to ridicule and attack it. Eventually, if the new paradigm continues to gain credence over time, it may overturn and replace the dominant paradigm. With regard to eating, as the pressure continues to build, coming primarily from people who are either young or from outside (home-leavers), the dominant paradigm can no longer just ignore the vegan paradigm.

Science, a stalwart defender of the dominant herding paradigm, could be a potent tool for unseating it. Openly and fairly applied and publicized, 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.

Rather than relying on science to validate veganism and our basic herbivore physiology, we may do better by calling attention to universal truths: animals are undeniably capable of suffering; our physical bodies are strongly affected by thoughts, feelings, and aspirations; and we cannot reap happiness for ourselves by sowing seeds of misery for others. Nor may we be free while unnaturally enslaving others. We are all connected. These are knowings of the heart and veganism is, ultimately, a choice to listen to the wisdom in our heart as it opens to understanding the interconnectedness and essential unity of all life.

Deepening our understanding of these truths will give science the guidance it so desperately needs. 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. We should by now be aware that conventional science is in actuality its own mythology with a set of value-laden underlying assumptions that are taken on faith like any religion, and that it is easily prostituted, as other religions have been, by those with money and influence.

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.

However, as soon as we look beyond the shallow doctrines, we find that there have been strong voices resisting the oppression of animals from within the Jewish and Christian traditions since the beginning, from the later Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Hosea to Jesus and his Jewish disciples; to the early church fathers like St. Jerome, Clement, Tertullian, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Benedict; to the later voices of John Wesley (founder of Methodism), William Metcalf (Protestant minister and writer of the first book on vegetarianism published in the United States), Ellen White (a founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church), and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (co-founders of the Unity School of Practical Christianity); as well as the voices of prominent Jewish rabbis and writers like Shlomo Goren, Moses Maimonides, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.9 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. It seems to be an unconscious reflex action. For example, if we read Jesus’ teachings, we find a passionate exhortation to mercy and love, yet the possibility that the historical Jesus may have been a vegan is a radical idea for most Christians. Nevertheless, Jesus’ exhortation that we love one another and not do to others what we wouldn’t want done to us is the essence of the vegan ethic, which is a boundless compassion that includes all who can suffer by our actions.

In light of this, it is intriguing that Keith Akers argues convincingly in The Lost Religion of Jesus that Jesus and his earliest followers were ethical vegetarians committed above all to nonviolence and the spiritual harmony of simple living. Drawing entirely on the earliest written source materials by and about the early followers of Jesus, who were Jewish people known as Ebionites, Akers’ careful scholarship reveals how Jesus’ original message was tampered with and suppressed. He shows how, through the schisms and pressures within the early church, Jesus’ followers were clearly recognized by their contemporaries as ethical vegetarians opposed to the ongoing sacrifice of animals in the temple in Jerusalem.

Jesus’ message was intolerably radical, for it was the revolutionary vegan message of mercy and love for all creatures that strikes directly at the mentality of domination and exclusion that underlies both the herding culture we live in today and the culture of Jesus’ time. Jesus questioned the foundation of war and oppression, which was then, as it is now, the killing and eating of animals. Back then it was animal sacrifice performed by priests at the Temple, in Jerusalem, which was the main source of wealth and prestige for the Jewish religious power structure as well as being the source of meat for the populace. Jesus’ confrontation at the Temple, in which he drove out those selling animals for slaughter, was a bold attack on the fundamental herding paradigm of viewing animals merely as property, sacrifice objects, and food. Akers writes, “We must remember that the temple was more like a butcher shop than like any modern-day church or synagogue. ‘Cleansing the temple’ was an act of animal liberation.”10 As Akers, J. R. Hyland, and others have written, it was for this flagrantly revolutionary act that Jesus had to be crucified by the herding culture’s power elite.

Akers argues that the reason the early church was so plagued by schisms was that Paul and others wanted to take the church in a direction almost completely opposite from what Jesus’ teachings actually were. (Paul in particular was antagonistic toward the veganism that was apparently a core tenet of Jesus’ teaching.) Akers explains many passages in Acts, such as conflicts between Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, in the light of the earliest writings attributed to Clement, Epiphanius, Tertullian, and Origen, that point to the understanding that Jesus, James, Peter, and the direct disciples were ethical vegetarians, whereas Paul, Barnabas, and others who came later were not. Through a detailed historical analysis, Akers shows just how Paul’s non-vegetarian movement was eventually able, often through brutal means, to eclipse the original thrust of Jesus’ teachings regarding nonviolence, and why the original Christians, the vegetarian Ebionites, were unable to survive.

