LET US END THE MEAT AND FUR INDUSTRIES

I was checking Susie Burrows Facebook page yesterday, and felt such sadness and despair about the world. You know, when emotions are allowed to flow freely through you, they do not bite so deeply.  In a large sense, you see that even the strongest emotions are just events that pass through you, who are the witness, the container, and the affects themselves.

Yet, I felt a strong movement in me to act on the issue of the worldwide abuse of animals for food and fur, as well as pure sport.  I felt guilty I have not done more.

I think it is time that We Are Sentience and our Sangha, to get behind ending meat eating by developing a long term plan for ending meat eating, animal testing, the fur trade, etc.

I will have people meet with me with ideas to develop such a plan.

Some ideas are to:

Start taxing meat, as cigarettes were taxed, on ecological grounds, the damage they do to the environment.  Make it a progressive tax.  That is, each year there is an additional tax that is to be spent in several ways:  To detoxify the environment; to subsidize ranchers who want to go out of business; to subsidize private industry food manufacturers to develop new and tasty vegetarian alternatives to meat, that can give the same protein and other nutrients as supplied by meat, and taste like meat, so that meat eaters don't feel "robbed." These foods can also be subsidized at the retail level to bring down their costs, as often vegan prepared dishes cost much more than actual meat-added prepared meals.

Centralize data on all research regarding the negative health effects of meat.  I have seen several lately, but there should be a central place to publish this information.

Add warnings about the deleterious effects of meat on all retail foods containing meats.

Have advertisements on television, as with smoking, about the negative health effects of meat eating.

Have you noticed, you never see videos of how animals are slaughtered on regular or cable television.  You can find this on Youtube and other places, but never on mainstreat TV.  The meat industry is VERY sensitive to such images going to mass audiences, and either they object to TV stations, or the stations suppress the videos themselves as too awful or offensive to air.

Many people really don't want to see images of such suffering caused by their own meat eating, fur using, or the use of other animal products.  They even attack Facebook people who post such images as offensive, when the worst offense is that they do nothing.

If we join together an offer people a leading voice to end this continuous assault on our open hearts, on our consciences, maybe we can end meat eating within the US, or mostly end it, not in our lifetimes maybe, but within this century, then we will have done something that Robert Adams and Ramana would have been proud of.