Vegan Blog Entry 4 April 25, 2019

I worked as a psychotherapist for about 30 years. Some of my work involved people who had suffered in very abusive families. Some of these clients would tell how animals were used as child substitutes to mete out punishment.

“Jane” lived in an abusive farming family with several older brothers who were jealous of her being treated as the most “fragile” child. They killed and forced her to eat the pet lamb she loved. Barbara’s father sexually abused her and controlled her by torturing, killing or threatening to torture or kill her pet cats.

Most of us as children do not suffer such extremes. Yet our experience is also deeply traumatic. The frightening nature of the adult world is brought home to us by the daily display of a dead animal on our table. This is alarming to us on either a conscious, or more commonly, pre-conscious level. The horror is kept like a secret video stored deep inside. It is the stuff of horror movies where those we most love and trust turn out to be monsters. We must keep this pressed down lest we live in constant terror of our own parents who after all, hold our lives in their hands. For the overwhelming majority of families this murder displayed on our tables is never talked about; therefore must be unmentionable, an unspeakable secret.

The fact that we have been identified with animals from birth (stuffed animals, animal patterned bedding, animal mobiles, animal stories, animal cartoons) heightens our sense of endangerment – if we complain, will we remind these all-powerful adults that we are kin to these animals?

We repress all this from consciousness if we possibly can – it is too disturbing not to. Most of us are successful at this. But when we see an infant, child, or “animal” in pain it threatens to bring up this stored fear. For many this repressed endangerment triggers rage toward the thing that threatens to bring it up; instead of sympathy we may savage the being that has activated, or threatens to activate, the buried terror. This may explain why the most vulnerable children are almost always targeted by other children. It may also explain why young children of a certain age go through a stage of torturing and killing small insects and other helpless creatures. Finally, it undoubtably explains the otherwise unfathomable lengths of cruelty we inflict every day on billions of animals worldwide in our factory farms, laboratories, and slaughterhouses.

The submerged horror within us is evidenced in various ways. The proliferation of zombie films and books where “the living dead” (the unfeeling, uncaring) kill and eat the living (the sensitive, emotionally normal) is a direct projection our reality. Because our repressed fear forces us to deaden our sensitivities, we become true zombies.

We go about our daily lives blithely slaughtering over 160 billion non-humans a year (over 10 times the human population of the earth). Are we not unconscious? Are we not brain-dead creatures engaged in the most gruesome nightmare imaginable? The “Walking Dead” … are us. We are sleepwalkers with a knife.

In the 1970’s I was involved, first as a client, and later as a therapist, in what was known as Primal Therapy. Primal did not live up to the all encompassing claims of its originator Arthur Janov, but it was a very illuminating phenomena and still deserves a place as a valuable tool in the therapist toolbox. In Primal Therapy a client lies down and is encouraged to let their voice and body go where it wants to go. In most cases if people feel sufficiently safe to follow their impulses without restriction, very strange and powerful things may, and often do, happen.

Perfectly respectable, responsible people would, sometimes within minutes, move into a realm where they would be writhing, retching, screaming, frothing, and pounding like a scene out of bedlam itself. Bodies would lurch and thrust and flop about in prehistoric ways, sounds would emerge that would only otherwise be heard in newborn babies and torture chambers. What were these forces contained within us and why were they emerging now? Why when allowed to go inside and follow what they found, did these people become so explosive?

As we live today, we cannot eat, sleep, defecate, urinate, masturbate, expel gas, have (or even show signs of) sex, or even cry, laugh, or shout in accord with our natural personal rhythms or needs. Even mild expressions like sneezing, burping and coughing are often followed by “excuse me”, or “so sorry”.  Moaning, and groaning are all but disallowed. Spontaneous expressions of love, hate, joy, ecstasy, and sadness are similarly tamped down.

All of these natural expressions are shaped and severely limited by the social mores surrounding us. This control of our natural selves begins at birth and continues to be refined throughout our lives. We do not just naturally grow up. Instead we must “learn” to be a “grown-up”. Despite all the talk of “liberation” and the “sexual revolution” we remain very, very repressed and stifled creatures.

