Ethics, Laws, and Traditions
What does Republican Matthew Scully, the former senior speechwriter for George W. Bush, have in common with Ohio's ultra Democrat and former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich? The same thing Russell Simmons, Erykah Badu and Joaquin Phoenix have in common with Cesar Chavez, Pythagoras and Leonardo da Vinci. Besides capturing the hearts and minds of generations, all are vegan. By not wearing fur, leather, wool, silk and down, nor consuming milk, cheese, eggs, honey and the meat of any land or marine animal, they made a compassionate decision to directly save the lives of thousands of animals.
Animals had an inherent right to be free and live completely unfettered by human domination, I wondered why it takes so much time to attain this nonviolent awakening.
I began to ask, "Who taught me that animals were put on this Earth for food? Who taught me to disrespect animals and view them as mere commodities? Who stole my compassion, my empathy and my conscience? Who lied to me? Who instilled this vicious mindset of human-to-animal exploitation as standard operating procedure?"
If every meat, dairy and egg-eater logically and compassionately re-evaluated their beliefs, they would understand why veganism is the only ethical and acceptable way to live on this planet.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the compassionate Jewish humanitarian who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland, once condemned every animal-exploiter by stating, "What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."
Singer's indictment is probably the most damning statement ever about humankind. It establishes the fact that violence is violence and murder is murder even if the victims have beaks, horns, gills, feathers or fur.
It's important to note that animals were the first victims of slavery, oppression and murder. Humans perfected these psychotic techniques on animals before using them on each other. In the last 12 months alone, tens of billions of animals worldwide were enslaved, murdered, dismembered or tortured by the food and clothing industries, in vivisection experiments, by hunters, in rodeos, circuses, and zoos, making the Animal Holocaust the largest and longest-running Holocaust of all time.
When Nazis rounded up Jews, babies were ripped out of their mothers' arms. In the dairy industry, calves are stolen from their mothers after birth. Other animal mothers, such as sows, rabbits and ewes, have their babies taken within days, weeks or months after birth. Separating families is a psychologically devastating tactic used to weaken one's pride and inhibit their desire to retaliate and fight back. Nazis swiped this technique from the meat, dairy and egg industries. Jews were tattooed to mark them. All animals in the meat and dairy industries are branded with hot irons, or ear-notched with a numerical tag. Jews were sent to the concentration camps in the same extermination trucks that still send animals to slaughterhouses. The Nazis constructed human slaughterhouses to massacre millions, while these torture-buildings have been strategically built all over the planet to massacre billions of animals. Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don't matter.
You can also compare the two Holocausts this way. Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau. If you travel back in time and remove the Jews from Birkenau and replace them with cows or pigs, a Holocaust is still taking place. During my 2012 lectures in Israel, after showing a new slaughterhouse video, I asked thousands of people the following: "How come if the animals in that video were dogs or cats, you'd be outraged? If they were kids, you'd be screaming bloody murder! Instead the victims are cows and chickens and fish and all of a sudden no one cares, it's okay? So I'm a little confused here. Is the slaughterhouse a problem? Or is the problem who's getting killed in the slaughterhouse? It's a HOUSE OF SLAUGHTER. Why does it even exist? Especially in a country that loves to say, 'NEVER AGAIN. IT'LL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.' I got some news for ya. The Animal Holocaust was happening long before the Jewish Holocaust, during the Jewish Holocaust and it's still happening today. It's time for Israel to become the first nation on this planet to abolish concentration camps once and for all."
The global atrocity of eating animals kills more innocent beings in one year than all human atrocities over the past 5,000 years combined! This makes veganism the most important aspect of animal rights because almost every animal who is abused and killed on this planet is abused and killed by the meat, dairy and egg industries, despite the fact that no one in this day and age needs meat, cheese, milk and eggs to survive. The only exception would be people residing in icy environments or desert settings. But eating animals for pure survival is rare with only around 1 percent of the earth's population being able to use this excuse. Keep in mind, this is just a valid excuse and NOT a justification. I understand why they do it. I wouldn't do it under any circumstances, but I understand their motives. Everyone else on this planet eats animals and the things that come out of animals for four reasons: Habit, convenience, taste and tradition. With the addition of the profit motive, those are invalid, unnecessary and barbaric reasons to intentionally harm animals.
Meat, dairy and egg-eating societies are also the main cause of world hunger as they continually feed around 50 percent of the world's corn, wheat, oats and soy to 60 billion land animals and tens of billions of marine animals (fish-farming) instead of hundreds of millions of starving people! Every two to three seconds, someone on this planet dies from malnutrition while pigs and cows get fat. Consequently, meat, dairy and egg-eaters are anti-human because feeding billions of animals instead of millions of hungry children is an indirect form of genocide.
Worldwide, around 60 billion land animals [10 billion in the USA] and 90 billion marine animals [18 billion in the USA] are killed and eaten every year in a monumental Holocaust borne of ignorance, arrogance and racism. The human race v. animal race brand of racism permits humans to enslave and kill any other species with impunity. Singer calls speciesism the "purest form of racism" because it kills more innocent beings that any form of human-to-human racism.
This is why vegans are the utmost humanitarians. We indiscriminately seek justice for all by doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves [THE GOLDEN RULE].
