Good
evening, fellow animal rights activists. I am honored to share with you
for the next few minutes my perspective on the history and evolution of
the animal rights movement that we are here to celebrate and promote at
this conference. All of us in this room have some basic things in
common. We all care about the suffering imposed by humans on non-human
animals and we all are working in our own ways to reduce this. But
beyond this, all of us have deeply questioned the official story of the
culture into which we have been born. This questioning is at the heart
of our movement. The official story is that non-human animals were put
on this Earth for us humans to use and that the violence this entails
is perfectly acceptable.
When we question this official story, we also question the power structure and world-view of this culture, as well as our culture’s standard interpretation of its history. We
all know that there are countless examples of official stories that are
false, both currently and historically. For example, here are a few:
“If you don’t eat any meat, dairy products, or eggs, you’ll probably
die within 24 hours of a protein deficiency.” “If you don’t fluoridate
the water, you’ll get lots of cavities.” “ The World Trade Center towers were destroyed by Arab terrorists.” “Animals don’t have a soul.” “U.S. foreign policy is to promote freedom and democracy throughout the world.” “To be healthy, you have to have vaccinations and medications.”
And so on. At its core, the animal rights movement is about questioning
the official story of our culture at the deepest level. This is why
animal rights is so threatening to the existing power structure.
Essentially, the animal rights movement is about vegan living as
minimizing our cruelty to animals, and when we trace it all back, we
find that our movement has ancient roots in questioning the official
story of this culture.
According
to anthropologists, around 8 to 10 thousand years ago, in what is today
Iraq, people for the first time began the practice of herding -- owning
and confining animals for food – first it was wild sheep and goats, and
around 2,000 years later, cows, and eventually other animals. This was,
I believe, the last major revolution that our culture experienced, and
it changed our culture, and us who are born into this culture, in a
fundamental way. For the first time, beings were reduced to mere
property commodities, rather than being mysterious, autonomous, and
respected cohabitants of the Earth with us. This changed the essential
orientation of the culture, and a wealthy elite emerged that owned
livestock as their wealth, the first large-scale wars evolved, and
indeed, the first word for war that we know of is the old Sanskrit word
“gavyaa,” which means “the desire for more cattle.” Capitalism (from
the Latin “capita,” meaning “head” as in head of cattle and sheep)
emerged with warfare as profitable for the wealthy livestock-owning
elite, along with the ownership of humans as slaves—often people vanquished in war—and the
systematic reduction in the status of women, who by the arrival of the
historic period, roughly three thousand years ago, were bought and sold
as chattel property. The reduction of wild animals to the status of
pests because they could threaten the herders’ capital, and the
development of science as a method of dominating animals and nature
followed, as did the arising of a new and different role model for boys
of the macho male herder, tough, disconnected, and capable of extreme
violence and cruelty toward both animals and rival herders. This
bellicose culture spread gradually and relentlessly throughout the
eastern Mediterranean, eventually to Europe, and to the Americas and is
still spreading, and we are born into this culture, which has the same
basic attitudes, behaviors and practices to this day.
Shortly
after the beginning of the historic period, roughly 2,500 years ago, we
have the first cases of prominent and respected people urging
compassion to animals and what we would call today veganism. In India,
two contemporaries, Mahavir, a significant teacher in the Jain
tradition, and Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, both preached
and practiced a meatless diet, and required their students to observe
strict codes of conduct that prohibited them from owning animals,
harming animals, and eating animals. Both traditions, the Jain
tradition in particular, claim that they go back much further than
2,500 years; that the practice of nonviolence that they enjoin is an
unbroken teaching extending back centuries earlier into pre-history.
These
are the first animal rights activists that we are certain of today, and
the basis of their activism was the teaching and understanding of
ahimsa. Ahimsa is the doctrine and consciousness of
non-violence: that violence toward other sentient beings is not only
unethical, and brings suffering to them, but that it also inevitably
brings suffering and bondage to the perpetrator and society as
well. It is very interesting that both of these traditions are
essentially spiritual traditions, and they focus not so much on animal
welfare, but on what we would call today animal rights and animal
liberation. Ahimsa is the essence of veganism, which is the commitment
to minimize cruelty and exploitation by not interfering with animals at
all, or as little as possible, and allowing them sovereignty in their
lives in nature.
