Dr. Will Tuttle's Blog

Veganpalooza is Coming, Just in Time

2012-07-08T15:25:35Z

“Except for one piglet, which abruptly quieted down when I took him in my hands and then he looked me right in the eyes, as if saying: ’How could you do this to me?’ That look in his eyes shattered me and kept me awake all night,” Lo said. (From the recent Taipai Times article, “Pig Farmer Turns To Animal Rights.”)

Like the former pig farmer, we are all on a life journey of awakening and resensitizing. To facilitate this, in a few days, on July 11, 2012, Veganpalooza will come whirling into our world. Together with Steve Prussack, I’ve been working on this for quite a few weeks, and indirectly, for years, even decades.

Everything I love and stand for can be summed in Veganpalooza: it is communicating the understanding that is bringing the positive revolution of compassion and health gathering momentum in our culture every day. It is celebrating inclusivity, radiant wellness, freedom, creativity, beauty, kindness, justice, equality, and authentic spirituality, and the ever-present possibility of world peace. It is disseminating the truth that our shocking cruelty toward billions of animals for food is completely unnecessary, and that all of us humans can thrive on sustainable plant-based diets and lifestyles that would not only liberate us from most disease and environmental devastation, but would transform our way of relating to nature, animals, each other, and ourselves.

Respect and kindness toward others is the essence of the vegan way, and the redeeming inevitability in this leads to self-respect, self-confidence, inner peace, clarity, and healthy kindness for ourselves. The single greatest act of benevolent liberation and healthy self-empowerment is to make an effort to understand the amazing ramifications of our routine violence toward animals for food, and to help and encourage others to do the same. This is the key to awakening from the consensus trance of disconnectedness that is injected into all of us from infancy.

Veganpalooza is over thirty of the most committed, visible, and hard-working vegans on the planet sharing their wisdom and experience derived, collectively, from many centuries of vegan practice. Veganpalooza is a five-day planet-wide event that is available wherever there is a phone or computer connection. A full 24 hours of vegan information and inspiration, it is already going to be translated from English into Russian, and more languages will follow. This movement for us as a species and as a human family is our calling and our destiny. We will have peace, happiness, freedom, purpose, and health when we are deserving of them, and we are deserving of them when we no longer deny, but rather offer them, to those who are at our mercy.

So please join me, and join the other remarkable vegan pioneers who have a platform on Veganpalooza to help humanity launch into the next phase of our collective evolution, and spread the word about Veganpalooza far and wide. Join Drs. John McDougall, Neal Barnard, T. Colin Campbell, Gabriel Cousens, Brian Clement, Thomas Lodi, Jameth Sheridan, Milton Mills, and Jonathan Balcombe, as well as Kathy Freston, Rory Freedman, Victoria Moran, Colleen Patrick-Goodreau, Dawn Moncrief, Rae Sikora, Cherie Soria, Rip Esselstyn, Rich Roll, Nathan Runkle, Harold Brown, Bo Rinaldi, Keith McHenry, Howard Lyman, and many more, as we explore, expound, and expand the vegan message of kindness, health, sustainability, and freedom into our communities and into our world.

Veganpalooza is a free event, available to all. Whether you’re already vegan, or yearning for better health and understanding of the solutions to our planetary problems, Veganpalooza, in its magnificent abundance, will have keys, insights, and inspiration for you on your life journey.

You can find out more and register for Veganpalooza.

Please tell your friends and all your colleagues. We are all in this together!

Click here for information on being a Veganpalooza affiliate.

Thanks so much for your efforts on behalf of others. Together we are changing our world!

What Did American Indians Eat, Actually?

2012-02-24T18:54:40Z

A couple of months ago, in early November, 2011, my wife Madeleine and I visited Natural Bridge State Park in the mountains of Virginia, and as part of that, we also visited the Monacan Indian Living History Village that is there. It was a fascinating experience!

The Monacans were a tribe living for many centuries in the Appalachians before the arrival of Europeans, and the display at the state park is a replica of part of one of their villages. It was staffed by several docents who were there to explain things to the tourists. We happened to arrive there shortly after a large field trip of local high school students had arrived, so there were probably 60 kids there and a male docent was explaining to them the Monacan people’s life. He was, not surprisingly, talking a lot about their methods of hunting and fishing and how they killed and ate animals for food.

As Madeleine and I were looking at some of the beautiful baskets they created, a female docent came over and we started talking about the food practices of the Monacans. There was a small plot of corn growing, and I asked her about the corn the Monacans traditionally grew and what percentage it was of their total food consumption. She replied that it was only about two percent. She told us that she is herself descended from the Monacan Indians, and that her people had traditionally set up and stayed in villages such as this one for several years, and that they would then would move to a slightly different location in the same general area, and did this repeatedly because they would gradually exhaust the local resources. I asked if she was referring to the animals who were hunted and fished, and she said no, that meat and fish accounted for less than two percent of their food. Virtually all their nutritional needs – 96 percent – came from acorns, together with nuts, berries, roots, seeds, leaves, shoots, and other plant foods that they gathered.

From what I have learned, the Monacan Indians were pretty typical of the people living here in North America before the Europeans came. Indians’ diets were overwhelmingly plant-based, as in the case of the Monacans, according to this docent, 98 percent. And yet, ironically, all the school kids visiting the Monacan Living History Village got the impression from the male docent that they subsisted primarily on meat and fish. They left the Monacan Village with a completely different message than we got, one that would reinforce their acceptance of the foods in their school lunch programs and at the local fast food restaurants, and it was in many ways forced onto them by exploiting their trust and innocence. Of course the male docent was in no way consciously exploiting the children, but was part of a process that happens inexorably—the replication of culture.

What I continue to discover is how far from reality are many of the “official stories” that we tell ourselves and teach our children. They are stories that serve a specific purpose, which is to justify the existing order, and they are passed on effortlessly and subconsciously, because they make us all comfortable in believing, in this case, that our current practice of enslaving and slaughtering huge numbers of animals for food (75 million daily in the U.S. alone) is somehow a normal and natural expression of who we are as human beings. It is no accident that we term native cultures “hunter-gatherers.”

This emphasis on “hunter” for earlier humans is chosen by the mainly male meat-eating anthropologists whose views are unconsciously filtered by their own culturally-imposed meat-eating behavior, and the deep discomfort it inevitably causes. We will and must go to great lengths to justify violent behavior, and this is an example of this.

It is long past time to question these official stories, and to create new stories that more accurately reflect the fact that plant-based foods provide us all that we need to thrive on this Earth and celebrate our lives here with wisdom and compassion. The animals of this Earth, the oceans, rivers, and ecosystems, hungry people, slaughterhouse workers, and the future generations of all living beings are certainly yearning for the day when we awaken from the indoctrinated delusions that we need meat and dairy to get adequate protein and calcium, and that the world and nonhuman animals were put here for us to use.

We are not separate from this world and from the precious web of life here. Eating the products of enslaved and murdered animals forces us to forget this, but at any moment we can question the official stories, remember the truth, and become a force for healing, peace, joy, freedom, and health for all. The ancient Lakota prayer, Mitakuye Oyasin – “All my relations” or “All are related” – reflects this fundamental human wisdom of our essential interconnectedness that is repressed by the corporate diet of death and denial.
The wisdom of the Monacan people can inspire us today if we listen deeply within and question everything.

The Five Universal Taboos

2011-12-25T15:24:53Z

Built-in Fairness Meters

The more biologists and psychologists delve into understanding innate behavioral drives, the more they find that we humans seem to be hard-wired to be highly sensitive to fairness in social interactions. Interestingly, this universal taboo against unfairness in human relationships is also found throughout the nonhuman animal realm as well, especially in mammals and birds. It seems that the better we get to know animals, and ourselves, the more we realize that equity, justice, and fairness are not just intellectual concepts or noble ideals, but are actually embedded in the psycho-social fabric of consciousness that manifests as human and animal life on this planet.

The great liberation movements are examples, with, for instance, many 18^th- and early 19^th-century British people devoting their lives to ending the enslavement of African people—people they neither knew personally, and who were of a different race. Despite these factors, the blatant unfairness of the slave trade drove them to action. There have been many more examples we can all think of since then. The burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement is one of the contemporary manifestations of our essential sense of repugnance and outrage when witnessing flagrant unfairness.

Our sense of fairness results from our intuition of our interconnectedness with other human beings, and of our basic equality with each other. While it is violently repressed in our culture in many ways through the exclusivist and competitive official stories pervading our media and our religious, economic, educational, and governmental institutions, this fundamental sense of fairness and justice continually reasserts itself and easily extends to our relationships with nonhuman animals as well. The vast majority (around 95 – 98%) of people polled in the U.S., for example, agree that people who engage in self-serving cruel treatment of animals should be held accountable for their actions, and face social consequences for this behavior.

Universally-Recognized Taboos

In light of all this it is not surprising that all cultures in the world recognize certain behavioral taboos. Anyone engaging in these forbidden and unfair actions toward other people in the community faces consequences for doing so. There seem to be five universal taboos:

Not physically harming or killing others.
Not stealing from others.
Not harming others through sexual misconduct.
Not deceiving others.
Not forcing others to ingest drugs, alcohol, or toxic substances.

It’s obvious that we human beings have created elaborate legal, ethical, religious, and social structures to protect us from these unfair and harmful actions, and to discourage and punish those who knowingly commit these kinds of actions. Authentic spiritual teachings encourage compassion and fairness, and these are the foundation of social justice and harmonious living at the interpersonal level, and at the global level as well.

