I have just finished reading this passionately written book and as a Buddhist practitioner and animal lover it has had a huge impact on me, making me want to adopt a vegan rather than just a vegetarian diet. (It has also inspired me to want to set up a self-help vegan group in Rome, where I live, in order to promote the values of veganism - such is the power of the book to inform and motivate). I was as usual horrified to read yet more evidence of the cruelty inflicted on sentient beings in order to satisfy our appetites, but what I also found upsetting in the book was the discovery that many Buddhists use technical loopholes to justify meat-eating. Even more puzzling was reading about the Dalai Lama's attitude to meat-eating and his apparently contradictory, if not indeed hypocritical statements on the issue. Norm Phelp's insistence that adopting a compassionate treatment of animals is not about us, but about the suffering of other beings was very helpful, as it underlined the fact that Buddhist ethics is first and foremost about relieving the suffering of others, and not about the psychological discomfort that may be involved in changing some of our entrenched eating habits. That said, I have to say that at times I felt that his tone was a bit strident, bordering on the abusive, but the more I thought about it the more I could understand the vast suffering and indignation he must have felt on exploring this silent holocaust, and wondered if indeed a strongly critical voice was not in this case appropriate in order to wake us up to the horrors of industrial animal farming, and the double standards of many Buddhists. After all, if we Buddhists are still shilly-shallying about whether or not to eat meat butchered from terrified animals confined to concentration camps, or drink milk stolen from calves, how on earth can we expect others who have not had the great fortune to be introduced to the Dharma show sensitivity to the plight of our fellow sentient beings? What sort of example are we setting? And if we still continue to eat meat, can we at least be honest with ourselves and admit that we are doing so out of wilfull ignorance and craving, rather than trying to find justification for our cruelty in the dubious example of others or in legal technicalities? That way, we at least only break the first precept (not killing) and the second precepts( taking the not freely given - animals have no choice when we steal their flesh and milk) and not the fourth one as well ( being dishonest in our speech)! Plus there is a better chance that we may come round to abandoning our cravings for food produced at the expense of billions of suffering beings, if we can at least be aware that this is what we are struggling against.
Thank you, Norm, for such an eye-opening account of the horrors of meat production, and the dangers of self-serving arguments promoted by a weak interpretation of Buddhist ethics.
