Do you believe one day animal husbandry will be seen as slavery is viewed today?!
Now that it is illegal, & though it still happens in various forms to a limited degree, it is widely accepted as an unenlightened social ill.
It may be hard to conceive that things will change on a massive enough scale to trip a cultural transformation but in countries like India where 45% of the population does not eat meat and only 30% eat it regularly this phenomenon did not happen over night but over millennium of spiritual cultivation and social encouragement.
Now that we are in the information age ethical philosophies and spiritual world views can be more easily shared and mulled over. A sincere seeker of truth will take the best from all the world views.
I know my transformation to a vegan lifestyle was a long and at times a resistant one. If one individual representing the micro can change why can't the majority of the world representing the macro change?
Answers: At one point in history, though not everyone liked it, slavery was on whole a common and accepted practice.
Now that it is illegal, & though it still happens in various forms to a limited degree, it is widely accepted as an unenlightened social ill.
It may be hard to conceive that things will change on a massive enough scale to trip a cultural transformation but in countries like India where 45% of the population does not eat meat and only 30% eat it regularly this phenomenon did not happen over night but over millennium of spiritual cultivation and social encouragement.
Now that we are in the information age ethical philosophies and spiritual world views can be more easily shared and mulled over. A sincere seeker of truth will take the best from all the world views.
I know my transformation to a vegan lifestyle was a long and at times a resistant one. If one individual representing the micro can change why can't the majority of the world representing the macro change?
I think it is possible for the human race to reach that moral stand a century or two from now. But as of now we are too elitist and specie-st as a whole. In order to view human slavery and non-human animal slavery the same you have to view the lives of other species with equal importance to your own.
That's called "Eco-feminism". As you can see from some of the other answers most are unable to conceive of that concept. Eric Markus made the correlation that you're making in "Meat Market" and I thought it made a lot of sense.
He pointed out that one reason blacks were able to be emancipated was due to the fact that the abolitionists didn't argue that blacks were equal to whites. They only argued that it was inhumane to enslave. Civil rights and black suffrage came later. I think it is the same with animal rights.
First you have to get everyone on board with the idea that is sense-less to breed and kill. Then we can look back on it and see how barbaric and morally unconscious we've been as a human race. More than likely though, our vegetarian descendants will have to make that happen.
Also, slavery was an issue of economic unfairness to the North. The Federal Gov. was becoming concerned about the growing Plutocracy of Southern Planter culture. So you see it was not all about humanitarianism. Mother Nature will probably give our human race a kick in the boot and compel us to all go Vegetarian for selfish reasons like avoiding HN51,
and Bovine diseases. For some reason it takes more than morallity to motivate a huge population to do the right thing.
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