Fairness to Animals

The ironic, devastating, and indisputable fact, though, is that we engage in all five of these universal taboos relentlessly and flagrantly when it comes to animals we want to exploit for food, clothing, and other purposes. They are obviously capable of suffering and are as sentient as we are, and in many cases much more so, and furthermore they lack the capacity for discursive thought that we have that can insulate us from suffering and help us make sense of it. They are often driven into insanity by the extreme abuses they are forced to endure in the cruel, toxic, and hyperconfining environments we force them into.

First, they are physically harmed in countless ways, with routine unanaesthetized mutilations like castration, dehorning, debeaking, tail docking, ear notching, teeth clipping, nose bashing, as well as electroshock prodding and clubbing. They are all murdered also, typically in terrifying, painful ways—millions die daily for food by bleeding to death, hanging upside down in shackles—a nightmare of extreme violence and cruelty. Second, everything is stolen from them—their babies, their time, their milk, eggs, purposes, and freedom, and their bodies and their lives. Third, they are subjected to painful and perverse sexual abuse, including repeated raping of female animals in order to produce profitable offspring and masturbation of male animals—milking them for sperm to be used in the raping sperm guns—as well as well-documented sexual abuse by frustrated and hard-hearted workers in farms and slaughter-plants. Fourth, they are deceived by lures hiding barbed hooks, and reassuring curved tunnels that end in the terror and pain of the killing knife. Fifth, they are forced to endure injections of countless drugs whose application is not in their interests, but only in the interests of their exploiters. Antibiotics, steroids, chemicals, various hormones, and other drugs are administered to fatten them, boost milk and egg output, alter moods, and in other ways make them more profitable.

These billions of “food” animals have done nothing to us to merit such gratuitous violence from us. The same is true for animals abused and killed for clothing and other products, and for entertainment, scientific research, and other uses. It is true for the wild animals destroyed both directly through trapping, poisoning, and shooting, and indirectly through habitat loss, both of which are caused primarily by animal agriculture’s demand for massive areas of deforestation and land enslaved exclusively to grazing animals and growing feedstock for its confined animals. (In addition to the unfairness meted out to these animals is the inherent unfairness to starving and malnourished people, to slaughterhouse and factory farm workers doing the soul-deadening dirty work for the rest of us, and to future generations and everyone inheriting the ecological, economic, and cultural devastation wrought by animal agriculture.)

How can we as a society expect that our efforts for social justice for ourselves can be realized while we are acting so heartlessly, unfairly, and violently toward those whose vulnerable lives we hold in our hands? How can we respect each other’s interests, when we don’t respect the interests of billions of animals (and other humans), knowing that their interests are as important to them as our interests are to us?

Our massive and ongoing violation of the five universal taboos reduces our efforts for peace, justice, and freedom to mere hypocrisy and irony. Until we treat the animals of this Earth with fairness, and respect them as we wish to be respected, we will obviously continue to reap the seeds we sow daily by the tens of millions.

And Now the Good News!

Each and every one of us can say no to the industrial killing machine, and do the best we can to awaken from the program, understand what’s happening, and embrace a vegan lifestyle that treats others with fairness and respect. As we do this, and encourage others to do the same, we create the foundation for justice, harmony, abundance, and meaningfulness in our human world. We live on a beautiful Earth that can easily feed and support all of us celebrating our lives with joy, but only if we do it with fairness and respect for everyone. It all starts on our plates.

Cows: Herbivores or Omnivores?

2011-11-03T13:47:03Z

It’s heartening to see that the Occupy Wall Street protesters have included widespread industrial animal abuse in their list of atrocities perpetrated by the corporations that have taken over our governments:

“They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
“They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.”

A Sleep of Death
As we are awakening to the widespread corruption and inequity that are devastating our economic, governmental, environmental, and cultural well-being, I’ve found it to be highly illuminating to look deeply into our food system and its enormous repercussions that radiate into every aspect of our lives. As I discuss in The World Peace Diet, our unwillingness individually and collectively to recognize and take responsibility for the massive violence required by our food choices is our defining blind spot as a society. Sowing seeds of enslavement, cruelty, and terror in millions of animals who are confined and killed daily for food, we also sow the seeds, unfortunately, of our own oppression and demise. I believe that awakening from the socially imposed practice of eating meat and dairy products is the essential requirement for creating a new cultural foundation where equality, harmony, justice, and freedom are possible.

Paying for and eating animal-sourced foods is behavior that is profoundly antithetical to our interests on every level, and increasing numbers of us are realizing that besides damaging our physical health, eating meat and dairy is devastating our environmental, psychological, spiritual, and cultural health as well. However, as the Occupy Wall Street statement implies, animal agriculture serves well to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of elite corporate interests controlling the military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex that profit immensely from disease, environmental devastation, and war.

"If It Eats Like a Cow . . ."

In this, our cultural situation parallels that of a typical dairy farm or beef feed-lot, and this is where the poignant riddle comes in: are cows really herbivores or omnivores? They surely seem to be herbivores! We all know that cows have a digestive system designed for eating grass. They evolved eating this way for millions of years in the grasslands of central Asia. Now, however, their diet is quite different. Their owners “enrich” their diet with corn, soy, wheat, and other grains in order to spur weight-gain, boost milk output, and increase profits. This diet is unnatural and causes the bovines to experience digestive distress, including the unnatural intestinal harboring of toxic E. Coli pathogens that sicken and kill hundreds of human consumers every year.

However, the riddle goes much farther than this. In addition to grain, agribusiness scientists long ago discovered that feeding cows animal protein, saturated fat, and cholesterol dramatically amplifies milk production, weight-gain, and consequent profits. The result is that for decades now, cows have been routinely fed diets not of grass, but of grain that is “enriched” with the rendered flesh and organs of fish, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals, such as the millions of dogs and cats who are euthanized every year, and the road-kill and other carcasses collected by governmental agencies. Besides feeding the cows and steers all this meat from other species, they have been typically fed the ground-up slaughterhouse by-products of other cows (internal organs, nerves, brains, eyes, etc.), effectively turning them not just into carnivores, but into cannibals as well. This standard industry practice was supposedly stopped back in the '90s when it was discovered that it caused devastating mad-cow disease in human consumers of cow flesh. Nevertheless, we know that today, cows (as well as sheep, goats, pigs, and other obviously herbivorous animals) are eating huge amounts of meat because it boosts profits for the industry owners and operators, as well as the banks and financial institutions investing in the system.

Cows dutifully eat what they’re fed, even when it causes them digestive distress, cancerous tumors, and many other problems. Their owners feed bovines fishmeal, slaughterhouse waste, and other animal-sourced foods not because it is in the cows’ interests to do so, but because they exploit the cows and use them for their own purposes. They also force many types of drugs, chemicals, and antibiotics on the cows, again, not because doing so is in the interests of the cows themselves, but because it is in their interests as owners and investors to increase productivity and profits. Ironically, bovines all die very young: beef steers at about eighteen to twenty-four months, and dairy cow slaves at about four or five years. Though they would naturally live about twenty-five years, they die hanging upside down by one leg in slaughterhouses, stabbed in the neck and bleeding to death, killed for profit by their owners, and for their flesh and skins by obedient consumers.

Set Up

Do cows ever suspect they’re being ruthlessly exploited, or that the meat in their diet is toxic and part of that exploitation? Do they suspect they’re fed meat because doing so benefits their exploiters? After so many generations of being conditioned to eat meat, cows may think it’s their natural food. How would they know differently?

Now try re-reading the above paragraph, replacing the word “cows” with the word “people.”

The pharmaceutical-medical complex rakes in billions of dollars in profits from people eating diets high in meat, dairy products, and eggs, people who suffer from and buy drugs to treat the diseases caused by eating these foods: heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, strokes, obesity, osteoporosis, kidney disease, liver disease, autoimmune diseases, and so forth. This same industry brings in even more profits from people who eat foods sourced from animals who suffer terribly from the terror, frustration, and agony of modern animal confinement operations. Eating food products embodying this depression, anxiety, and insomnia, people ironically spend billions for psychiatric drugs to combat the same illnesses forced on the animals they eat. Drugging animals and humans, the pharmaceutical complex gorges on suffering to amass huge profits that enable it to control governmental bodies, the media, and public awareness. By analogy, the military-industrial complex profits from wars and policies that feed on disconnected, frustrated people, and powerful financial corporations steal people’s homes and wealth as dairy operations steal the cows' babies and milk.

Awakening

We can free ourselves when we awaken from the cultural food trance and its official story line—that meat and dairy are natural for us to eat—and switch to a plant-based way of eating that frees the animals, ecosystems, and people enslaved by this official story. Like cows, being fed meat and cheese is not in our interest, but is only in the interest of exploitive forces. By freeing others, we will attain freedom. By questioning the official food story and going vegetarian and then vegan, we open the door to discovering our purpose on this beautiful Earth, and to being able to create a new world of equality, freedom, and harmony.

May we contemplate deeply the riddle of the cows we dominate for food! Are they really the omnivores they’ve been forced into being? Are we?

Time to Wake Up

2011-08-17T17:54:30Z

Time to Wake Up

OK, everyone! It’s time for us to pay attention. It’s long been obvious that there are apparent forces spreading economic, environmental, and social devastation. Since 9-11, the pace has accelerated noticeably, and since Obama took office, the frequency and intensity of direct attacks on our freedom, our ecosystems, our health, peace, and economic security have further increased.

The question that everyone throughout our local district in the galaxy must be asking (and maybe placing bets on) is whether the humans on Earth will wake up, grow up, and act up, or feebly submit to de facto enslavement and ecocide. Will we awaken from our seeming complacency and distractedness, and grow up out of our disempowering gullibility? And how do we do this?