Despite what might be said of the possible necessities of such repression – especially in highly dense population settings such as most of us live in today, the net result of all this containment is usually a rather unhappy creature at odds with its own natural self – a creature that conceives of its own impulses, bodily functions, and feelings as “improper”,  “embarrassing”, “immoral”, “uncivilized”, and often plain “bad”.

Not surprisingly, people on the verge of deep feeling sometimes feel terrified they will “explode”. Prior to Primal Therapy even therapists would get very anxious if a patient began to show powerful “abreactions” and would often reach for their hypodermics or call the ambulance as their patients neared a “catastrophic breakdown”.

As we know from the daily news, growing numbers of people in our midst are walking time bombs. In fact, the increasing use of suicide bombs in “terrorist” attacks may reflect the need to “explode” from the unbearable containment the human animal has created for itself. Why the caging? Why the fear of self? Is there another way to be?

Oddly enough, our salvation is all around us. To regain sanity, wholeness, and a fair degree of inner peace we must humble ourselves. We must sit at the feet of those we have despised as inferior; who we have persecuted mercilessly for millions of years; we must look, really look, at the superiority of the other species around us and truly see them for the first time.

What we denigrate as “animals” are beings who are at peace with themselves. They are not afraid of their own bodies or their feelings. They do not live in perpetual fear of humiliation. They are also very much “in the present”. They do not spend the majority of the time living in regret over the past or endless fantasizing over the future. For the most part, they are in harmony with themselves and the world around them. We have lost all this and we desparately need to get it back. They should be our role models, but instead we reduce them to nothing and destroy them.

Our lives literally depend on this new perspective, and so do theirs. It is our division from, and consequent war upon the “animal” outside that has led to the war with the “unseemly”, resonant aspects of the “animal” within. The war against “the animal” within perpetuates, allows, and guarantees the war against “the animal” without. As long as we mindlessly kill “the animal” outside, we must kill “the animal” within and vice-versa in an endless reciprocal feedback loop.

It is time to stop.

It is time to stop being a sleepwalker with a knife.

It is time to wake up.

Vegan Manifesto 

An Axiom (mine, e.w.)

Our civilization has evolved to render us blind.

This evolution enables us as a species to do the most despicable things imaginable on unimaginable scales without having to think about it at all.

Beneath the thin tablecloth of civilization lies an ocean of agony.

On top of our tablecloths, in almost every home, lay victims; burnt, bleeding, and shredded, proudly on display. Evidence of an atrocity is right there in front of our eyes, yet we cannot see it at all.  This is surreal magic. How is this achieved?

We Homo sapiens produce the least self-sufficient offspring on the planet. Our offspring are dependent on their parents for a very long time. For parents to remain devoted for these long durations requires a large amount of empathy. For humans to act in the wholesale murderous ways we do, void of feeling, requires very powerful counteracting structures to be in place.

Architecture of the Blind

The components  

(Note: what I will describe in abbreviated form was never designed by anyone. Processes evolved to aid a cultural direction (meat eating in this case) just as they evolve in the natural world. Things necessarily adapt in the direction strong forces are moving. Countervailing tendencies eventually are eroded or are extinguished.)

1. Fear and terror at the beginning

An initial threat beginning at birth sets the stage for denial and dissociation.

In modern times birth has become an unnatural uphill battle against gravity and into the hands of the (usually) male stranger – “the deliverer”. Held upside down by the ankles by this strange man the message received by the infant is: “we may drop and kill you at any moment.”

This threat is underscored by slapping the infant, performing circumcision (without anesthetic), premature umbilical cutting, suctioning, weighing, measuring, testing, blood typing, bright lights, and often separating the newborn from the mother and then left alone, or alternatively placed in a roomful of other screaming babies.

