Welcome

I began my journey as an ethical vegan in the summer of 2016. I had just returned from South-East Asia and having witnessed the ways which animals were treated and killed in the food markets, decided to become vegetarian until I could be sure that we didn’t treat them same way in Australia. After learning more about factory farming and the environmental impact of animal agriculture in my own country, I became vegan.

I joined an animal advocacy group and immediately had myself marked as the ‘the other’. I was suddenly among the ones that the media was talking about when they talked about activists. I was the one who made my family uncomfortable in conversations about food. I was among the ones the government changed laws to silence.

I had hoped my place in an advocacy group would afford me a safe space. Within my group I was safe, but among advocates what I found was more division, more polarisation. It is difficult to work with other animal groups as each has their own agenda and campaigns and don’t seem to want to let each other in for fear to losing control of the narrative. The people working within the groups each think the others are not pushing hard enough for change and criticise each other individually for not being vegan enough. Each group seems to simultaneously push their own agenda while also holding back to see what other groups might do, fearing the initial criticism of presenting a dividing issue to the public.

In an effort to prove that their task is most difficult, most animal groups have intense and complicated websites offering a multitude of reasons to suggest that most people are not ethical enough and that they need to find the right reasons to change their behaviour. Their online navigation menus require multi-fingered scrolling to reveal all options and their social media pages follow a narrative more like reading a ‘choose your own adventure’ book, page after page in sequential order, without following the advised instructions. And they scroll through torturous image after image of the cruelty humans perform on animals.

Many animal advocates will tell you that there is a hard line between those who care about animals and those who don’t. But this misnomer is similar to the ‘hard line’ we draw between an animal and a plant, or between those who are and aren’t sentient. The line is not so clear when we explore the finer details: we still cannot agree on where the line between an animal and a plant is; we still cannot agree on a definitive definition of sentient; and it’s not possible to agree that if you are not vegan, you don’t care about animals.

Vegans will criticise environmentalists for not being vegan. Environmentalists will criticise human rights advocates for not caring enough about the environment. Human rights advocates will criticise vegans for caring more about animals than about other people. The more groups you throw into the circle the more criticism each receives and the harder it is to reach the ‘opposing’ group. We are not only polarised politically, but also ethically.

When we have so much to care about, how do we find the time to care about everything? I have dedicated the past five years of my personal and professional life just to the narrow field of animals in experimentation, and I cannot keep up. How could we expect anyone else to? The reason we find our way to brief outrages over popular campaigns is that we only have the time to post one thing on social media at a time before the next thing grabs our attention, and we are outraged again. We cannot possibly dedicate any more time to any issue than we already are. There are simply too many things we need to care about.

We need to take care of ourselves first.

We hope you find Easy For Animals a valuable resource in educating and communicating the ways in which humans treat animals.

This week’s action:

We hope you find Easy For Animals as a valuable resource in educating and communicating the ways in which humans treat animals. Each webpage and post will only take #thenextsixtyseconds to read. Each post will cover a part of an issue which will slowly construct a better and simpler understanding of some complex issues. If you're new to animal issues, or even if you are a seasoned campaigner, we hope you now understand why these issues need to be made simpler.

Welcome!

If you find these issues confronting and need someone to talk to, The Ethics Centre in Australia has a wonderful service, Ethi-call, which is a free helpline service offering decision-making support from trained ethics counsellors.