The precious and hidden key to everything is learning to understand and remove the toxic program that has been injected into all of us through our meals since infancy. It is a program of disconnectedness, elitism, exploitation, infantilization, numbing, and ultimately, our own enslavement. The vegan meme of radical inclusiveness, awareness, kindness, and concern for others is studiously ignored (and feared) in the mass media and popular discourse, but I believe that we know deep down it’s the only gate that leads to a positive future. Everything else is disaster, and horrific disaster at that.

Let me explain. I’ll try to summarize the essence of it in a few paragraphs.

There is no question that we are facing systemic breakdown and collapse across the entire spectrum, including environmental, economic, cultural, and medical. Environmentally, rainforest clear cutting is accelerating to over one acre per second to clear land for meat and dairy production, excess fishing capacity is utterly devastating marine ecosystems, animal agriculture is driving habitat destruction and the consequent spike in species extinction and loss of genetic diversity, and is the primary driving force behind climate destabilization, as well as water scarcity and pollution, air pollution, and soil erosion, just for starters. Economically, the gap between the super rich and everyone else is exploding, as jobs and housing opportunities evaporate and the world’s two main currencies, the dollar and the euro, destabilize and head increasingly into hyper-inflationary disaster. Culturally, the U.S. is now engaged in six wars, with increasing rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and violence that ripple throughout our planetary culture, added to the economic and environmental stresses that cause the increased breakdown of family structures. Medically, we find the general physical and psychological health of the world’s population declining in the face of environmental breakdown, nuclear and electromagnetic radiation, polluted and dwindling water supplies, forced vaccination programs, and increased meat and dairy consumption leading to epidemics of obesity, starvation, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, osteoporosis, and autoimmune disease.

Embedded within this multidimensional crisis are many other factors, such as the despair and genetic damage caused by genetically engineering organisms, the emergence of super bacteria and viruses through antibiotic resistance and corporate-military engineering, increasing violence toward women and children, with proliferation of pornography, pedophilia, and slavery rings, as well as spreading famine and malnourishment, and the rampant increase in psychiatric drugs for depression, anxiety, insomnia, autism, ADD, OCD, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and so on.

There are two main points that must be understood in looking at all this so that we can change the causative behavior and attitudes. One is that the law of cause and effect is in operation here: as we sow, we inevitably reap. Our routine violence toward trillions of animals for meat, fish, dairy products, and eggs is the primary driving force behind not just the environmental devastation on our planet, but also behind the cultural, economic, psychological, and physical disease we experience as well. We sow seeds of not just cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with our violence toward animals, but also of drug abuse, family breakdown, war, hunger, slavery, and exploitation because this is precisely how we behave toward cows, chickens, fish, and other animals for food, by the hundreds of millions every day. We are killing over sixty billion mammals and birds for food annually, plus an estimated one to two trillion marine animals, as well as untold billions more animals who are killed as collateral damage as their habitats are destroyed and pesticides ravage global ecosystems. Three quarters of the food we grow is fed to imprisoned animals for meat and dairy, while roughly a billion people are chronically hungry and starving. The scale of the industrial killing machine of animals for food is so vast, it is mentally incomprehensible. Inevitably, the violence and heart-hardening required by this killing machine boomerang in countless ways.

We are called to understand that animal agriculture is not only the driving force behind the many crises we are facing, but is also the driving force behind the underlying mentality that both causes these crises and is unable to effectively deal with them. On the surface level, eating animal foods is the primary contributor to forest and ocean destruction, species extinction, climate destabilization, resource depletion, genetic pollution (corn, soy, and cotton, the main GMO crops, are used mainly as feedstock), air and water pollution, disease, hunger, sheer violence, and yet even these obvious and critical connections are minimally made and discussed in either the mass media or the alternative media, or in popular culture.

The deeper level is virtually completely invisible: that eating animal-sourced foods is the primary contributor to the way of thinking and being that creates these problems. For example, what is the mentality required of a culture that routinely kills and eats 75 million animals daily (very conservatively) as we do in the U.S.? It is precisely the mentality that devastates the landscapes we inhabit, ecologically, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually. We are all forced from our earliest days to participate in ongoing daily rituals in which beings are reduced to things—pieces of meat—and this mentality of reductionism, commodification, exclusion, privilege, domination, and exploitation, routinely injected into us in the most powerful ways, by literally eating them, creates an essential inner environment of disconnectedness, numbing, low self-esteem, insecurity, and competitiveness that lead inevitably to complacency, gullibility, and the planetary disasters we are creating. This is our essential wound: the brutal suppression of our inner feminine wisdom, which I refer to in The World Peace Diet as Sophia (the Greek goddess of wisdom). With Sophia repressed by forcing us all to eat the flesh and secretions of enslaved, terrified animals, we become complacent and gullible, and in fact, according to sociologists, there is literally more human slavery today, both actually and proportionately, than in the nineteenth century before human slavery was supposedly abolished.

The second main point is that the environmental, economic, cultural, and medical disasters are not just befalling us; they are being consciously engineered in order to enslave us, and our ongoing violence toward animals for food, and the complacency and gullibility that follow, drain our power to resist. Because we have been forced to eat meat and dairy from infancy, and have been wounded in countless ways by the many ramifications of this toxic cultural program, we tend to be easily dominated. Unable to stop the basic indoctrinated behavioral violence that defines our culture—paying for (causing) and eating animal cruelty and murder—we tend to be complacent, and have difficulty challenging the violence we see enacted around us, because we know deep down we are also guilty of being agents of violence ourselves. We tend similarly to be gullible and easily distracted. We’d rather not see the truth of the violence and misery we are consuming and causing daily, so we regularly practice not looking deeply, being willingly deceived by corporate, governmental, and institutional lies, and pretending blindness to what is actually happening because of our food choices.

This is our culture’s essential dilemma. Eating animal foods is not anyone’s free choice. It is behavior engaged in only because every institution in our culture has indoctrinated us from birth to do so, and it is behavior that is profoundly antithetical to our own best interests. Our complacency, gullibility and distractedness are effectively increased by corporate messages and governmental policies that constantly infantilize us. One primary characteristic of emotional maturity is the ability to delay gratification, but we are bombarded with messages to buy now, have now, and pay later. The media serves us a continuous stream of images treating us all like children who want only to be entertained and distracted with sports, celebrity scuttlebutt, sex scandals, and fragmented news bites, and the government increasingly warns us and controls us “for our security” as if we’re frightened, helpless children, while increasingly attacking our sovereignty. Underlying all this is a truly massive dairy industry that keeps us as adults still sucking at the breast we never got, drinking milk like infants who can’t bear to grow up, eating cheese, cream, and butter from violently abused mothers whose babies are stolen from them, whose milk and lives and purposes are stolen from them, and as we drink and eat the milk of these sexually abused mothers, we tend to remain gullible infants, believing and trusting the false and disempowering official stories concocted by the parental authorities. Until we question the false official stories we’ve internalized, especially those normalizing eating animal foods, we remain merely ironic in our quests for ethical maturity, social justice, and spiritual evolution.

Eating the large quantities of animal foods that we do is wasteful and expensive, and this leads inevitably to massive economic inequity. The medical/pharmaceutical bills are expensive. The fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, water, and other resources are expensive. The resultant wars are expensive. Every year, this amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars transferred from the many to the few—the military-industrial-meat-medical-pharmaceutical-media complex and the banks in the background. With their ballooning wealth, it is easy for the wealthy elite to buy legislation and governmental policies, and saturate and control the media conversations to the point where now in the U.S., just one-tenth of one percent of the population now owns more wealth than 90% of the entire population combined!

The apparent forces that would steal our lives, dignity, freedom, and purposes, and reduce us to dumbed-down micro-chipped servants that do their bidding are taunting us openly now, blatantly stealing from us, lying to us, and openly trashing our economy and ecology. We seem to be so gullible and compliant that we apparently don’t see their clumsy ruses to enslave us—the multiple false flag operations such as the 9-11 controlled demolition, the ongoing flood of assassinations and media charades, the chemtrail skies, fluoridated drinking water, mandatory toxic vaccinations for helpless infants, growing Homeland Security police state, the banker bailout and wholesale looting of our treasury and stealing of our homes and retirement funds, and the mocking irony that laughs while enslaving us under a black president.

By far the most empowering and effective action anyone can take today to halt this violence and inequity, and to reverse the enslavement of humanity, is to go vegan. As we sow, we reap. As long as we enslave and terrorize nonhuman animals, stealing their purposes for our own ends, we will find ourselves enslaved and terrorized and our purposes stolen from us by others for their own ends. As we say yes to kindness, respect, compassion, freedom, health, sustainability, mindfulness, justice, and peace in our actual behavior toward others, then and only then will we be worthy of living in a world that mirrors this.

Our world is a mirror. Our massive violence toward animals for food boomerangs ineluctably, and each and everyone of us can be part of the vegan solution. We can actually remove the toxic program that has been injected into us by our dysfunctional culture since infancy, and switch to a healthy organic, plant-based diet that uses a fraction of the resources and opens our heart to the interconnectedness of all living beings and the amazing beauty of life on our precious Earth. And we can dedicate ourselves to spreading the vegan message of radical inclusion and compassion, and help others to remove the toxic indoctrinated food program from their body-mind as well. There is no more noble and vital activity than this! Ultimately, it is the path to freedom, joy, abundance, and peace. What we want for ourselves we are called to give to others. Animals are not mere props in the human drama; their suffering is as significant to them as ours is to us, as we know in our bones.

