Don't Kick A Dog
People love their pets. Most people would say they love animals. Or at the least, very few people would consider themselves animal abusers.
Yet most people eat meat, dairy, and eggs.
What a disconnect!
People will take their pets, whom they rightly regard as beloved, irreplaceable family members, to expensive veterinary procedures or surgery, or to pet daycare to ensure the animals' safety and emotional enrichment. People are happy sharing their lives, homes, and hearts fully with these animals. People recognize the precious individuality of their pets and adore their unique personalities.
This is as it should be. Animals are fellow souls traveling with us, and we should respect them as family.
But most people also eat animals. The animals raised on farms to be eaten by people have just as much awareness and sensitivity as the beloved pets many people keep.
Farmed animals feel pain and terror, just like our pets do.
Farmed animals enjoy freedom and experience yearnings and emotions, just like our pets do.
But animals raised to become food are treated without respect, as mere objects, commodities, products. Their lives and deaths mean nothing to those who raise, sell, slaughter, buy, and eat these unfortunate creatures. Animals suffer in this system. Immensely.
Most people would not want to think of themselves as animal abusers, but it is inescapable that they do contribute to serious, horrific animal abuse if they eat animals. Limiting oneself to only eating dairy or eggs may seem like a better approach, but animals who are exploited for their milk or eggs are also abused and killed.
None of these farmed animals want to be eaten or used as a "product" and none of them deserve the painful, horrifying processes involved in becoming food for us to eat.
Buying products made from animals directly funds animal abuse, no way around it.
If we want to say we genuinely love animals, or that we sincerely are not animal abusers, the only way to achieve the truth is to be vegan.
Learn to go vegan here.
To read stories of people who have successfully gone vegan, and why they did, please visit Vegancouragement.
Image Credits:
Randy Rodriguez