I Just Woke Up

I just woke up to my consumption habits. I am awake, finally, to the impact I have on this planet. It’s taken me a long time to reach this state of awareness. Up until this point in my life I’ve been sleepwalking - or so it seems.

Not so long ago I discovered a groundbreaking truth in my own feeble existence. I love life. I love life so much I don’t want to kill it. I don’t want to eat animals anymore. I don’t want to contribute to the mass murder that’s going on in the name of commerce and evolution and development.

Instead I am compelled to raise awareness to the effects modern-day meat consumption is really having on the world we live in. I don’t need to travel to the Far East to make my point. No, I can sit behind my computer and write about the unscrupulous behaviour that is going on right on my doorstep. Animal factories.

Ironically enough it was a documentary on CNN in China that first fueled this awakening. I saw cats and rabbits and dogs and beautiful wild animals all starving and squashed together in tiny cages where, half dead and desperate, they were being sold for food at an open-air market. For the next week my dreams were full of pitiful cries of pain and torment. I was shocked. I cried and wept. Yet still I did nothing. I felt so helpless. Instead I turned my head and tried to forget.

But I couldn’t forget the imprint of pain that seared my soul. Life. This isn’t how life is supposed to be. Every animal on this planet has the right to experience the beauty of life. Respect. Where is the respect for life when we contain it and torture it, ignore the pain we inflict in the name of nourishment. Humans get nourishment enough without killing so many animals.

We don’t need to eat so much meat. We certainly don’t need to eat so much cheap meat. Instead of consuming vast amounts of cheap, tortured animals we could easily eat less at no major cost to our current lifestyle. If everybody chose to eat one less portion of meat a week and were prepared to pay one 7th of the price more for the rest, how many animals would be saved from the factory farms? How many would have to close down?

If everybody made a conscious effort to eat organic meat, how many animals

would be spared a life of misery and torture?

I appreciate we all have to die. I appreciate that many people don’t want to stop eating meat. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the fact that most people don’t think further than the shelf on which the meat sits, don’t have a clue about the cruel practices involved. I know they don’t because I didn’t either. But now I do.

In fact, I can’t think of anything else these days. I’m shocked at the bubble of ignorance I was living in. But now I’m awake and my conscience has been pricked, it’s time to focus on the solutions.

Life is a gift. It’s time to respect this gift for myself and for every other living creature on this planet.

I will make a difference.

I Just Woke Up