In religion, as for science and society, major paradigmatic inconsistencies cannot be tolerated. The dominant paradigm of the parent culture is exploitation, symbolized and articulated in sacrificing animals, and for Jesus to be widely recognized as Lord and Savior by the people of that culture, his opposition to animal sacrifice had to be hidden and denied. Why, then, was his revolutionary opposition to war, to religious elitism, to seeking personal gain at others’ expense, to nationalism, racism, and many of the other fundamental characteristics of the parent culture preserved and canonized? His opposition to killing animals is drastically more radical, practical, and threatening to the established order, because it questions our meals, the intimate landscape of our daily lives. We don’t, after all, declare war three times a day. This same pattern of denial continues today. As mentioned earlier, the passionate teachings of Unity’s co-founders, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, advocating the vegan ethic of kindness to animals have been virtually completely repressed and forgotten in less than seventy years! While Unity ministers and congregants avidly and respectfully discuss the Fillmores’ books and teachings on prayer, metaphysics, and Christian healing, their teachings on veganism are ignored or passed off as just one of their “quirks.”

An interesting objection to adopting a plant-based way of eating that many Christians rely on is the saying by Jesus that “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man” (Matthew 15:11).11 This is often interpreted as giving us permission to eat anything we like and instructing us instead to be mindful of our speech. By now it should be clear that this objection misses the point entirely. When we order a chicken or a cheeseburger at a deli, restaurant, or market, that is the moment that we engage in violence and cause “murders,” “thefts,”12 and suffering to defenseless animals and disadvantaged people. At that moment we are like the general who gives an order to kill someone in a faraway country; though he never sees the blood or hears the scream, he is nevertheless responsible for the killing.

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. A good example is Gary Zukav’s Seat of the Soul, a best-selling book esteemed by people who consider themselves progressive, open-minded, and spiritually aware. Not surprisingly, in the chapter entitled “Souls,” we find Zukav’s proclamation that only humans have individual souls, and that every animal is simply part of what he refers to as the “group soul” of its species. “Each human being has a soul. The journey toward individual soulhood is what distinguishes the human kingdom from the animal kingdom. Animals do not have individual souls. They have group souls. Each cat is a part of the group soul of cat, and so on.”13 He also says that there is a hierarchy within the group souls of animals, and that dolphins and apes are higher than dogs, which are higher than horses, and so forth. He offers no evidence, though, for his hypotheses.14

This book appears to be another wave in the sea of literature our culture has produced that tries to justify our abuse of animals on spiritual grounds. Readers of Zukav’s book are no doubt comforted knowing that the chicken, fish, cow, or pig they are eating was not really an individual with a soul, but just an expression of its species’ “group soul.” It’s ironic that while the book purports to elucidate spirituality and raise consciousness, it may actually do the opposite, reducing its readers’ sensibilities and blinding them to the reality of the suffering that individual animals experience because we reduce them to objects, mere fractions of a hypothetical “group soul.”

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.15 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. These words by Swami Prabhupada reveal an alternative to our culture’s dominant paradigm.

Prabhupada: Some people say, “We believe that animals have no soul.” That is not correct. They believe animals have no soul because they want to eat the animals, but actually animals do have a soul.

Reporter: How do you know that the animal has a soul?

Prabhupada: You can know, also. Here is the scientific proof. The animal is eating, you are eating; the animal is sleeping, you are sleeping; the animal is defending, you are defending; the animal is having sex, you are having sex; the animals have children, you have children; you have a living place, they have a living place. If the animal’s body is cut, there is blood; if your body is cut, there is blood. So all these similarities are there. Now why do you deny this one similarity, the presence of the soul? That is not logical. You have studied logic? In logic there is something called analogy. Analogy means drawing a conclusion by finding many points of similarity. If there are so many points of similarity between human beings and animals, why deny one similarity? That is not logic. That is not science.16

And Schopenhauer, in criticizing how some Christians treat animals, wrote, “Shame on such a morality that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun.”17

Whether or not we believe that animals have souls, the knowledge that they can suffer as we do compels religious persons to refrain from causing them to suffer. As guardians and vehicles of our spiritual impulses and teachings, our religious institutions have a profound obligation to speak on behalf of all beings who are voiceless and vulnerable, and to the degree they fail in this obligation, they betray their mission and become enablers of terror and oppression. Failing to act to protect life is itself an action, a turning away. By looking the other way and ignoring the plight of defenseless animals, religious institutions have supported our culture’s inhumane agenda of reducing animals to objects. Willfully neglecting to defend innocent lives from cruelty is immoral action, and by its failures religion has forfeited its mandate and dissipated its credibility as an authentic moral or spiritual authority.