As an ethical vegan, it's logical for me to proclaim that the only nice slaughterhouse is an empty slaughterhouse. This statement, however, is often challenged by uninformed, egocentric individuals who believe mercy and kindness are exclusive to humans. But to deny every animal's inherent right to fly, swim and run freely is cruel and dishonest. If given an option, no animal would choose pain or death.
To understand the compassionate movement of animal rights, empathy must be used to examine the issue from the animals' point of view. This isn't a radical concept either. Abolitionists looked at slavery through the eyes of subjugated blacks, just as the Allied Forces looked at Nazism through the eyes of Jews and other non-Aryans whom Hitler labeled unworthy and expendable. Empathy allows people to understand the injustice without over-analyzing the issue, especially when those in power deem the victims unworthy and expendable, something Hitler, slave-owners, and meat, dairy and egg-eaters have all done to their respective victims.
In an attempt to defile the animal rights movement, meat, dairy and egg-eaters often proclaim that Hitler practiced vegetarianism. However, biographers Albert Speer and Robert Payne attested to Hitler's love for liver dumplings, stuffed squab [pigeon], ham and sausage. German Chef Dione Lucas wrote about Hitler's carnivorism in her Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook, published in 1964. Rynn Berry's Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover describes how Goebbels, The Third Reich's propaganda minister, tried to sell Hitler as a vegetarian to make him seem as peaceful as Gandhi. The next section in this series, HITLER WAS NOT VEGETARIAN, provides ample evidence that, contrary to a good deal of popular misconception, Hitler and his henchmen were not vegetarians at all.
Were you also aware that animals in the meat, dairy and egg industries receive no legal protection whatsoever? After all, slavery and slaughterhouses cannot co-exist with freedom and protection. Here's an excerpt from section two of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), the federal law that oversees animal-use in America: "When used in this act, the term "animal" ... excludes farm animals, such as, but not limited to, livestock and poultry used or intended for use as food ..." That's pretty cute, isn't it? The animals who are enslaved or eaten aren't even recognized as animals under the law. Does this remind you of another piece of legislation that ignored the victims and existed to shield victimizers from prosecution? When the Constitution was first enacted, only land-owning, slave-owning, white men of European descent were protected. Blacks, Natives, women and many others were conveniently excluded.
The AWA, kosher and halal-style killings, and the free-range/freedom/organic/cage-free/antibiotic-free/hormone-free/grass-fed/buying local marketing terms are used to manipulate people into thinking that meat, dairy and egg production can be done happily and humanely. But there is no such thing as happy and humane slaughter just as there is no such thing as happy and human rape, happy and humane slavery, or happy and humane child molestation. From the animals' point of view, anyone who commodifies their bodies is equally vicious. And if for some reason my aforesaid words aren't proof enough of the terrorism claims I'm lodging against the meat, dairy and egg establishments—and the people who consume these products—maybe the billions of dead, dismembered animal bodies consumed annually could count as proof.
Fortunately, de-programming the perfunctory ways of meat, dairy and egg-eaters is possible. The University of North Texas opened a vegan dining hall in 2011, a New York elementary school turned its cafeteria vegetarian in 2013, and the Victor Valley Medium Community Correctional Facility in Adelanto, California, successfully ran a vegan rehabilitation program, just to name a few. My lectures convert thousands to veganism annually while thousands more significantly reduce their meat, cheese, milk and egg intake. Reduction and abolition are the only options to end this massacre. Welfare regulations are a stamp of approval to let the carnage continue unabated because compassionate ways of enslaving and killing billions of animals do not exist.
This is why we shouldn't be a fan of legislation. Fighting for bigger cages or "better" treatment of animals is contradictory and ridiculous. It will never lead to empty cages. When examining human liberation movements, you'll notice that Malcolm X and Dr. King didn't fight for "better" treatment of blacks via improved segregation policies. They wanted to abolish segregation. They fought for equality and freedom. Cesar Chavez fought for it, too. Same thing when Gandhi liberated India from British rule. If abolition instead of welfare were somehow legislated, I'd be down for that. But I don't believe you can legislate until you educate. Passing welfare laws—which won't be enforced anyway—without explaining why it's evil to commodify animals is backwards.
In America, each meat, dairy and egg-eater is responsible for the deaths of 3,000 land animals and thousands of other marine animals throughout their lifetime. Meat, dairy and egg-eating, however, is not an instinctive behavior. It is learned tradition. Scientific claims of the human body being omnivorous or carnivorous are erroneous and illogical. If someone placed a two-year old child in a crib with a bunny rabbit and an apple, the child would play with the rabbit and eat the apple, an unambiguously herbivorous reaction. People become inured to the taste of blood, flesh, veins, muscles, tendons, cow secretions [milk], hen-ass droppings [eggs] and bee vomit [honey], as I will discuss in the "Humans Are Herbivores" section.
Since veganism is for anybody who wants to be kind to animals, good to the environment and healthy, millions of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, black, white, Asian, Latino, Native, pro-life, pro-choice, pro-gun and anti-gun people live a vegan lifestyle. Millions of Democrats, Independents and Republicans are vegan as well. Tales of tree-hugging liberals being the only supporters of veganism couldn't be further from the truth. Scully's Dominion is a right-wing, faith-based, Christian conservative view supporting veganism because ethnicity, religious affiliation or political party have no bearing on eating a veggie burger tonight instead of a hamburger.