It’s
important to understand that owning animals as property to be killed
and eaten is the hidden and defining core of our culture, and that all
of us were, and are, routinely indoctrinated into the mentality of
domination, exclusion, reductionism, elitism, and disconnectedness
required by the food practices of this culture. The spiritual sages of
India, with their propagation of ahimsa, rejected and boycotted the
core of cruelty of our herding culture 2,500 years ago, and were the
earliest vegans we know of, consciously attempting to minimize their
violence to animals, and to spreading this to others. This powerful
time in our cultural evolution, called the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers,
saw similar ethical giants emerging simultaneously or shortly
thereafter: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Socrates in the Mediterranean,
Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tzu & Chuang-tzu in China, Isaiah and the
later prophets in the Levant. All emphasized compassion for animals,
the rejection of animal sacrifices, and the fact that violence toward
animals boomerangs as violence toward humans. As we sow, we will reap.
These ideas spread through spiritual teachers and philosophers over the
centuries, and by the beginning of the Christian era, for example,
Buddhist monks had established centers as far away as England in the
West, China in the East, and Africa
in the South, and brought ahimsa and veganism with them. I am using the
word veganism here explicitly because unlike the word vegetarian, the
word vegan stipulates that the underlying motivation is to minimize
violence to sentient beings.
With
all the cross-pollination of ideas in the ancient world, it is not
surprising that many of the ancient historians record that Jesus and
his disciples were well-known abstainers from animal flesh, and it is
documented that the early Christian fathers were vegetarians and most
likely vegans. A few centuries later, when Christianity became the
official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, the practice
of compassion to animals by Christians was viciously suppressed, with
Constantine’s soldiers reputedly torturing to death anyone who refused
to eat meat. This attitude continued in the centuries that followed
after the fall of Rome, with vegetarian Christians in Europe in the
medieval period, such as the Cathars and the Bogomils, being suppressed
and eventually exterminated by the church. There were other strands and
individuals promoting nonviolence toward animals in the ancient world
going into the medieval as well, in the neo-Platonist, hermetic, Sufi,
Judaic, and Christian traditions.
With the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment in the 16th to 18th
centuries, the influence of the church waned as reason and modern
science began to ascend, but unfortunately, this was not good news for
animals, and signaled the beginning of a much more ferocious
exploitation of them for scientific experimentation, as well as for
entertainment, clothing, products, and, of course, food. While there
had been some modicum of respect for and protection of animals as God’s
creatures under the old order, under the new materialism, they were
reduced to mere resources and commodities in the clutches of a surging
industrialism and population expansion of omnivorous humans that
continues unabated to this day, and is threatening all animals, and
indeed all of nature and even humanity itself, with destruction and
perhaps complete annihilation.
The
cross-currents of intercultural dialog have always served to help
people question the official story of their culture, and in the 19th and 20th
centuries, we saw this happen in the striking rebirth of vegetarianism
and animal protection, inspired to a great degree by the rediscovery of
Eastern thought in Europe and North America. With the translation of
ancient Buddhist and Jain sutras, as well as the Upanishads, Vedas, Tao
Te Ching, and other Indian and Chinese texts, as well as the discovery
of vast populations thriving on essentially plant-based diets, more
people in the West began to question the routine violence toward
animals that characterized their culture. The word vegetarian was
coined in 1850 to replace the old word Pythagorean, and experimenting
with and promoting vegetarianism became popular with many influential
writers such as Shelley, Byron, Shaw, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Emerson,
Alcott, Besant, Blavatsky, Tolstoy, and Gandhi, among others. There was
also a Christian strand as well, with several church leaders such as
William Cowherd in England and his protégé in America, William
Metcalfe, advocating compassion for animals, with some, like Ellen
White of the Seventh Day Adventists and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of
Unity School of Christianity advocating a the main tenets of veganism
forty years before the word was invented. They were aided in this by
the pioneering work of early vegetarian proponents like Graham, Post,
and Kellogg who raised consciousness about the health benefits of
plant-based eating, as well as the animal cruelty involved, and also by
the efforts of the first animal protection societies such as the RSPCA,
ASPCA, and the Humane Society.
In
1944 Donald Watson in England strengthened the foundation for the
modern animal rights movement by coining the word vegan and founding
the Vegan Society in London, directly challenging the official story
and the underlying core of our culture. He defined veganism as “a
philosophy and way of life which seeks to exclude, as far as possible
and practical, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals
for food, clothing, or any other purpose.” Thus the vegan movement was
born as a continuing manifestation of the ancient and universal wisdom
teaching of ahimsa, and is at the heart of today’s animal rights
movement.