We have today an unprecedented opportunity to transform our culture and ourselves by recognizing, living, and sharing the truth that we can all thrive on plant-based diets. Acting on this realization, we can launch a new human awareness rooted in and expressing compassion, health, inclusiveness, and freedom. Out of the ashes, a new world yearns to be born, and needs every one of us to contribute by going vegan, understanding why, and spreading the word.

We are all inherently wise, compassionate, powerful, and creative, but we’ve had the faculties of our hearts and minds slammed so hard by a violent culture that we have succumbed to complacency and gullibility. Let’s no longer be tools in the hands of violence. Let’s wake up, grow up, and act up, and live and spread the unyielding truth of our interconnectedness, and freedom and peace for all.

(For further information, please see The World Peace Diet. We also now offer a self-paced online in-depth study of these issues, and training to facilitate World Peace Diet study groups: http://worldpeacemastery.com Thanks for being part of the solution.)

The Australian Scape-Camels

2011-06-24T04:19:28Z

    In case you haven’t heard, Australia is considering proposals to kill all the wild camels that roam the outback as part of its contribution to fighting global warming. The 1.2 million camels, considered pests by ranchers and some conservationists, each produce a methane equivalent of one ton of carbon dioxide a year. That makes them collectively one of Australia's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and now it seems there’s a good chance they will all be murdered to fight global warming.
   To many observers, this is just a ruse put forward by Australia’s powerful animal agribusiness to get rid of what it considers potential nuisances, and have the government take financial and moral responsibility for the mass slaughter as well. It is something they have been pushing for in recent years as the camel population has grown. This is nothing new. For example, the U.S. government’s Wildlife Services Department of the USDA has been spending tens of millions of dollars annually for decades killing millions of wild animals—coyotes, bobcats, raccoons, bears, blackbirds, foxes, badgers, prairie dogs, cormorants, lynx, and other “varmints”—at the behest of ranchers and farmers. Similarly, the free-living horses inhabiting the American West are being ruthlessly and tragically terrorized, captured, and removed from public lands by federal agencies serving ranchers who see them as pests competing for range that should be reserved only for their cattle.
   Globally, 70 percent of all agricultural land is devoted to animal agriculture. In many places, like North America and Australia, the percentage is even higher. In the U.S., for example, besides the millions of acres of grazing land devastated by livestock, there are millions of acres—80 percent of all grains—devoted to growing feed grains for hyperconfined pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, and factory-farmed fish. These vast monocropped fields are toxic killing fields where farmers try to kill all species of plants, animals, and insects other than the GMO corn, soy, or other feed stock they are growing. On top of this, the oceans are being decimated by toxic runoff from the pesticides and chemical fertilizers required by this monocropping, and by overfishing because now over half of all caught fish are ground into fishmeal to feed livestock and farmed fish. Animal agriculture is a human war against nature and wildlife, and it is a war that we humans are decisively winning.
   The driving force behind all of it is the massive culturally imposed demand for meat and dairy products. While I (and many others), for example, have eaten exactly zero pounds (or ounces) of animal foods over the past 30-plus years, and enjoy fine health on every level, the average American is consuming over 300 pounds of solid animal foods (meet, cheese, and eggs) annually, and devastating not just their own health, but destroying ecosystems and the lives of workers, animals, wildlife, and future generations.
   Now let’s look at the Australian camels again. The ranchers in Australia, like ranchers everywhere, wage a war against free animals who in their minds pose a threat to their profits. “Kill the varmints” is their war-cry, whether it’s camels in Australia, horses, wolves, and coyotes in the U.S., elephants and lions in Africa, or bears, tigers, and wild cattle in Eurasia. According to the United Nations F.A.O. study, Livestock’s Long Shadow, the meat and dairy industries worldwide are producing over 7,000 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every year. The 1.2 million tons supposedly produced by Australia’s camels are a microscopic fraction of this amount caused by human meat and dairy eating, and the 50 billion or so land animals we raise, feed, and kill annually for food. According to World Watch Institute scientists, the F.A.O.’s 7,000 million tons is a gross underestimate, and a more accurate figure is that animal agriculture produces over 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
   Obviously, if the Australian government were sincerely and intelligently interested in fighting global warming, it would spend the millions of dollars required to slaughter these innocent camels instead on public education programs that would help people transition to more healthy and environmentally-benign plant-based diets. This would not only be far more effective in permanently reducing carbon dioxide equivalents and mitigating climate disruption, but would also slash water usage and pollution, ocean devastation, drug use, disease, cultural violence, and a whole host of related disasters and unnecessary suffering.
   There is nothing stopping us from living harmoniously on this beautiful Earth, other than the mentality of disconnectedness, cruelty, elitism, and foolishness required by our mandated food choices that murder and maim billions of sentient beings. We are called to educate each other at the grass roots level, raise consciousness, and stop allowing a tiny wealthy elite to brainwash us and dictate the suicidal and ecocidal policies destroying our world any longer.
   Instead of attempting to solve the problems we create through violence and killing, we can solve them through compassion, inclusiveness, and respecting the sacred interconnectedness of all life. Moving toward vegan living and loving-kindness in all our relations is the only wise and lasting solution to our problems.

Upgrading Our Motivation

2011-06-13T04:18:55Z

Question: Some people say it doesn’t matter why people become vegan just as long as they do. Others, however, say that using arguments that ignore the injustice of nonveganism, such as self-oriented health or environmental concerns, is unethical and deceptive, similar to asking people not to commit murders because they may injure themselves in the process, or arguing against killing innocent victims in gas chambers because it pollutes the environment. What do you think about this?

I believe the motivation that is most lasting is the ethical justice-oriented motivation that is rooted in seeing nonhuman animals as beings, not as inferior things or property. Another way to say this is that it is motivation based on compassion and respect for others.

For me personally, this was the reason I originally went vegetarian back in 1975 – because of learning about and understanding the suffering to animals required for meat, and 5 years later, in 1980, for cows and hens for dairy products and eggs.

However, I’ve met many people who were drawn initially to vegetarianism for health (or environmental) reasons, and then after getting off of eating meat, were able to open for the first time to the ethical motivation, because they were no longer eating animals. So it seems very difficult for many people to make the ethical connection while they’re doing (by paying for) the actually killing.

In addition, though, I think it’s important that we realize the importance of “upgrading” our motivation from personal health to compassion for others.

Virtually all the people I’ve talked with who’ve told me that they “were” vegans but aren’t any more say they were vegan for health reasons. Many raw foodists, for example, are vegan because they’re eating raw foods, but they’re doing it for health reasons primarily, or for more energy, purity, longevity, etc., and when that doesn’t work or the cravings set in, they don’t typically just switch to include more cooked plant-based foods and stay vegan. Instead, they almost always, it seems to me, start eating animal foods of some kind again, because they were never in it for reasons of compassion, so why not?

I believe that veganism, in contrast to diets and most raw or specialist food regimens, requires no will power. It’s simply based in understanding. It may take will power in the very beginning when things are all new, but with understanding, there is no need for will power at all.

Animals are not food – there is no desire to eat them. Even non-vegetarians understand this clearly. For example, an American doesn’t need any will power to keep from eating dog meat – dogs are not seen as food in this culture.

But when I was in Korea I saw that many men there felt they needed to eat dog to be healthy, and so, since they did eat it regularly and it was a part of their culture to do so, it took quite a bit of will power for them not to eat it.

We must never underestimate the power of cultural programming. In determining the contexts of our behaviors, aspirations, fears, and wounds, cultural programming is everything! The only reason people are eating animal flesh and cow mammary secretions is the massive indoctrination we all receive at the hands of every institution in our culture.

It’s also important to recognize, I think, that most of the folks who move from eating a typical diet to a vegan one do so in two basic stages – first, they move to vegetarianism, which seems actually doable to them, and it’s typically quite a public event.

Then, secondly, from vegetarianism, they move to veganism. This is typically a quieter, more private transition. Veganism is almost inconceivable to the typical omnivore, but vegetarianism usually lies within the realm of possibility. As activists and educators, it’s helpful to be aware of this so we can plant seeds effectively. People need strong reasons to question something as primary and personal as food choices, and our challenge and opportunity is to present these reasons effectively.

I find it important to remember the two cardinal teachings – first, that the best way to help others to make positive changes is to make positive changes in ourselves. Though we can’t typically force others to change, we can plant seeds of change in others, and the more we are living the truth that we are espousing, the more skilfully and deeply we’ll be able to plant these seeds. And secondly, not to be attached to the fruits of our actions. Just do our best, and let go of the results. We never know! We are part of something far greater than we can imagine.

The more we can upgrade our motivation, and purify our own consciousness of anger and judgment, the more effective and fulfilled we will be as agents of cultural awakening. Remembering the beauty of the animals and people harmed by our culture’s routine violence, we can appeal to the highest in others and help bring out the best in them. This is the all-inclusive path of loving-kindness that is the heart of the vegan transformation that is developing every day.

I’ve recently put together a couple of online educational programs, the World Peace Diet Mastery Program, and the WPD Facilitator Training, that go into all this more thoroughly.

With practice, we can help more and more pre-vegans become vegans!

Spiritual People Moving Toward Veganism?

2011-04-02T15:10:53Z

Question: In the last couple of decades, how much of a change do you think there’s been in the perspective of spiritual people about the human relationship to nonhuman animals?

Overall, I’ve seen a gradually increasing tempo of change among “spiritual people” about our routine mistreatment of animals in the 3 decades I’ve been a vegan and activist, and I’d say that while the percentages are still small, they are making an increasing impact on the consciousness and behavior of our culture.

