Beef burgers, but not mouse burgers?

Have you ever wondered why you might drink cow's milk, but not pig's milk?

And have you ever wondered why you haven't wondered?

I never wondered about these things until I had a shocking experience that changed my life forever.

Let me explain:

In attempt to understand what had happened to me, I spent years conducting research,

which led to a fascinating discovery.

What I discovered transformed my worldview, my health, and my happiness, so that today,

at 49, I feel better than I did when I was half my age.

To help you understand what happened to me, I'd like you to Imagine you are a guest at a dinner party,

enjoying a delicious beef stew,

and your food is so delicious that you ask your host for the recipe.

“The secret,” she replies, “is in the meat.

You need to use three pounds of well seasoned...

golden retriever."

Now, take a moment to reflect on your thoughts and feelings.

Chances are, even though the meat itself didn't change at all, your experience of it changed dramatically.

So, what happened to cause you to have such a strong reaction?

That's the question I began asking 25 years ago, after I had a similar experience. Well, sort of.

Like many people, I grew up with a dog who I loved, and I also grew up eating meat.

And I never thought about how strange it was that while I would never want to eat my dog,

I regularly ate the flesh and eggs and dairy of animals who were not terribly different than my dog

– they, too, had feelings, and lifes that mattered to them.

I just never thought about why I ate some animals, but not others.

I never thought about the inconsistencies in my attitudes and behaviors toward animals,

because when I was eating meat, eggs, and dairy, I didn't actually think I was eating animals.

Of course, I knew on some level that these products came from individuals who had once been alive;

I had that “knowing without knowing”.

But on another level I just didn't make the connection.

It wasn't until I wound up hospitalized after eating bacteria-infested beef,

that I had a major paradigm shift.

After I got sick, just the thought of eating beef disgusted me.

In fact, all meat seemed disgusting.

And suddenly, I saw meat not as food, but as dead animals.

Beef stew seemed no different than golden retriever stew.

And as I looked at the world with new eyes, I saw animals' body parts everywhere I turned:

lining grocery store shelves, filling trucks bound for the market, spilling off lunch trays,

packed in delicatessen freezers.

And people everywhere, rational, caring people like myself,

were putting these animals' bodies into their mouths as though nothing at all were wrong.

I had to understand how I could have gone through my entire life being blind to what was right in front of me,

and why nobody I talked to about this was willing to hear what I had to say.

It wasn't until two decades later,

after I had completed my doctoral research on the psychology of eating meat,

that I had the answer.

And this is what I discovered.

It turns out, that most of us eat animals not because we need to, or even because we truly wish to,

but because we have been conditioned to, by a widespread, destructive belief system

that operates outside our awareness and therefore without our conscious consent.

We often assume that only vegans and vegetarians bring their beliefs to the dinner table.

But the only reason many of us eat cows but not dogs, for example,

is because we do have a belief system when it comes to eating animals.

When eating animals is not a necessity -- which is the case for many people in the world today

then it is a choice.

And choices always stem from beliefs.

So what my research uncovered is that there is an invisible belief system

that conditions us to eat certain animals.

And I named that system carnism.

Carnism is universal; in meat-eating cultures around the world,

people typically classify only a tiny handful of animals, out of millions of possible species,

as edible.

All the rest are classified as inedible and disgusting.

So even though the type of species consumed changes from culture to culture,

members of all cultures tend to find their own choices

to be rational and the choices of other cultures to be disgusting and often even offensive.

Carnism is like a vast fog that surrounds, saturates, and shrouds our world.

And carnism is a violent system:

meat cannot be procured without violence, and egg and dairy production cause extensive harm to animals

In fact, today, the egg and dairy industries are arguably the most brutal of all carnistic industries.

And violent systems such as carnism keep themselves alive by using defense mechanisms

so that rational, humane people participate in

irrational, inhumane practices without fully realizing what they are doing.

These defenses hide the truth about animal agriculture and distort what little we are able to see,

so that we support a system we would likely otherwise find deeply offensive.

The primary defense of carnism is denial.

Carnism denies the truth by making it invisible.

One way carnism remains invisible is by remaining unnamed,

so eating animals appears to be a given, rather than a choice.

Another way carnism remains invisible is by keeping its victims out of sight

and therefore conveniently out of public consciousness.

But although we don't see the inner worlds of farmed animals,

these individuals are in fact sentient, conscious beings.

For example, pigs are at least as intelligent as three-year-old humans.

Cows develop deep and lasting bonds with their family and friends;

for instance, they may cry and keen for weeks when their babies are forcibly taken from them.

Chickens are able to distinguish between 100 different faces of members of their species,

and they have 30 different calls to signal types of threats.

And scientists have demonstrated that certain fish and crustaceans have intelligence and pain receptors,

such that in some places in the world it is now illegal to keep fish in small bowls or to boil lobsters alive.

And although we don't see the factories in which animals are turned into food,

these so-called farms produce approximately 98 per cent of the meat, eggs, and dairy we eat.

In fact 124,000 farmed animals are slaughtered globally not every day, or even every hour,

but every, single, minute.

But think about it: how many of these animals have you seen?

Ultimately, hiding the truth about meat, egg, and dairy production from us

is what carnism most depends on.

So becoming aware of this truth is essential to freeing ourselves from the system.

