This morning I was looking at my Facebook news feed and saw the most adorable photograph of my dear cousin’s beautiful three-year-old daughter. I’ll call her “Susan”, as my cousin really does not want her daughter referenced by name in this piece. Susan is the kind of child that is so beautiful that people stop and stare. She has these puppy dog eyes and an inquisitive nature that is readily apparent through every expression of her cherubic face. In the photographs, Susan was out shopping with her mother who is a bit of a fashionista. The caption under the photo was that she looked “too cool with her leather jacket and $2,000 Celine bag.”
Children love their companion animals like they love their other family members.
For some reason, the photo and caption combination irked me all the way through my 5K run this morning. Then it finally hit me why it bothered me so much. It wasn’t just because this sweet little girl was unknowingly wearing the skin of another sentient being as a jacket. It wasn’t even because the cow skin jacket and pig skin bag- objects borne of oppression- are being used as status symbols of wealth and luxury, although those are certainly disturbing factors in and of themselves. What bothered me was that I know how much Susan loves her family’s two companion animal dogs. Susan tells people that they are her brothers, and she really believes this. I wondered what Susan would think of these items if she knew that the animals whose skin she was wearing were just as feeling, self-aware, loving and smart as her ‘brothers’. How would she react if she knew how horrifically the cow and the pig were treated in their short miserable lives? Would she be okay even touching these items of “clothing”? Or, would it disgust her and make her scream and cry because of her inherent compassion towards and love for all animals that most all children have? I think we all know how that hypothetical scenario would play out.
A strong feeling of despair came over me as I absorbed and processed the image of this photo. Witnessing this early indoctrination into the cognitive dissonance necessary to simultaneously use and love nonhuman animals left me feeling depressed. As I pondered this early process of desensitization from the cruelty that we as a society impose on nonhuman animals it hit me: herein lies an enormous opportunity. If we really want to wake people up on a massive scale to the truth about how humans exploit animals, we would be far more effective and reach a greater number of people in a shorter amount of time if we targeted our message to children rather than jaded, defensive, entrenched adults.
As a gay man, I am uniquely sensitive to the idea of “targeting children”. There have been decades of vicious homophobic propaganda that, “The gays are coming for your children.” Of course this is utter nonsense. Painting LGBT people as sexual predators against children is a long-held propaganda/ scare tactic that homophobes employ in societies around the world. Not just here in United States but also in places like Russia and Uganda where they are passing laws allowing discrimination and violence against gay people based in large part on these vicious lies. In spite of this, the LGBT community and the marriage equality movement have targeted a younger generation in a nonsexual way. We have been extremely effective in appealing to their sense of fairness and enlisting them in our struggle for full social equality. As a new generation of younger, LGBT-supporting/ marriage-equality supporting people are now adults of voting age, they are radically influencing the politics towards LGBT people in our nation. Because we appealed to these folks when they were younger children and exposed them to images and ideas that all of us, gay or straight, want the same things and deserve the same rights and privileges, this generational shift is now happening at exponential and unprecedented rates within all civil rights movements in modern history.
I grew up in a fundamentalist religious community of faith. I know very well that the indoctrination begins at a preconscious age. Songs, books, movies, holiday observances, family rituals and gatherings all serve to reinforce a faith and religious belief system before an individual is able to discern for himself whether or not this something he actually believes. As far as religious communities, the modern Orthodox Jewish community that I grew up in is relatively benign compared to some of the more right wing, conservative, fire-and-brimstone evangelical Christian faiths that are sweeping America in the 21st-century. Make no mistake, they are indoctrinating their children into their hate-filled, fear-based belief systems at ages far younger than little Susan. There is a double standard in our culture and religious people and communities of faith get a pass on behavior that the rest of us don’t enjoy. Nobody bats and eye when children are being indoctrinated into religious observance at a preconscious age but if we attempt to share ideas about justice, love and equality for all with young children, people get very up in arms about our attempt to “brainwash” their children.
It took the LGBT community a very long time to come around on this issue and realize that our only hope for a better future was starting with the children of today. We are finally reaping the benefits of the more enlightened and progressive generation of young adults because of that investment we made 20 and 30 years ago. The time has come for those of us in the animal-rights and vegan advocacy communities to start doing the same thing. We need to take a page out of the LGBT rights movement’s playbook and confront this systematic indoctrination and desensitization of young children into a confused, “morally schizophrenic” and speciesist relationship with non-human individuals before they get lost in this brainwashing and forget who they really are. We ought to be bringing our protests to places children frequent; outside zoos, circuses, safari parks and Seaworld. We need to stand outside children’s clothing stores with the same disturbing images of the origins of leather, fur, wool and down. We need to bring about situations wherein children ask their parents why we are protesting to help pierce the silence their parents would otherwise keep on these subjects. We also need to be conscious of the language that we use with children so as to be totally clear about the “foods” they are fed. We ought to stop calling them “hamburgers” and call them “ground up cow burgers”. “Chicken nuggets” should be referred to as “breaded ground up chicken chunks”. Terms like “Ham” and “bacon” would be more accurately called “dead pig parts”.
I’m not naïve and I have no illusion that the omnivore parents of these children are going to be okay with this. Parents always want to try and hold onto a sense of “innocence” for their children as long as possible, before the children grow up and become wise to the knowledge that the world is less kind, loving and sweet than their parents taught them. I mean, what parent would want you to walk up to their young child and shatter the myth of the tooth fairy? Who would want their young child to be told “there is no Santa Claus”? Of course, nobody wants that. Still, that day inevitably comes. Fortunately there are no dire consequences for a child growing up and learning that those were just fables. But waiting to explain to them the truth about the animals they’ve been eating has enormous consequences. Delaying this truth gives them more time to become habituated to animal consumption and exploitation, and generally, makes it harder for them to stop engaging in that learned, unconscious, unthinking, unwitting behavior. Appealing to children and reaching them before the cognitive dissonance about animal use and exploitation sets in is critical and makes all the difference. If we can reach the young Susan’s of the world before they learn to be selective in their compassion towards only some animals, then we can bring up a new generation of people who will support non-human rights, reject humanity’s cruel, exploitative and barbaric past, and live vegan.