For example, for the past 20 years I have been traveling full-time presenting lectures and workshops to people in progressive churches virtually every Sunday, and while it’s constantly frustrating on one level, I have to say that today the general consciousness—and level of conscience—is vastly different from what it was, say, 20 years ago.

Veganism is on the map and recognized, and, I’d have to say, respected and seen as a noble (if somewhat unattainable) ideal by many people. Curiosity and confusion are rampant, as is fear of change, clinging to past habits, and a reactive pushing back against what I believe is an ongoing awakening of human consciousness.

This is to be expected, and is natural, but the awakening is happening, I feel, and it will bring us ever onward, at an accelerating pace, toward vegan living (or our extinction or utter enslavement if we continue the trajectory of conventional Western eating/living/thinking).

I’m actually able to give lectures blatantly promoting veganism and critiquing our current animal enslavement system in increasing numbers of Unity churches and Unitarian Universalist churches. The entire UU denomination, in fact, has taken “Ethical Eating” as its study-action issue for the period 2008-2012, and so there is active gnashing of teeth and squirming about going on occasionally in these congregations, as they peek behind the curtain, which is I believe, a wonderful and necessary thing.

There is also the Hallelujah Acres movement which is booming, and bringing a 100% plant-based diet to the awareness of hundreds of thousands of people who are conservative Christians. The fact that veganism is being espoused by Ellen DeGeneres and other celebrities is also making a huge difference among people who consider themselves progressive and spiritual.

I’ve also been actively involved in Buddhist groups, and it’s heartening to see that Thich Nhat Hanh, who has enormous influence, now requires all his monks and nuns to eat a vegan (not just vegetarian) diet, and lay students to not eat meat. Even the Karmapa, head of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, mandates that all monks be vegetarian, which was unthinkable 20 years ago, and the Dalai Lama continues to maintain Dharamsala as a meat-free zone.

We also have Supreme Master Ching Hai and her community making tremendous strides in bringing the vegan and spiritual message to the world through their worldwide vegan chain of restaurants, now over 200 strong. This was unthinkable just 5 or 10 years ago! And also through their SupremeMasterTV internet television program, they bring the spiritually-oriented vegan message 24/7 by broadcasting vegan-advocating programming with cooking classes, interviews, and constructive news in over 20 languages.

PCRM is offering vegan cooking classes in communities throughout North America, and this is percolating into local churches, as well as the ideas in The China Study, which is growing every year. Food not Bombs often works directly or indirectly through local churches in using their kitchens, etc., to distribute free vegan food to the needy and this is also helping to bring the vegan message to spiritually-oriented people. The large organizations, like HSUS and PETA also have outreach programs to churches and church leaders, and the Christian Vegetarian Association is doing continuous outreach to Christian communities through their literature and internet presence. ISKCON continues to promote vegetarianism (and increasingly veganism) around the world, and the Food For Life program delivers millions of vegan meals annually.

As another example, we have created the internet-based Worldwide Prayer Circle For Animals, with members from around the world who join in consciousness every day at noon to hold all animals in our hearts and minds with love and compassion and mentally repeat this prayer: “Compassion encircles the Earth for all beings everywhere.” This circle of spiritually-committed people continues to grow.

In addition, we see the booming yoga movement awakening to the ancient teaching of ahimsa, which is the essence of veganism, and increasing numbers of yoga studios, like Jivamukti, are encouraging their students to be vegan, and in the case of Jivamukti Yoga, The World Peace Diet is a required text for all instructors in training. We also now have the first national ongoing conference that explicitly brings together spirituality and veganism, the World Peace and Yoga Jubilee that is held every October in the Cincinnati area. The Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona is a vegan healing center that explicitly combines spirituality in its modalities as well.

So from the perspectives of health, environment, and compassion for animals, as well as spirituality, I see people awakening very quickly, especially in the last five years, and it’s happening much more quickly than the mainstream media is letting on, from my perspective. A lot of the change is subterranean, and I think it’s the result of grassroots vegan activism and that it’s absolutely essential that all of us continue to urgently advocate veganism in our communities throughout the world in whatever ways we can – there is literally nothing more benevolent or vital that we can do, in my opinion.

At its core, veganism is a spiritual movement, based on the ancient wisdom teaching of the interconnectedness of all life, and founded on the compassionate yearning within all of us to bless our world and to celebrate our lives creatively and joyfully on this magnificent Earth. Thank you for living this message in your daily lives, and for bringing it, in whatever ways resonate for you, to our world and to help uplift human consciousness to the truth that compassion and health are two sides of the same coin.

Loving Hut - Part of Something Bigger

2011-01-27T20:14:52Z

I recently discovered that on January 30, 2011, the Loving Hut on Irving Street in San Francisco officially opens as the 219th Loving Hut restaurant in this burgeoning international chain of vegan restaurants.

I would like to urge everyone to support this inspiring, and nearly miraculous, manifestation of the vegan spirit of compassion, sustainability, health, and benevolent cooperation. For years, we in the vegan movement have been plotting, planning, and praying for a successful worldwide vegan restaurant chain—at last we have it!! Woo Hoo!

Please patronize a Loving Hut near you, get to know the people running it, and encourage your friends, vegan or not, to eat at Loving Hut. The menu is filled with healthy dishes that are friendly to non-vegans, to help them make the transition to more compassionate eating habits.

As most are aware, the Loving Hut vegan restaurant chain is a project of the international community inspired by the Vietnamese spiritual teacher known as Supreme Master Ching Hai. In my view, this community is one of the most purely benevolent, hard-working, and effective forces for spreading the vegan message on the planet today. I have watched, read, and studied their teachings and actions for over twenty years, and since the publication of The World Peace Diet, I’ve worked with them in cities around the U.S., and the more I have gotten to know them, the more I have grown to love and respect them as individuals and as a movement.

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend an evening in Cancun, Mexico, with Master Ching Hai and about 400 guests and celebrities that she had convened to help bring the vegan message to the international global climate change negotiations that were convened there. After this experience, I can only say that I am even more humbled and inspired by the magnificent work that the Supreme Master Ching Hai community is doing in the world. Every day, from early in the morning till late at night, they were working hard, leafleting and speaking with the negotiators and the press abut the link between global climate breakdown and animal agriculture, and were the only ones doing so, just as last year, they were the only ones do so in the bitter cold of Copenhagen.

For me, the Ching Hai community provides a great source of hope in human nature. The community emphasizes the importance of combining the diligent inner work of regular meditation and cultivating humility and kindness with the outer practical work of helping the world by feeding hungry people vegan food, providing shelter to disaster victims, ministering to people in prisons, orphanages, hospitals, and old age homes, and creating vegan restaurants, books, pamphlets, videos, CDs, and Supreme Master TV, which broadcasts vegan cooking classes and constructive programming 24/7 throughout the world in over 20 languages.

Refreshingly (and remarkably), the SMCH community accepts no donations, and Master Ching Hai herself accepts no donations from her students or from anyone. Nor do they accept revenue for advertising. They finance everything through creativity and hard work. And so by not engaging in fund-raising nor selling advertising, they are not beholden to donors or advertisers, and are uniquely free to spread the vegan message without having to please anyone in how they do it. Like Food Not Bombs, the SMCH community is a grass-roots movement that is quiet, but enormously effective. In addition, the members of the SMCH community never get involved in debates or the infighting that characterizes the vegan movement, but just do the work of spreading the message to the world.

They were recently targeted by VegNews magazine (of all bizarre things!), which ran an “exposé” in the Sep/Oct 2010 issue that awkwardly tried to “expose” the SMCH community as a “cult.” I have rarely seen a sorrier piece of journalism, and have written an in-depth critique of it here.

In the Jan/Feb 2011 issue, VegNews chose to publish a second misleading disparagement of the SMCH community in the form of a double spread of comments on their earlier article. My letter was severely truncated, eliminating vital information, as were the letters of others writing in support of the SMCH community. And VegNews gave its usually constructive platform to denigrating letters that fortunately, I’m sure, savvy vegan readers can easily see are unsubstantiated.

Hopefully this misunderstanding is behind us, and I’m grateful that the vegan message is continuing to spread through the efforts of dedicated advocates throughout the world. As I emphasize in The World Peace Diet, and as Master Ching Hai emphasizes in her excellent new book, From Crisis to Peace, without a vegan revolution, our culture’s hope of survival is slim. The vegan revolution is an evolution in consciousness, where cruelty is transformed into caring, competition into cooperation, and violence into mercy and compassion.

Let’s continue to work together, in the persevering and self-sacrificing spirit of our Loving Hut brothers and sisters, and work to further the vegan message in our world, without rancor or judgment, but with joy, harmony, and appreciation for this precious opportunity of a human life. From my heart, a huge thank-you to Master Ching Hai and her community, to VegNews, and to everyone who is part of this movement to heal the deep wounds we have all received. May we succeed in our quest to create a world where peace, equality, justice, truth, freedom, and love are not only possible for all humans and animals, but also manifest in our daily lives. May this future draw us ever onward, out of the cultural indoctrination, and into the new world we can create together. Thanks to all who are helping in this vital effort!

The Greatest Gift

2011-01-17T21:00:32Z

The Greatest Gift

What is the greatest gift you can ever give to yourself? The greatest gift you can give to your loved ones and to the world?

It is the gift of deprogramming yourself.

