When you commit yourself to vegan activism, sometimes there is no other choice but to talk about death, murders, sentient beings that want to live and the minimum we must do to help them, really help them. And here you suddenly find yourself, in the middle of an argument with someone who claims vegans must advocate regulations of animal slavery. In order to illustrate my position, I say that is the same as being opposed to death penalty and demand someone should be executed by lethal injection rather than in the gallows. Whatever the method used, there is not a humane way of killing someone. However, although it is hard to believe, there are some “animal rights supporters” (alleged defenders of animal rights) who think that using and killing animals with no suffering is an advancement we vegans have to celebrate.
There are days I can’t get over my amazement.
I often wonder if I am vegan in this life because I once was a slave forced to fight, a black female slave, an executed prisoner, a beheaded Cathar woman, a female executed prisoner, a shot counter-revolutionary… It is not only veganism, in my Facebook I am also assaulted by violent scenes I don’t want to see, like those picturing Angola’s soldiers shooting down women with her children in the back, for religious reasons. I can’t forget the fact I also found myself in similar situations, situations of helplessness, persecution, executions… in sum, my life was taken for various reasons, when the only thing I wanted to do (in the majority of cases) was to keep on living. So I know that if, being imprisoned in a damp and stinking dungeon in 14th century Ireland, because I rebelled against my family’s oppressors, someone had come to tell me that instead of hanging me, they would kill me slitting my throat so that I would not suffer that much, I would have thought they were making fun of me. I would thank them if it were quick, yes, and if possible not painful, but without any doubt, changing a form of execution for another wouldn’t be any gesture of compassion or empathy. It is unbelievable that in top of this, I am the one accused of lack of empathy.
I don’t understand how some people think this is different in the case of nonhuman animals. I don’t understand how wicked a mind can be to think that nonhuman animals will be grateful if we kill them quickly and with no pain, when the only thing they want to do is to be free and live their lives in peace, as we all want to. You only need to look them in the eye to know, if only an ounce of humanity is left in you.
It is unbelievable how some people search for ways to justify the unjustifiable. And all this topic causes me a lot of sadness, because I once was a slave too, and I knew what it is to be treated as a thing. I knew what it is that a doctor comes and examines you after waiting in a queue of slaves, to decide if it is worth you keep working or you’d be better be sold. I knew what it is to be raped and your children stolen and killed for being a mestizo, more or less what happens to cows that are exploited today. To suggest that they have to keep doing the same, but caressing you and saying kind words, not only it is mocking the victim, but also being really evil. And, though it is hard to believe, there are alleged animal right activists requesting this for the nonhuman animals that inhabit the Earth.
And one has to keep quiet.
So while I write and argue trying to keep my memories far away, I can’t forget. It is impossible to forget your last moments when you have a rope around your neck, or when someone pushes you against a piece of wood so that you lay your head on it. It is impossible to forget the rifle pointing to your chest in the middle of the confusion and shooting without mercy. It is impossible to forget the emptiness in your soul which is the only thing that is left in you when you have seen your life pass by without knowing what freedom is. And how can one summarize the emotions that consume you in the inside in those moments? How can one explain the nature of the fire that burns inside, the very thing that originates your current restless fight for Animal Rights (and in case someone wonders, this includes human rights)? For PEACE, ultimately? Such a short word and so denigrated in our civilization… Catharism (the real one, not the current) is also a part of me, to the core, now I know it has been with me since my birth. And I might well be beheaded one and a thousand times more, but I will keep defending what is just.
But of course… it is not the first time I defend we can and must live without violence, and back then I ended up decapitated in a fortress by a bunch of Catholic fundamentalists. Centuries have passed and we still have to keep fighting for questions of fundamental justice, questions that even a four-year-old kid understands better than one of those “animal rights activists” that think are heroes because they demand from supermarkets to keep exploiting hens but in larger cages. They will say that the fact these hens end up equally with their throats slit when someone decides they are not useful to lay more eggs, is the least of it. Killing someone is not considered violence, what matters is that we kill them with compassion.
And this individual tells me I am the one that lacks empathy.
Seeing is believing.