In
the decades since, there have been many books and studies written, many
organizations and periodicals founded, many documentaries filmed and
websites created as part of humanity’s effort to reduce our violence
toward animals. Veganism and animal rights issues are becoming
increasingly mainstream as a result of all these efforts, and the
momentum continues to build in spite of enormous resistance by all the
institutions in our culture, and in spite of the difficulties in
responding to pervasive cultural hostility and the complexity of the
issues involved. For example, it is increasingly clear today that our
violence toward animals is a primary driving force behind environmental
devastation, physical and psychological illness, war, hunger, inequity,
and social violence, besides being ethically wrong. Groups and
individuals align themselves with and promote the animal rights agenda
for varying combinations of these factors, depending on their
predilections, and so there are a number of competing perspectives.
Besides
this, there has emerged a tendency, especially on the part of the
larger organizations, to engage in campaigns that attempt to engage
with and influence animal abuse industries to get them to reduce the
cruelty of their practices. These campaigns, while they may be
financially successful for the organizations by encouraging generous
contributions that lead to what are proclaimed as victories for the
enslaved animals involved, run the risk of ultimately, and ironically,
harming the animal rights/vegan movement. This is for many reasons,
such as the fact that the animal use industries have enormous power,
and can thus turn what seem to be defeats into de facto victories; that
we lose the moral high ground when we argue over, for example, what
type of slaughter is more humane than another; that consumers are more
likely to consume more animal foods and products when they are assured
that they are humane; that the status of animals as mere property
commodities is actually reinforced by these campaigns; and that as a
movement we are failing to encourage people to go vegan, but rather to
vote with their votes and their dollars for animal violence that is
disguised as being compassionate and humane. This has led to the
current state of our movement as being in many ways co-opted and
undermined by the animal abuse industries, which is understandable,
given their power, and divided by conflicting perspectives on how best
to actually liberate animals from the human violence that is inevitable
when they are reduced to property status.
In
sum, we live in a culture that has as its core official story the
complete domination of animals, and everyone is indoctrinated into this
from birth. When we question this we become part of an ancient and
ongoing effort to liberate animals, and this is the essence of both
ahimsa and veganism. The vegan movement (which is another, more
pro-active name for the animal rights movement) is a movement of
complete cultural transformation, and in this, it is different from
other justice and liberation movements. The routine violence toward
animals for food corrupts and undermines our essential wisdom and
compassion, and creates the essential context within which other animal
abuse occurs, as well as the domination and exploitation of humans. The
vegan movement is radical in the sense of going to the essential root
of all our dilemmas and violence and requires of all of us who would
promote veganism and animal rights that we purify our consciousness of
the violence and exclusivism that our culture has planted in us, as the
ancient spiritual teachers who started the animal rights movement
emphasized. We can only harm animals by excluding them from the sphere
of our compassion, and so veganism is radical inclusion, and as vegans we are called to practice this radical
inclusion that includes not only animals, but all humans in the sphere
of our compassion. Thus, it may not be appropriate to compare our
movement and tactics to those of other movements. The vegan movement
requires us to become the change we wish to see, and treat all beings,
including our so-called opponents, with respect. This is the essence of
ahimsa and veganism as historically understood and taught.
And
finally, we live at a time of immense and growing crisis that gives us
unprecedented opportunities. The old complacency is being stripped away
by the multidimensional crisis facing our culture. More and more people
are realizing that the only viable future for humanity is a vegan
future. Rather than negotiating with the suppliers of animal cruelty,
we can see from the wisdom of those who have gone before us that the
real power we have is in reducing the demand for animal foods and
products by raising consciousness and educating and encouraging people
to reduce and eliminate animal-sourced foods and products. Thankfully,
we see this happening today with the proliferation of both secular
national, international, regional, and grass-roots groups and efforts
to spread vegan ideals and practices, and also, increasingly, religious
and spiritual groups and efforts that are similarly doing this.
This
is the way forward. The idea of ahimsa and the idea of veganism are so
powerful because they resonate with the core of our true nature as
beings of love, awareness, creativity, sensitivity, and compassion.
Donald Watson and the other sages that have gone before us have planted
a seed deep into the core of the obsolete story that has mired and
encrusted our culture and that threatens to destroy all life on this
planet. As we each water that seed and plant our own seeds, a new
garden of compassion will grow that will inevitably break the bonds of
violence that enslave all of us. People will realize that as we have
enslaved animals, we have enslaved ourselves.
The
vegan revolution – the animal rights revolution – has been coming for a
long time now. We are entering the final stages of its realization, and
it is a revolution of benevolence, joy, and creative celebration, and
it needs all of us! So plug in, join in this noble and ancient work,
and together we can transform our culture. Liberating animals, we can
liberate ourselves and allow the Earth to heal for our children and the
children of all living beings.
The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past. The future is vegan!
May all beings be free. Thank you.