The adult world is hostile and dangerous, that is the frightening first perception of the newborn. This may seem far-fetched but imagine any other mammal on the planet allowing their newborns to be treated in these ways by strangers (male strangers at that). We have been conditioned to believe all this is done for the good of our babies. Most of it is not. The newborn comes into our world with a core feeling of mortal endangerment.

2. Forced identification with the “animal”

After birth we are surrounded by “animals”, we are given soft, lovely stuffed animals to sleep next to us in our cribs, animals hang over our heads in mobiles, they decorate our wallpaper, sheets, blankets, and pajamas. Our earliest stories are of lovable animals who speak and think like us. We are made to identify with these animals – we share their fears, their dangers, their joys. And why not? Animals are also non-verbal, less cerebral, more feeling/body based, often smaller than adult humans, and at least, as depicted, very lovable.

 As we grow a bit older the stories take a more sinister turn. These sweet animals find themselves threatened. The Three Little Pigs are in danger of being devoured by the wolf and must make their houses more and more secure. Three Blind Mice are threatened by the farmer’s wife who tries to “cut off their tails with a carving knife”.

Then come the stories of children being threatened by thinly disguised parent substitutes. The motherly woman who offers Hansel and Gretel cookies then throws them into cages to fatten them before cooking them in her oven. Red Riding Hood’s grandma turns out to be a wolf (in disguise) that wants to eat her. Jack and The Beanstalk’s “giant” (isn’t an adult a giant from a child’s perspective?) who chases Jack and wants to eat him. Billy Goat Gruff and his siblings are confronted by the Troll who wants to eat them and on and on. The terror of being eaten by adults runs through these stories like a virulent river.

Unsubtle hints at endangerment to the young child come in many forms even in the lullabies we unthinkingly use to put our children to bed.

“Rock a bye baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, When the bough breaks, the baby will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Sweet dreams.

3.) The Compulsion to de-identify

About the time the child’s stories start to turn dark, the child has developed cognitively. What happens when this young child begins to recognize that what is to be eaten is the very thing he has learned to fully identify with? And who is serving this dish of death but the very parents who hold his/her whole life in their hands? This is the essence of a horror movie, where those you most love and trust turn out to be monsters.

What child can allow this into awareness? Almost all will immediately go into denial and repress this cataclysmic terror. To not do so would be to live in continuous emotionally catastrophic stress, or worse; remind these all-powerful murderous adults that you are kin to these victims and thereby possibly join their fate.

There is a powerful need to de-identify with both the animal and the state of infancy where this kinship was enshrined. About this time children frequently exhibit a compulsive savagery against small creatures. Me and my friends spent hours avidly cutting up caterpillars and torturing ants as young children.

We also taunted other children with “Crybaby, crybaby” and “Baby, baby, stick your head in gravy” (“gravy” can be seen as a possible pointer to the baby as meat.)

The repudiation of our “infantile” selves and any “animal” identification becomes pronounced. We renounce our panda pajamas, our rubber duckies, and once loved stuffed toys – now they embarrass (and threaten) us. We no longer want to in any way be considered “babies” let alone be equated with “animals”.

4. Language and new stories.

As we age our stories become centered on humans. “Animals” in these stories, when they exist at all, are clearly subservient, they are pets, or horses we own. We are given words to define them and told that we are “their masters”.  As we grow our language provides easier and better ways to distinguish ourselves from these “others”.  “They” devolve further and further; they become: “livestock”, “cattle” “heads of beef”, poultry, “cold cuts”, “steak”, “reflex and instinctive organisms,”  “live agricultural harvests”, etc. 

The word “Animal” is the greatest gift of language to human convenience and unconsciousness. This single word compresses all the individuals of each of the 9 million species of living beings of the planet into a single entity. All are subsumed into one trite idea (“they are not us”). The individual non-human being can now be more easily conceived with little, if any, thought, consideration, or feeling. The word “animal” is so large it is entirely empty. If I ask you to think of an “animal” what comes to mind? Perhaps a tiger, perhaps a turtle, maybe an elephant, maybe a cow. In fact any of 9 million different species can come to mind. Consequently the word can never be the equivalent of anything. It is a label covering something so vast and nebulous that the object becomes invisible. It has no real meaning. But is derogatory.