As we are successful in removing the toxic program that was injected into all of us from infancy, primarily through meals and food, we find our inherent joy, inner peace, creativity, radiant health, compassion, and spiritual clarity spontaneously returning. We become a benevolent force for healing and blessing our world, and we become successful and rich in the only ways that matter--living a life adventure of meaning, healing, authenticity, depth, and love.

How do we deprogram ourselves? By understanding the program. How do we help others? By deprogramming ourselves so our innate wisdom can freely function again. Going vegan is a big part of it, but there's much more to it.

As I explain in The World Peace Diet, cross-culturally, meals are the most powerful social conditioning factors, and the food program in Western culture underlies everything else: it enforces a mentality of exclusion, reductionism, might makes right, privilege, and disconnectedness. This is the subtext of every meal, and virtually all of us were raised eating this program and incorporating it into our body-mind at the deepest levels.

We yearn to awaken, to live authentically, to contribute our passion, to love and to be loved, to see and to be seen. The essential nexus point where everything comes together is the food program. As we disable this malevolent program, we find that healing naturally takes place - we heal physically, and psychologically, and spiritually, and cognitively. As a culture, we heal, and as a species, and the Earth also is healed as we liberate animals from being reduced to mere food objects. All the dimensions of ourselves from the personal and physical to the spiritual, transpersonal, and cosmic, are interconnected, and as we disable the food program, move toward a vegan diet and way of living based on compassion for all life, our life aligns with a larger purpose and we become a living force for blessing others and ourselves.

Our culture is in a critical situation, and you are needed - more than you probably know! We can turn things around, but we have to go to the roots - to the food program--and effectively deprogram ourselves.

I invite you to join me in discussing and exploring the most empowering, transformational, and benevolent changes we can make in our lives today. Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I'll host a phone call - to register, please click here.

A week from Thursday (Jan. 27, 2011), I'll be offering the World Peace Diet Facilitator Training, an 8-week program where we'll go into all this in much more depth.
Thanks for being the change! Together, if we go to the roots, we can transform our culture and our selves.

Of Meat and Porno-Scans

2010-11-26T21:12:42Z

    There is growing outrage about the TSA's new airport policy that requires all passengers to submit to body scans that reveal them naked on devices that can store images. Travelers wishing to avoid this, and the known carcinogenic effects of the ionizing radiation employed by these "porno-scanners," can "opt out" and then must endure such aggressive genital groping by TSA agents that it constitutes sexual assault. Our government, through the Homeland Security's TSA agents, is routinely engaging in behavior that would land any of us citizens in jail if we did the same.
    What can we do to stop this from happening? Why are our freedoms continually being eroded? It is obvious that governmental forces and agencies are increasingly stealing our basic rights and liberties, and I urge all of us to take this seriously and to look deeply to understand the roots of this so we can ensure our freedoms won't be further eroded. Representative Ron Paul recently introduced a bill in Congress to safeguard our freedoms. It is a simple bill that would require government agents to abide by the same laws that we must abide by. In his speech on the floor of the House, Paul compared the treatment of travelers to the treatment of cattle being rounded up for slaughter. This is absolutely apt, and it reveals why we continue to witness our freedoms being blatantly stolen, and why we seem so powerless to prevent it from happening.
    One of the most important principles that we are called to understand by our inherent yearning for meaning and wisdom is that whatever we sow, we will eventually reap. As I emphasize in The World Peace Diet, our routine abuse of animals for food inevitably boomerangs; we end up experiencing what we inflict on them. It's so obvious that it's amazing more people don't notice it and talk about it. Lately, we've been witnessing the emergence of more and more mandatory vaccinations, for example. The cows, pigs, and other animals confined for food do not have a choice as to which vaccinations and drugs will be forced on them. They are injected with dozens of different drugs, hormones, and antibiotics not for their benefit, but for the benefit of those who dominate and use them. Their sovereignty and purposes are completely stolen from them.
    How do we think, as a culture, that we can steal the sovereignty, purposes, and freedom of billions of fully sentient beings whose suffering is, to them, as significant as ours is to us, and miraculously escape the consequences of this violent behavior? As we enslave others, we become enslaved ourselves. The net is ever tightening, and the mass media lulls us into complacency, while the ruling elite stages ridiculous, obviously bogus "terrorist attacks" in order to scare us, and make us like infants scream and run to our parents for security and protection.
    The system infantilizes us by forcing us, like perennial infants, to drink milk our entire lives, to be taken care of by authoritarian medical and governmental forces, to seek happiness in consuming meaningless and distracting products and entertainment. Like infants, we are fed foods of violence without comprehension, and it never occurs to us to take responsibility for our violence toward others, to question the official stories that are drilled into us and that enslave and numb us and steal our freedom and sensitivity.
    Every human being--like every living being--is a manifestation of the light of eternal consciousness. Each of us has a purpose and we all deserve respect. We experience self-respect and are respected to the degree that we respect others. We celebrate lives of freedom to the degree that we allow others to celebrate their lives freely. Our routine daily violence toward millions of animals for food is enslaving us and destroying our freedom.
    The only lasting solution to the TSA abuses is veganism: as long as we reduce others to objects and steal their sovereignty, we will be reduced and lose our sovereignty. I urge all of us to support the efforts of Ron Paul, EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), and others working to rein in Homeland Security and the TSA. More important, though, are our efforts to deepen our understanding and practice of vegan living, of ahimsa (non-violence), which is the essence of veganism, and to advocate vegan living as earnestly and skillfully as we can. There is nothing we can do that's more essential for freedom, peace, sustainability, and for our health and happiness. We are all interconnected. What we do to others, we do to ourselves. We see it everywhere when we awaken from the mass hypnosis of the military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex of materialism and fear. The most effective way to resist the oppression of the established order, and work to transform it, is to embody and spread the vegan message. Without this our efforts are merely ironic--we want for ourselves what we refuse to give to others. Our culture will be a vegan culture of celebrating respect for all life, or an alternative that is painful to contemplate.
    To find out about these ideas, please read The World Peace Diet, and consider becoming a WPD facilitator to help spread them. We are offering the first-ever WPD facilitator training modules in December and January. Together we can be the change we yearn to see; as we act, the positive evolution becomes inevitable. It is our future calling to us.

Switzerland - The Dark Side of Small Farms

2010-07-31T00:17:04Z

Lessons From Switzerland

As the chorus of anti-factory farming voices grows, many people are calling for a return to the "good old days" of small family farms to provide our meat, dairy products, and eggs. Having just returned from three weeks in the small alpine country of Switzerland, where family farms still prevail, I am more convinced than ever that the way forward is the complete elimination of all animal agriculture, whether small-scale or large-scale.

    Switzerland, in addition to its powerful banking, pharmaceutical, and food industries (UBS, Novartis, Nestlé) has a deeply rooted small-scale farming tradition. House gardens and community gardens proliferate, and fields of grain are interspersed with forest throughout the country. Cows with clanging bells around their necks wander the summer highlands, and small-scale animal farms dotting the landscape provide the cheese for which Switzerland is famous.

    Generally speaking, I found there are both positive and negative lessons we can learn from Swiss agriculture. The positive ones are the beneficent effects of hundreds of thousands of small, organic vegetable gardens and orchards. Every house seems to have a garden and fruit trees, and this strengthens the Swiss sense of caring for their land, fostering a healthy community spirit that propels Swiss people to cooperate to protect their lives and resources from pollution and exploitation. All GMOs are banned, virtually everything is recycled, and land, water, and air are safeguarded from pollution by stringent laws. Candy, soda, and junk foods are banned from schools. Fast food is minimized to just one chain: McDonalds (which advertises that it gets its potatoes--but not its meat--from Swiss sources).

    But there is also a dark side. On the surface, the small Swiss farms all look so idyllic. Hiking the wanderwegs through the mountains, hills, and dales of Switzerland, though, provided me the opportunity to look behind the curtain of the Swiss "happy cow" image. It was revolting to suddenly come upon small, dark, stinking barns where goats were haplessly confined on the hillsides, the land around cut down and barren from grazing. These unfortunate females were the source of the "gourmet delight" goat cheeses in posh stores and restaurants. Kept almost continuously pregnant, their male babies had all been killed at birth for kid gloves and other upscale leather products. I also walked by young heifers imprisoned in pens, waiting for the sperm gun that would impregnate them, and cows separated from their calves, waiting for the next milking. The calves, both male and female, are mostly sold for slaughter for the veal that is omnipresent on the menus in Swiss restaurants, or they are killed at birth for the rennet in their stomach lining that is traditionally used to coagulate cheese. I also saw deer imprisoned in pens for the venison that is similarly popular on restaurant menus.

    There is virtually no true wilderness left in Switzerland. Even in the high and remote mountains there are wandering goats and cows who are someone's property, and who will be duly slaughtered while still quite young when their production declines and it doesn't pay to feed them the expensive hay they need in the barn in winter. Most of the Swiss forests have been cut down to grow feed-grains for livestock, and this has led to a loss of habitat for wildlife.

    The metaphor of hidden exploitation echoes in eerie ways. UBS finances mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, Novartis promotes the spread of toxic chemicals and GMO agriculture in other countries, and Nestlé is well-known to be one of the largest purveyors of junk food in the world. Swiss companies do in other countries what they would never dare attempt in Switzerland. Additionally, while Switzerland produces expensive cheese and meats that have the aura of being sustainable and "humane" for its wealthy class and for export, it imports huge amounts of inexpensive factory-farmed meat from Germany, France, eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. Because Swiss animal foods are viewed as humanely produced (there are laws banning battery cages, for example), animal food consumption is among the highest in the world. And dairy in particular is sacrosanct. There is not one vegan restaurant in the entire country. The inherent cruelty in the dairy/veal industry is well hidden, and rivers of blood and misery flow behind the clean curtain of Swiss tidiness. The Swiss have, not surprisingly, among the highest rates of osteoporosis, heart disease, and diabetes in the world, and obesity rates are climbing quickly. Veganism is still in its infancy in Switzerland because of the monolithic power of the dairy industry and its ubiquitous advertising, as well as the generous subsidies dairy and animal farmers receive from the government.

