Jain Digest 1990 11

Author(s): Federation of JAINA
Publisher: USA Federation of JAINA

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the animal. In other words, it is very inefficient to feed plants to animals then eat the animals rather than eat a smaller number of plants to live. (This inefficiency is going to be the reason that this country collapses since 1/3 of our entire country's resources go to just the production of livestock and dairy). Secondly, anyone who's ever taken biology or botany or zoology knows the vast difference between mammalian physiology and any plant. The plan has no nervous system, no brain, no mechanism for fighting or flight from painful stimuli. If you've ever been to a slaughter house to say that corn or oats could undergo the terror that the pigs and cattle do is so stupid it's not even laughable. The reason people eat meat is that they have been blinded in an ethical sense. In a manner of speaking, just like someone who is visually blind, people who eat meat actually cannot see in a moral sense what is happening to animals who are raised for slaughter. These people have become ethically blind. The cure to this blindness is two fold.
First, visit a slaughter house first hand. This may not be easy since some like Kahn's does not give tours since it is too slippery and if a visitor falls and get hurt, Kahn's might get sued.
Secondly, if you can't visit a slaughter house, read Diet For A New America by John Robbins. If you are the slightest bit concerned with the environment, you might be a vegetarian or all your other efforts to conserve fossil fuels, decrease water pollution, save forests, cut down on deseritification, are a joke since meat and dairy production use up more resources and water more trees, water and fuel than anything
else.
The thing that brought me back to being a vegetarian was a book written by Philip Kapleau (author of The Pillars of Zen and Zen, Dawn In the West) on the conditions of slaughter houses. Any person concerned about spiritual matters even in the most casual way could not justify our treating our fellow creatures the way we do in the slaughter houses. It is gruesome and revolting work. I know people who have worked in those places and it's 10 times worse to see what is going on than to read about it. I refused to pay someone else to do the dirty work that I wouldn't do personally.
I became vegan in 1984 after reading Jon Wyne Tyson's book, Food For A Future, and his chapter on the dairy industry. They are the basis of the veal industry. A description of the veal industry is beyond the scope of this article but let it suffice to say that some believe it is the cruelest of all animal abuse industries.
I would hope that other cultures will learn if they can before it's too late from this country's mistakes when it comes to misguided agricultural practices. There is a tremendous wealth this country has in terms of agricultural resources. But due to the acceptance of the propaganda of the cattle and
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dairy industry, too many people have been guided down a path of deception believing it's good to eat meat. We're losing our top soil at a rate that will lead to food shortages within the lifetimes of some people reading this article. Maybe if enough people pay attention to Diet For A New America, that won't happen but each of us must do our part.
Marching for Animal Rights
By Narendra Sheth, SanDiego, California
Th
his summer there were several Marches for the rights of animals. Many people all over the world have become irritated at the cruelty being extended to animals in laboratories. They are getting impatient because governments and churches are not doing anything about it. Many organizations planned to bring this to the attention of masses and governments in peaceful manners. Hundreds of thousands of people went to join these Marches.
On June 10, there was a March in Washington, D.C. In the twenties, there were Marches for Women's Rights. In the sixties, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a historic March for the rights of the blacks. Now the time came for the rights of animals. Nearly 24,000 people from all over the country showed up. The regulations set by the beaurocrats have no regard for the speechless, helpless monkeys, rabbits and other animals. The aim of the March was to loosen or eliminate these regulations, so that unnecessry or useless product testing on millions of animals can be eliminated.
Another March was known as "Walk to Rome", with two aims. In the first place, an attempt through petition to Pope John Paul II to reform the long-standing Catholic doctrine that animals have no souls. The second objective, that the Pope proclaim that soulfulness - and the possession of rights which depend upon the having of a soul - is shared by all the species; and that it is duty of all the faithful to honor all the creatures, doing unto them only that which we would have done unto us; and that it is God's will. The Walk is mostly an imitation of the journeys of Saint Francis, Gandhi, and King. Those Marches had provided a vehicle for new truth in the spirit of Ahimsa.
The Marchers said that "We have drawn a line dividing the universe into artificial halves. On this side is us - the humans - so we are all that is valuable; on the other side is everything that is not human, that is, objects, THINGS that we may exploit or abuse at will. The Nazis justified what they did to the Jews by proclaiming them less than human. The slave traders herded men, women, and children into the holds of ships, and sold them at auctions, because they told themselves that it was a fine and natural thing to make a profit from those who were not quite human. The govern
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