Keeping Your Own Nose Clean

I've often had animal rights folks and vegan persons who are very very strident and vocal about their beliefs have me wondering about hypocrisy. I do know, through loving a vegan close to me, how many do get this hypocrisy label thrown back at them though..this is not new. Many times I will see someone voicing off very passionately and not always thinking through their passion to their own backyards. Whether it is leather shoes, medications that "for now" seem to require animals, vegetarians doing what they do for kindness reasons and not realizing that the dairy and egg industry are also kept going through much animal cruelty, etc.

There is a big difference to me in people that go about their day to day practising their ways of conscience and people who yell and scream and call down another person because of their ways. I can see the benefits of veganism and a kinder world however I can also see that not all of those that eat meat are into disregard for an animals pain or life or well being. I personally fall into the nearly vegetarian/vegan who wishes to get there eventually but not having the focus or drive to do it now.

Many indigenous cultures see animals as no different than themselves. Wolves, for instance, are omnivores and eat many different things as do bears. How can we be better than these animals? Some would say that an animals doesn't know any different..and I say "how do we know?". How do we know that omni and carnivores don't just have a different attitude towards death and life and that we are anthropomorphizing them into human? How does it become evil with a human to eat meat and yet we don't put those kind of moral judgements on animals? Perhaps seeing another animal (for that is what we also are!) as below us as in "not being aware of what it is doing" is a kind of separation from humans and other animals...a sort of condescension as it were. Who is correct?

Factory farming is a whole different thing all together however. It can be hard to see animals doing something so foreign to their nature and think that this is good or kind. A life spent crowded in a cage, overly milked, had their babies taken away, had their male babies killed or tortured and then killed, been given antibiotics, growth hormones and not being able to move and live freely..how can this go on in an ever enlightening world? Many factory farmers will convince themselves that animals are dumb and don't know any better. Do we do this to make it easier? Do we detach ourselves so that the concept of torture of sentient beings doesn't bother us so much? Better to at least be out in the wilds in dignity to live your life being predator or prey like most animals no? It takes some thinking.

Someday I hope to be vegan just for the sake of the health and various other reasons to me alone but I hope to never shout out my strident beliefs with all the subtlety of a World War two tank without first at least making sure that my own nose is clean.

Blessings
Ravynwolfe