    From the Swiss example, it's clear that the "good old days" were filled with routine cruelty and other problems. I hope that those who advocate for humane animal foods are able to look behind the curtain and see the suffering of confined sheep, goats, cows, chickens, and other animals on small farms, whose babies, freedom, lives, and inherent purposes are systematically stolen by farmers who profit from providing foods of questionable benefit. The beckoning path to health, sustainability, compassion for animals, and world peace is through persistent grassroots vegan education and the consequent abolition of animal agriculture. Cruelty and environmental damage is endemic to imprisoning animals for food, and global markets always undermine local efforts by providing mass-produced animal foods to meet the demand for inexpensive meat and dairy products. It should be more clear than ever: reducing demand for all animal-sourced foods--whether small-scale or factory-farmed--is the key to attaining environmental, social, physical, and spiritual health.

Stopping Our War on Animals

2010-06-17T19:05:33Z

The last few weeks have been painfully embarrassing for the dairy and egg producing industries. First, there was the release on May 15, 2010, by Mercy For Animals, an animal protection group, of undercover video footage taken at Conklin Dairy, a typical small dairy outside Columbus, OH. It depicted shocking cruelty by workers toward dairy cows and their baby calves. This 3-minute video is so arresting, it has gone viral on the internet. This was followed just a few weeks later on June 7 by more MFA undercover video footage taken in a large Maine egg producing facility, Quality Egg of New England, causing it to be fined $130,000 for cruelty to animals in a landmark case.
    While most people are dimly aware of the unavoidable cruelty involved in eating meat, the routine cruelty involved in dairy and egg production has been less recognized. The Conklin Dairy video exposes the "hot" cruelty of enraged and sadistically violent abuse perpetrated by workers, while the Quality Egg video exposes the inherent "cold" cruelty of treating beings as things, and the mentality of indifference and numbness this fosters in workers, as hens are hyper-confined for life, and when sick, tossed live into trash cans and manure pits, not with anger, as at the dairy, but without caring or awareness. These videos expose our war on animals.
    The most remarkable thing in all of this is the realization that whenever an animal protection organization such as PETA, HSUS, Farm Sanctuary, MFA, or COK places an undercover investigator in any of the animal agriculture operations--egg production, dairy production, hatcheries, slaughter plants, auctions, feedlots, stockyards, or broiler, turkey, pork, or foie gras production facilities, there is always graphic footage of extreme violence by workers toward the animals. As Nathan Runkle, found of MFA, recently said after the Conklin Dairy video, "Whenever we send an undercover worker into an animal agriculture facility, they always obtain footage of shocking violence to the animals there."
    Why is this? The renowned social psychologist Robert J. Lifton has called war "an atrocity-producing situation." Animal agriculture is, in fact, a war against animals, and the soldiers in this war, the workers, are similarly in atrocity-producing situations--situations that bring out the worst in them. Lifton and other psychologists have pointed out that war reduces enemy combatants and civilians to the status of mere pests and objects, and produces two types of atrocities--the hot violence of infuriated stabbing, beating, and killing we see both in war and in the Conklin Dairy video, and the cold violence of drones dropping bombs that kill and maim, like the cruelty inflicted on hens confined in battery cages where they are routinely maimed and then killed in the industrial meat grinder.
    This war on animals, with our soldier-workers killing an estimated 75 million animals daily in the U.S. alone, is the underlying war driving our war on other humans, the Earth, less-privileged people, wildlife, and, ultimately, ourselves. It is vast and invisible, and yet everyone, except for vegans, is participating and demanding it to continue. Until we understand that the mentality of disconnectedness, reductionism, and violence ritually injected into all of us through our meals is the underlying mentality driving the U.S. war machine and the war on nature and animals, we will never be more than merely ironic in our quests for peace, justice, freedom, and wisdom.
    Food is our most intimate and far-reaching connection with our culture and the world. We are called to stop immediately our benighted practice of enslaving and killing animals for food if we are to survive. We have no other choice. Fortunately, we're beginning, ever so slowly, to realize this. There's nothing more important to understand and practice than this right now. When we purchase animal-sourced foods, we are paying for and thus directly creating countless atrocity-producing situations. The atrocities inevitably boomerang, as chickens come home to roost.

Memorial Day for Animals

2010-05-31T03:54:05Z

    Here's an ironic 3-way conjunction: Memorial Day; the recent release of the undercover Conklin Dairy video footage; and the spewing volcano of oil deep in the Gulf. Memorial Day is a time to honor those serving in war, harmed by war, killed by war. It's become increasingly obvious that war has always been a tool of oppression and of wealth and power accumulation by a small elite, and Memorial Day is one of many ways war is legitimized in the public stories that are told to us from birth. The real war, again becoming increasingly obvious, is against the capacities for wisdom and compassion that are inherent within us, and the ultimate victims of this war are the most vulnerable: animals, ecosystems, children, women, hungry people, and future generations. Especially animals.
   How many animals are we killing daily in the U.S. for food? Roughly seventy-five million! How many is that? Basically ungraspable, at least by me. For example, if we take just part of the ongoing slaughter of animals--the slaughter of four species: cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys--and leave out all fish, sheep, goats, ducks, geese, and other animals killed by us daily in the U.S., and do the relatively simple math, we realize that we are causing a daily flow of blood that amounts to about 8.5 million gallons! This is many times more than the estimates of the Gulf oil gusher, which we have all been praying will be finally plugged up. This oil gusher is devastating! Every day that goes by brings greater destruction, so we yearn to have it stopped, and blame routine corporate greed and government corruption for the breakdown in safety standards that caused it to happen. Some estimates run as high as a million gallons per day of oil polluting the ocean.
   And yet we continue with our ongoing daily 8-million gallon blood gusher without any remorse or sense of urgency to stop. Disconnected from the terrible repercussions, unaware of and in denial about the pollution and suffering gushing forth, we go on devastating every level of our health: physiological, psychological, cultural, spiritual, ethical, and environmental.
   Who is accountable for this relentless blood gusher? It rings hollow to blame corporations and politicians, though we might be tempted, but that is just part of it. Ultimately, every drop of blood, misery, feces, and pollution spewing from the industrial meat grinder is generated because of personal choices by responsible individuals who pay for meat, dairy products, and eggs. Without these millions of daily choices, the blood gusher would dry up instantly and the ongoing war against animals for food would cease. The healing, joy, and celebration when this gusher is finally plugged is barely imaginable. Its stopping is inevitable, for whatever has a beginning has an ending. The question is: how will it be stopped - voluntarily or involuntarily?
   The crucial question in all this has to do with accountability. Why are the overwhelming majority of us--who are responsible for this carnage because of making choices to buy and consume the flesh and secretions of animals--not accountable for our actions? How can we evade responsibility so easily and blithely? Or do we? And what about vegans who don't make these choices to kill and cause others to kill? How are they accountable? And what about the producers and workers who do the killing on behalf of the consumers?
   In the Conklin Dairy video footage, we see about three minutes of shockingly cruel abuse of dairy cows and small calves by about three different men, including Mr. Conklin himself. There is violent and repeated hitting with metal bars, kicking, stomping, stabbing with a pitchfork, punching of calves, and it's even bragged about by one of the workers. I absolutely did not want to watch this footage, and procrastinated about five days because it is an ordeal to witness such violence inflicted on helpless animals. I finally decided that if these animals were forced by fellow humans to endure such abuse, the least I could do would be to bear witness to their suffering, informing myself, and holding them in my heart in love, mercy, and tenderness. The three minutes seemed like an eternity, and I felt the ordeal deepened my understanding and resolve, and I have recommended to many people that they see it also.
   We are all wired for compassion, and so this is why eating animal foods is so devastating to our self-respect and wisdom. Due to our innate empathy, we now see a flurry of media exposure and a universal call to hold this Ohio dairy accountable, and especially that the perpetrators be punished in order to send a strong message that such cruelty is not acceptable. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough, and reveals our blindness to our cultural indoctrination. Besides feeling compassion for the brutalized animals, can we feel compassion for the workers--the perpetrators? How quickly we tar them with a black brush, and make them the scapegoats for our broader cultural violence.
   We want inexpensive ice cream, cheese, and yogurt, and have as an entire culture created systems that provide that remarkably well, complete with economies of scale, government subsidies, technologies of enslavement and profit maximization, and an underlying story that animals are inferior to us and to be used as we please. From its beginnings eight thousand years ago, animal agriculture brought out the worst in people. It is the same today. These workers are in terrible situations that bring out the worst in them. Cows are powerful animals who naturally don't automatically cooperate with having their babies and milk relentlessly stolen from them. Violent force must be used, and always has been. Cows are innately silent when pain is inflicted on them, from millions of years of living in the wild when this was advantageous to avoid detection by predators. This fact unfortunately seems to encourage workers to beat them more brutally to move them or punish them.
   The entire system of reducing animals to mere commodities brings out the worst in both workers (cruelty) and consumers (denial and numbing), and as Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary emphasized recently--with his 30 years of experience rescuing farmed animals and investigating meat, dairy, and egg operations--what was videotaped at Conklin Dairy is standard procedure on all dairy operations. Nathan Runkle, founder of Mercy For Animals, the group that obtained the video footage, recently told reporters that whenever they send an undercover worker into an animal agriculture facility, they always obtain footage of shocking violence to the animals there. When we reduce an animal to an "it," how will we not degenerate into violence toward that animal? Owning animals and stealing their sovereignty is inherently violent. The workers are put in an ethically devastating position in which they are not accountable for venting their frustration and anger on these animals (unless a pesky vegan undercover operative with a video camera happens to sneak in), and as we understand well, the more anger and violence are expressed in an individual or culture, the stronger and more virulent they become. We become what we practice. What consumer of cheese, ice cream, milk, or yogurt, watching this video, would want to eat products coming from the kicked and stabbed udders and bodies of these poor animals? The thought is revolting, but eating violence, death, and despair is inescapable in eating dairy products, including so-called organic, free-range, and other industry-sponsored propaganda labels.
   We are all ultimately accountable for the violence we see in the Conklin Dairy video - anyone who purchases dairy products is obviously directly responsible, because, like the person demanding the assassination of someone, they are the motivating cause of the violence, while the workers are less culpable, being the hired guns who do the bidding of their superiors. It's difficult to refuse, because those who desire dairy products, and the corporations serving them, are constantly repeating, "Dominate, inseminate, steal from, and kill these animals for us, and if you don't, we'll find someone who will."
   As a 30-year vegan, I am not absolved of responsibility in this, because it is only those who are not perpetrators who can and must offer solutions, guidance, clarity, and a positive example to break the cycle of violence that is engulfing our world in so many ways. As vegans, we are called to cultivate hearts and minds of all-inclusive kindness, including both the victimized animals and the perpetrators in our compassion, and understanding that the perpetrators--consumers and providers of animal foods--are both victimized unwittingly by their violence and numbness. We are all connected. Veganism is radical inclusion--love in action--and requires of vegans a deep commitment to complete personal transformation, and an awakening from all dimensions of the cultural insanity required by eating animal foods.
   Who knows what terrible abuse the Conklin Dairy workers experienced as infants and children? Birth in our culture is a violent affair, like it is on a dairy. Babies are routinely separated from their mothers at birth, and their bodies are flooded with pernicious injections and harsh sounds and toxic chemicals. Like on dairies, less than four percent of the human babies born in the U.S. today get their mothers' milk. Whatever we do to animals, we end up doing to ourselves. Sending anger and judgment to Mr. Conklin and the workers only adds to the problem, and shows we are not looking deeply and are not free of the culturally indoctrinated mentality of exclusion required by eating animal foods. Personally, I yearn to send love and tenderness not just to the cows and calves in the video, but to Mr. Conklin and the workers as well, and to the masses of consumers blind to the effects of their actions, and to the millions of fish killed yearly to be fed to the dairy cows to boost their milk production, and to the starving people who could be fed the grain and beans fed to these cows, and to the whole interconnected web of life on this beautiful planet being devastated by animal agriculture.
   Not buying animal-sourced foods, products, and services for ethical reasons, while it is a fantastic, healing leap for anyone to make in this culture, is just a small first step on the great vegan journey of love and awakening, and for us to be successful in helping our culture evolve to nonviolence, freedom, respect for life, justice, and peace, we are called to cultivate and embody these qualities in all our relationships, and practice inclusivity, kindness, and respect for both human and non-human animals.
   The calls that are going forth from the larger animal protection organizations for stronger laws and regulations to protect dairy cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals will never succeed in stopping our violence toward animals for food, or free us from it. They may even legitimize it. What is called for is committed, resourceful, creative, and grass-roots vegan education. We must reduce and stop the demand for dairy products and meat by respectfully educating people that with whole, organic, plant foods we can feed ourselves and free ourselves. There is nothing more important today than each of us practicing and sharing these ideas of love for all living beings.
   The relentless blood gusher must, like the oil gusher, be stopped quickly and soon, or humanity and most life forms will be destroyed. Our violence toward animals and the Earth is a boomerang that is increasingly ferocious. We absolutely do not have the right or luxury to eat animal foods, or to think in the exclusivist ways that eating animal foods requires. This is the message underlying all the news headlines, if we can see it. Our future is beckoning and drawing us ever onward. What kind of future will it be? We cannot build a tower of love and harmony with bricks of cruelty and indifference. Our bodies, our lives, and our relationships are the towers we build daily and inhabit.
   May we have a Memorial Day for Animals, whose bodies, minds, and spirits bear the full fury of our culture's indoctrinated cravings and numbness. Their blood, gushing relentlessly in the hidden gulf of agribusiness machinery, is devastating the heath of our entire world. Remembering animals every day, let's be and spread the vegan message of love and compassion for all with, as JFK used to say, renewed vigor. We have no other choice. I propose a Memorial Day for Animals, which is a Memorial Day for all of us, and is the next step in our cultural evolution.

