escape from the killingway

In an online vegan group a dynamic discussion-debate arose challenging that vegan thinking is crudely shallow and misbegotten, steeped in popularized consumerist culture, so hypocritical that it falls short, so short that a strong animal advocate rejects donning the word as it is not redeemable, being deeply flawed from the very origins of its conception. Robustly astute counterpoints ensued, but the conversation haunts me, mainly because I do see how mainstream vegans overlook and excuse their needless harm to wildlife suffering and dying via their embrace of plant agriculture, this disastrous expanding global project of ‘progress’, and technocratic, consumeristic and speciesist supremacy. Yet I resist giving up my fight against vegan’s quandaries any more than I give up my fight against this globalized society’s earth-slaughtering lifeway. Motivated by the spirit of ‘vegan’, I sense a calling to continue pushing it toward its deeper essence. It’s the same resistance, same calling I sensed when I was two years old refusing to eat fish because I knew they were animals. It’s the same resistance many young children, pre-indoctrination, enact when they put their bodies on the line to protect and cry out against enculturated adults killing other animals to eat them. Vegan’s first focus on ending exploitation of animals as food is grounded in a visceral human primate repulsion to both inflicting suffering upon other animals and putting their corpse in one’s mouth. That is the starting point. That vegan stands strong within this kill culture is peremptory to ending it. Civilization’s infrastructures have reeked complex conundrums not immediately solvable by anyone, vegan or otherwise. But vegan and those ensnared in predatory culture are not to blame. Vegan’s primal cry is a primary catalyst to escaping the killingway, even when so many of us get lost in the haze of killing’s confusions.