The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

276 / the world peace diet
(and perhaps somewhat ashamed?) by the monkeys’ altruism. Though
it is our true nature, one wonders if we humans would be so noble.
In addition to having the capacity for empathy, animals have the
capacity to suffer psychologically, and often exhibit stereotypic behavior
when they are forced into mental illness by our cruel treatment of
them. The extreme confinement of animals used for food, fur, research,
and entertainment causes such deep damage to their emotional and
physical health that they repeat the same behaviors continuously, something
they never do in the wild. Chimpanzees and pigs will bang their
heads for hours against the metal bars of their cages, elephants will constantly
sway their heads and lift their feet, and foxes confined in
cramped cages in fur farms will circle manically and sway pathetically,
driven insane by the impossibility of fulfilling their natural purposes.
Like these animals, we humans may repeat stereotypic behaviors when
we become deranged and lose our connection with the purpose we were
born to fulfill.
It’s illustrative to watch how the attributes we have proclaimed
make us unique, such as using tools, making art, experiencing “higher”
emotions, having a sense of the ludicrous, using language, and so forth,
have all collapsed under the evidence as we get to know animals better.
Of course, we have certain unique attributes and abilities. Every species
has certain unique attributes and abilities. Eating animals makes us so
subconsciously nervous that we neurotically overemphasize our uniqueness
and our separateness from them. This allows us to exclude them
from our circle of concern.
Besides sharing a common home on this beautiful planet here in
outer space, animals share with us the vulnerability of mortality and all
that entails. It is problematic to determine whether our lives as humans
have actually improved over the centuries and millennia, for all our
valiant efforts. Although we have comforts and possibilities undreamt
of by our forebears, we also have stresses, diseases, and frustrations that
they could not possibly have imagined. For animals, however, the situation
has plainly deteriorated, especially over the more recent human
generations. As food production industries brought their herds and
flocks indoors into concentration camps, the extreme form of herding