Every oppressed people struggles to find names for themselves to shed the ages of perceptions and connotations that are embedded in the words used to name them. “Indians” renamed themselves “Native Americans” and “First Nations” to remind us that they were the first people and individual Nations in North America. Definitions and branding are incredibly powerful because they are the very tools with which we perceive (or perhaps more aptly here – learn how not to perceive). The word “animal” is the most pernicious word ever created. It can also be considered the single most destructive invention of the human race.

5. Religion.

Religion serves as a strong pillar of the structure we are describing. Here we are given, as one of the very first events in the bible, our “Dominion” over every other creature. (This is the Old Testament, but each religion gives man his license to kill in its own way). In religion we may find that not only is it ok to kill these “others”, but to not do so (as in animal sacrifices) may be an affront to god.

Religion also gives us the notion of “a soul” that is only granted to the human (made in god’s image) not to “the beast”. It is this soul that makes the life of a human important and sacred and the creature, lacking a soul, becomes fair “game”.

6. Science

Despite many points of opposition in modern times, science carried forth the baton wielded by religion in a fairly smooth segue. Science brought religious attitudes re the non-human up to date. Descartes declared that reason and thinking (which presumably only humans possessed), was proof of the great divide – “I think therefore I am”. “Animals” were really just living “clockwork mechanisms” devoid of reason, souls, and therefore feelings. Any “screams” were just the “creaking of machinery”. Those who didn’t understand these “mature facts” were foolish, “sentimental”, “womanish” and in fact “childish”. As science progressed, its language and thought became more effective at masking non-human realities and its activities grew more compulsively horrific.

When I was a Pre-med student we were taught the greatest sin was “anthropomorphism” – the projection of “human” attributes such as feelings, or suffering onto our animal “subjects”. We learnt instead to describe such things as “stimulus response mechanisms” or better yet “SR mechanisms”. Screaming was reduced to “high decibel vocalization”. Putting acid on living frogs or subjecting them to electric shock were “procedures”.  We were armed with new words and tools to help us stand above the average lay person. We could blind, deafen, shock, batter, and electrify animals with impunity because we were the newly anointed priests of science. We were given pure white robes and new language.

These attitudes would be bad enough if they just accrued to scientists but like religion before it, its values spread out into the general consciousness and gave these ancient dominion-based ideas even greater credibility.

Under the auspices of people like B.F. Skinner, and John Watson founders of Behaviorism, words such as feelings were even outlawed from the field of psychology. Only what could be measured was important. In fact until very recently, any scientist who proposed to study “animal consciousness” would be ridiculed and unlikely to find work in any accredited institution. Science has become the new residence of modern “beliefs” and as such helps carry the torch that used to solely belong to religion.

7. Male vs. Female – Anima vs. Animus – Masculine vs. Feminine

The division of the sexes is another potent foundational structure that serves our blindness. The female has been derogated since the onset of hunting. Tainted by association with the “animal/infant” the burden of “nurturing” and “caring” became her domain. This is much despised by the de-animalized and de-babied male hunter/warrior. Feeling and sympathy may suit a mother but the callous indifference of the hunter/warrior was more admired. And this “hunter/warrior” had both the physical equipment and the emotional aptitude to enforce their dominance by the ability, training and willingness to kill.

In Western religion of course it was woman: Eve, who had congress with the animal/serpent, corrupted Adam, and led to our being cast out of Eden. It was she who caused “original sin” which each baby is born with. The baby is actually born “evil” and in need of redemption.

9. Education

Here we find the fine-tuning of our structure. “Be still”, “be quiet”, “obey”. These are the first things taught at school. If we didn’t know it before, we certainly know it now – adults have the power and will not hesitate to use it. We must learn to control our feelings and bodies to an even greater degree than before. “You can’t behave like a wild animal here.” The war against feelings and self – the subordination to authority “If you need to go to the bathroom, raise your hand and ask permission”. Running, jumping, screaming, shouting, and even talking is frequently disallowed. “You must learn to control your feelings”. “If you want to jump or run around you wait till recess.”