So, I am going to show a two-minute video of animal factories.

Now I know this kind of imagery can be difficult to see,

but I encourage you to watch,

because I believe the empowerment that awareness ultimately brings, will be well worth your brief discomfort

and this is feedback I have gotten from thousands of people

who have been willing to see through the fog of carnism.

Piglets are castrated by workers who cut into their skin and rip out their testicles.

Next, the workers chop off their tail.

Once pigs have reached market weight they are send to slaughter.

At the slaughterhouse pigs are hung upside down and have their throat slit.

Inproper stunning condemnes many pigs to having their throats slit while they are fully conscious and suffering.

Because male chicks don't ley eggs and do not grow quickly enough to be raised profitably enough for meat,

they are killed within hours after hatching.

The Females have it even worse.

Workers use a hot blade or laser to remove part of the chick's beaks.

At the slaughter plant the birds are dumped from their crates,

then roughly snapped upside down into moving shackles by their fragile legs.

They are then pulled across a blade which slices their throats causing blood to pour from their necks.

Calves on dairy farms are dragged away from their mothers and violently killed.

The majority of today's dairy cows are confined on factory farms.

Workers subject young cows to painful mutilations and amputations.

Unreliable stunning practices at the slaughterhouse condemn many cattle to having their throats cut

and their limbs hacked off while still alive and conscious.

Massive trolling nets indiscriminately drag hundreds of tons of fish and other animals along the ocean floor.

They are then tossed on board where the surviving fish either suffocate or are crushed to death.

Thank you. I know it's not easy to see that. Fortunately for us, the hard part's over.

In fact, thanks to so many people like you, who have been willing to see the painful truths about carnism,

the meat, egg, and dairy industries have begun to be weakened.

So animal agribusinesses have scrambled to restore their profit margins

by assuring us that we can eat animals who are happy to be our food,

that we can eat so-called humane or “bio” meat, eggs, and dairy.

However, most “humanely” raised animals live in misery, much as their “inhumanely” raised counterparts do,

and all farmed animals ultimately end up in the very same place.

And humane meat is a concept so absurd as to be an insult to any consumer

who pauses to reflect on his or her choices.

For instance, most of us would consider it cruel to kill a happy,

healthy golden retriever simply because people like the way her legs taste,

yet when the very same thing is done to other animals we are expected to believe that it's humane.

And carnism hides the truth about not only the nonhuman victims of carnism,

but also about the human victims of carnism:

us.

An animal-based diet, which is what carnism conditions us to follow,

has been linked with some of the most prevalent and deadly diseases in the world today,

while a plant-based or vegan diet,

which is what carnism conditions us to resist,

has been shown to prevent and reverse disease,

as well as to optimize health and enhance athletic performance.

And, carnism conditions us to block our awareness and our empathy,

qualities that are vital to our own wellbeing and to the wellbeing of our world.

Another defense is justification.

Carnism teaches us to justify eating animals by teaching us to believe that the myths of meat,

eggs, and dairy are the facts of meat, eggs, and dairy.

In other words, carnism teaches us to believe in the 3 Ns of Justification:

eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary.

And of course, we've heard this all before:

slavery is normal, natural, and necessary,

Male dominance is normal, natural, and necessary,

heterosexual supremacy is normal, natural, and necessary.

And the myths of carnism are institutionalized:

they are supported and promoted by all major social institutions,

which in turn transmit them to us.

So carnistic bias is embedded within the very foundations of society.

And when we are born into an institutionalized system such as carnism, we internalize it.

We take into ourselves both the myths and the products of carnism.

Inside us, carnism creates a fog in our minds, distorting our perceptions of meat, eggs, dairy,

and the animals we eat.

For example, carnism teaches us to place animals in rigid categories in our minds,

and therefore in our hearts.

And carnism teaches us to see farmed animals as objects -- as things, rather than beings.

And carnism teaches us to see farmed animals as abstractions,

as lacking any individuality or personality of their own:

a pig is a pig, and all pigs are the same.

But the fact that carnism needs to use such elaborate defense mechanisms is actually good news.

It shows the true vulnerability of the system.

Think about it: we care about animals, we care about justice, and we care about the truth.

And carnism depends on our not caring, and the system is built on deception.

So carnism needs us to do its job for it,

to ignore the truth and to resist the very thing that would set us free:

awareness.

Awareness is the light that shines through the fog of carnism,

illuminating the dark truths the system works so hard to hide from us.

Awareness cuts through the cloudy haze in our minds,

dispelling the shadow that's been cast on our hearts and releasing the natural glow of our empathy.

Awareness is the greatest threat to carnism, because with awareness,

we can make choices that reflect what we authentically think and feel,

rather than what we have been taught to think and feel.

We can make our choices freely.

Without awareness, there is no free choice.

And while it's easy to feel that the problem is so big that our individual efforts won't make a difference,

or that the system will never change,

the truth is that every choice we make does make a difference,

to others, and to ourselves.

And history shows us, again and again, that awareness opens the door to social transformation.

When people of integrity clear their vision, they demand change.

And powerful change is happening right now, around the world,

as more and more people are opening their minds and saying no to carnism.

The vegan movement, which is the counterpoint to carnism,

is one of the fastest-growing social justice movements in the world today.

Carnism, of course, is fighting back, using misinformation, disinformation,