Religion’s turning away has allowed the atrocities to continue and legitimized the turning away of the general population. This turning away is the paradigmatic learning that our culture specializes in, particularly with regard to the plight of the animals we eat and use; it is the everyday teaching of not seeing, not caring, disconnecting, and ignoring. This learning to look the other way brings spiritual death in everyone who practices it. In encouraging it, religious institutions show how far they have strayed from the passionate mercy and all-seeing kindness taught and lived by those whose spiritual evolution and illumination inspired the institutions themselves. Spiritual teachings of our interconnectedness and the vegan ethic of universal compassion, besides being vital and transformative, are in profound alignment with the core instruction of the world’s religions, which is to love others. They are dangerous to the status quo, subverting the prevailing paradigm that justifies turning away, self-aggrandizement, and violence.

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.

If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities, and we pass it on to our children, generation upon generation. Our violent actions speak so much more loudly than our peaceful words, and this is the unyielding dilemma of the herding culture we call home. The only way to solve this dilemma is to evolve cognitively and ethically to a higher level where our actions do not belie our words and force us into unconsciousness and denial, but rather align with and reinforce our words and the universal spiritual teachings that instruct us to love one another, and to have mercy on the weak and vulnerable rather than exploiting and dominating them. All of us are celebrations of infinite mysterious Spirit, deserving of honor and respect. If our religions don’t emphasize this and include all of us, it’s time to replace them with spiritual teachings and traditions that do.

Other Objections

There are a number of other objections to veganism that our minds may use to keep us confined by justifying the incarceration and abuse of other beings. As with enslaving and killing innocent humans, there are no valid justifications for enslaving and killing innocent animals, but 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.

For many people, such arguments justify the continued commodifying, confining, mutilating, killing, and eating of animals for food, so some response is needed. 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.18 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,19 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 (except if forced by humans to do so), 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.

This brings us to 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 (to put it mildly) 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?

A more serious objection to veganism is the reverse of the previous one. The objection says that we can’t expect to effect impressive positive changes in our individual and collective lives by adopting this simpler, tastier, more affordable diet. This objection is influenced by our culture’s mentality of violence, which assumes that peace, joy, harmony, and fulfillment are difficult to attain. Of course they are difficult to attain when we are practicing daily food rituals that force us to view beings as objects, kill them relentlessly, and divide and numb ourselves to keep the whole affair hidden from ourselves. However, we will find that as we begin to view animals as unique beings with interests, feelings, drives, and purposes, and as our behavior changes to reflect this view, then harmony, peace, and joy easily and naturally begin unfolding in our lives. Practicing nonviolence in our daily lives, we can discover the easy equanimity that shines as the foundation of our being.

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.

Of itself, veganism is not a panacea, but it effectively removes a basic hindrance to our happiness, freedom, and unfoldment. As a living and ongoing expression of nonviolence, it is an enormously powerful agent of transformation in our individual lives, especially since our culture opposes it so vehemently. Living a consequent vegan life naturally encourages us to awaken from the consensus trance that brings unquestioning conformity and allows cruelty and slavery to continue. Refusing to see animals as commodities, we are able to see through countless other pretenses. And, as transformative as this is for an individual to experience, it would be infinitely more transformative for our culture to do so, and to evolve beyond the obsolete orientation that sees animals as mere food commodities.

It is like being in a boat tied to a dock with a length of rope. As we take off to cross to the other shore, we find that we make satisfying progress for a while, until the rope runs out. After that, we continue running the engine, but we can no longer make any real progress, though we do create a lot of smoke, waves, and commotion, and move perhaps from side to side or in circles. Until we realize that there’s a rope holding us back and untie it, we’ll be unable to make significant progress in our quest for the other shore. The boat of course represents our life, the other shore the fulfillment of our spiritual, creative, and intellectual potential, and the rope our culturally induced practice of buying, abusing, killing, and eating animals. When we untie the rope, we are free to go out across the waters and we may eventually reach the other shore. If we are eating animal foods, however, there is an invisible barrier hindering our progress because the disconnectedness and unconscious cruelty required to do so will keep us confined to the shallows of our potential.

As our culture moves toward a vegan orientation, we will see enormous healing and liberating forces unleashed. Indeed, imagining our culture as a vegan culture is truly imagining an almost completely different culture. This ever-present potential beckons to us. Every one of us, as representatives of our culture, is an essential part of this fundamental transformation and awakening. It is exciting to contemplate educational, economic, governmental, religious, medical, and other institutions based on honoring and protecting the rights and interests of both animals and humans. When as a culture we stop commodifying creatures, a new world of kindness, fairness, cooperation, peace, and freedom will naturally unfold in human relations as well.

Changing our individual daily food choices to reflect a consciousness of mercy will transform our lives and move our culture in a positive direction far more than any other change we can contemplate. Following right behind this change in our individual food choices is the necessity of practicing mindfulness and nonviolence in all our relations in order to bring our mind and heart into alignment with the truth of our interconnectedness, and to allow us to enter the present moment more deeply and experience directly the mystery, joy, and beauty of being.