In North America the day begins with either “Oh Canada” (“we stand on guard for thee”) or the Star Spangled Banner (“the bombs bursting in air gave proof in the in the night that our flag was still there”) Here we learn the primacy of an abstraction – “our country” and how we may be called upon to die for it and how honorable that would be.

The sacrifice of our lives for the adult world had many precedents God gave his only begotten son, Abraham became the father of the Jewish, Moslem and Christian people by his willingness to kill his own son, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter to the gods in order to help win the battle against Troy.

The Result

For a terrified animal-identified infant, the realization that animals are being killed and eaten is a huge shock. That these beloved animals are being killed and eaten by their own parents who hold their own lives in their hands is a cataclysm requiring violent and immediate suppression.

The best way to deal with severe trauma is to cast it far away with the greatest of force. Denial, amnesia, compartmentalization, screen memories, numbness, and dissociation are all reactions which allow traumatized people to cope with otherwise overwhelming feelings. Aided and abetted by religion, tradition, science and folklore, the grisly reality gets shrouded in layers of obscuring veils. Blanketed by trauma, language, family traditions, religious entitlements, scientific and philosophical rationales, we become literally blind to what is right in front of us.

Triggered by reminders of mortal fear we go numb, we go blind, we stand in front of atrocities and we feel nothing. Because of our understandable resistance to being the victim of a monstrosity we violently and automatically shift alliance to the other side.

We really have become deformed as a result of taking the meat-eating path. We have become deranged and this has lain unseen for too long.

The consequences for the human have been immense, the consequences for the non-human have been much worse.

Vegan Manifesto (Note: I will almost always use quotation marks around the word “animal” because the word only exists to differentiate us from all the rest of living beings, there has never been “an animal” in the entire history of the world.)

We come across an “animal” in the country and we stop and look, we would like to get closer – if it will let us. We look at “animals” on the web – adorable cat videos, irresistible puppies, heartwarming mixed species friendships, etc. We look at photos of “animals”, watch documentaries, decorate calendars and our children’s clothing and walls, books, we go to zoos, spend thousands of dollars on photo wildlife safaris, we collectively spend billions on our millions of pets.

We have been looking at “animals” for a long time – a very, very long time. Anthropologist Pat Shippman, in her book The Animal Connection, observes that in all of cave art , the overwhelming feature, with by far the greatest detail and prominence is the “animal”. The “animal” walks by us, and we stare.

We, homo sapiens, live outside of real time; instead, we spend our entire existence in an imaginary time. Part of our time is spent contemplating the past, the rest, thinking about the future. Gurus tell us to “Be here now”, “live in the present” but unless we are zen masters this is unlikely. We spend our lives in the non-existent future and past but seldom in the actual present.

We have removed ourselves almost completely from the real, ongoing world. We live in the map we have created of the world, but are no longer in that world. We have become phenomenally impoverished. With all our riches and accomplishments as a species, we are locked out of the real world. We live in the jail of our constructed reality. It is life imprisonment. We look out from our prisons at the “animal” still living fully in the real world and dimly sense what we have lost. The “animal” exists almost entirely in the present, while we almost never do. The “animal” is everything we have cast aside from ourselves, and what unconsciously we yearn to return to.  This deep ambivalence can be seen across history. We have variously made the animal into gods, into devils; we have worshipped them, denigrated them, slaughtered them by the billions, tortured them, and lovingly taken them into our houses and hearts. We are desperate to be close to them and at the same time murderously reject them. This is identical to the way we relate to the “animal within”. We despise it: “He ‘acts like an animal’, and we admire it: “She moves with the grace of an animal”,  “He has the heart of a lion”

This ambivalence causes us to entwine our beloved children with stuffed animals, animal clothing, cartoons, and stories then serve them dead animals on their plates.  

As a species we are crazy and we are growing crazier.