The War on Terra

2010-05-21T18:48:05Z

    As environmental devastation continues to escalate, it's essential to look at the roots of our abuse of the Earth and her complex and fragile ecosystems. Why do we allow industries to pollute and destroy with such impunity?
   The latest disaster, the massive underwater oil geyser in the Gulf, may be a far more destructive and malevolent onslaught than the media is letting on, and it is but another in a long and accelerating series of attacks we are mounting against our home planet. What underlying force drives this machinery of violence? Why do we insist on stabbing, burning, and cutting our precious mother Earth instead of cooperating with her miraculous bounty, respecting and loving her? Why are we ripping apart the fabric of living creation, destroying the beautiful interconnected life that is celebrating through the communities of birds, fish, animals and plants around us?
   I believe we have to look much more deeply than mere economic and political forces to the underlying, driving mentality that is ritually injected into all of us by our cultural upbringing, and more specifically, by the foods we are indoctrinated to eat by all the institutions in this culture. What we need more than anything now are conversations and discussions about the irresistible consequences of our routine violence toward billions of enslaved animals for food.
   The mentality that is required to hyperconfine, mutilate, kill, and eat hundreds of millions of animals daily is precisely the mentality that ruthlessly destroys ecosystems without remorse. It is the mentality that is injected into all of us from birth by powerful cultural forces that indoctrinate us into seeing beings as mere commodities to be used. Our innate inner landscape of compassion and wisdom is devastated by relentlessly eating the flesh and secretions of enslaved animals, just as the outer landscape is devastated by the same behavior.
   The hidden and mostly ungrieved tragedy is that all the devastation caused by eating animal foods--diabetes, cancer, arthritis, heart disease, osteoporosis; dementia, depression, insomnia, anxiety; air and water pollution, global climate change, massive species extinction, soil erosion; starvation, malnutrition, war, inequity; and the inconceivably vast enslavement, torture, and killing of billions of fully sentient animals for food--is utterly unnecessary. There are no nutrients in animal foods that we cannot get directly from eating plants. The door is open! Each and every one of us can walk out of the prison of misery of eating animal foods, right now! There is nothing holding us except the bone-deep disconnectedness that we don't realize we're in a prison. We are forced by our culture to forget the truth that we are all connected, and that as we harm and imprison others for some supposed benefit, we actually harm and imprison ourselves even more. Our violence toward animals for food is ultimately violence toward ourselves. It inevitably and elegantly boomerangs. We are so obtuse as a culture that we don't realize it.
   As I write this, I sit in our rolling home, parked for a few days here at a sanctuary for some abused goats, sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals who have miraculously escaped the giant industrial meat grinder they were destined for from birth. Caressing them behind the ears, rubbing their bellies, looking into their eyes, feeling the warm subjectivity of their presence, is all deeply sobering. They respond when their names are called. They are subjects of lives that are to them as important as mine is to me, and their interests are to them as important as mine are to me. Yet most of us participate in destroying them by the billions without remorse. Stealing their purposes, we lose our own, and become unwittingly enslaved ourselves in a heartless system that is devastating our Earth.
   What we do to ourselves, we do to the Earth, and what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. We are not essentially separate from this beautiful Earth, from beautiful animals, and from each other. Like the cows born into a system that forces them to eat meat to produce more milk, and get fat for slaughter, we are similarly forced to eat meat, and as we reduce beings to things, we ourselves are reduced to mere objects without abiding self-respect. Animals, the Earth, future generations, and starving people all suffer directly because of this.
   The way out is straightforward: Do not do to others what you wouldn't want done to you. The ancient universal principles are infinitely wiser than our science's latest theories and concoctions. All we need to know is in our basic human sanity, which has been relentlessly polluted like the clear Gulf waters by toxic cultural effluent.
   The great metaphor of our culture is the knife. We use knives to stab and dismember 75 million animals every day in the U.S. for food. We carve up forests, we stab and maul millions of acres of land for monocropped grains for animal feed, and cut and splice the genes themselves into unnatural abominations, and stab the living body of the Earth for oil, gas, and minerals. Just as we don't see cows and pigs as being alive, but as merely hot dogs and burgers, we don't see the Earth as being alive, but as a mere resource, and go on stabbing ourselves in the hearts and brains, laying waste our wisdom and compassion, suffering heart attacks, strokes, and endless war.
   It is now absolutely clear. Our culture must go vegan or perish. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. I see a great awakening on the horizon. We are not essentially condemned to slavery and oblivion. We are here to awaken from the nightmare of delusory separateness and celebrate our lives as manifestations of benevolence, joy, creativity, and love. This is the core teaching of veganism: we are all connected and love is our true nature. As we live this more deeply, we can transform our world.
   The clock is ticking; the oil and blood are spewing. How do we respond?