Folks often tell me that they are eating less meat these days — and some even proudly state that they are going vegetarian. And to them all I answer twofold: first, I offer a sincere “Well done” for taking a step in the right direction … and second, I remind them that this step — at least as far as animal cruelty is concerned — is but a small one.

“But how can this be?!?” they invariably exclaim, “What’s so bad about milk & cheese?”

Well, it is easiest to understand the answer to this question by considering the cow pictured below — a cow with a life no better and no worse than the millions of other dairy cows that provide you with your milk and your cheese every day. To put it mildly, this gentle girl has been abjectly reduced to a mere resource; a mere commodity in your shopping cart; a mere money-maker for the meat&milk industry … Her right to control her reproductive organs, her right to care for her children, her very right to live her life as a free individual have all been taken away; stolen by us humans — a species with no need for milk or milk products, and therefore a species with no justification whatsoever for treating her this way.

My Friends, this gentle girl and the millions like her are not mere things. They are individuals, and they are all — each and every one of them — vividly aware of what is being done to them. They are aware that they are slaves … They are aware that they are repeatedly raped & impregnated against their will … They ware aware that their babies (who they dearly love) are ripped from their embrace only hours after birth … They are aware that their cries of mourning fall on deaf ears … They are aware that they are over-milked until their udders become swollen and bloody and infected … And they are aware that after only a few short years of tortured living, they are shipped away to a cruel & horrifying death.

Rest assured that this is NOT what any of these gentle girls want. Just like you & me, if given the chance, they would all — each & every one of them — have wanted lives filled with love and joy and friendship and freedom. Just like you and me, they would all have wanted to live.

And yet this gentle girl will indeed die … She will die in agony and in terror, strung up by her feet with her throat slit; bleeding out while partially conscious; surrounded by the screams and the gore of friends who have suffered a similarly brutal end — screams stifled by the stench of death; gore hidden behind the strong walls of the slaughterhouse. And all of this merely because non-vegans like you enjoy the taste of her flesh; all of this merely because non-vegans long to drink the milk that her tortured body produced for the calves she was not allowed to nurture and raise.

My Friends, please know that this post is not a call to criticism — It is a call of Awakening. Please know that these are not judgments I make against non-vegans as people, but rather are the simple FACTS of the massive suffering that the non-vegan lifestyle creates and actively supports.

So, if you are still not yet a vegan — if you are still directly contributing to the immense & unnecessary suffering of thousands of innocent animals every year, please look into the mirror today and ask yourself the following questions:

*”Isn’t it time for me to enliven the values I hold most dear?”
*”Isn’t it time I not only admired the just, but also upheld justice?”
*”Isn’t it time I not only talked of compassion & goodness, but also walked that talk?”

I think once you do so, you will FEEL deep within that the threefold answer is quite clearly “Yes … It is time.”

Amen … Let it be so.

P.S. If you have any questions or concerns about going vegan — any at all — PLEASE feel free to contact me privately and I will do everything I can to help ease your transition to a cruelty-free life.

 

Filed under: Sanctifying Sentience by Scaughdt