General

On the counter over there is a large gold coin, heavy, worth a thousand dollars. If you can have it, if you kill Kitty. What are you going to do now? If you have enough food to eat and secure shelter and you've already mentally picked up that knife, taken the coin, you have chosen that life is worth less than money. Don’t feel bad about that, our culture trains you that greed is good, but it does make you a sleeper, a zombie. Almost everyone has a price. If you chose to save Kitty, well done, but I suspect you are better fed than most of the planet. If you're poor and hungry and you chose to save Kitty, then hats off to you. If you feel that anyone who chose to kill Kitty is immoral, try the next one.

If you kill Kitty you get ten coins of gold, a hundred coins, a million coins. Kitty gets it right? You’ve killed the Kitty now, I know you have. Lucky for Kitty she’s really here, in my reality, and you aren’t, so she gets is a saucer of milk. I know all the justifications. With that gold "I could pay for an operation my mother needs," "food for a month for my whole family or I’d never have to work again!" The principle again, that you’ve accepted, is that this kitten is worth less than money. If I’m honest, if my kids needed something vital, life or death type situation, I’d kill her too. But at that point it’s a life vs life choice, not really life vs money any more. When we use our money to support factory farming it isn't like any of the scenarios above, it's worse. You aren't being paid to torture and kill an animal, you are paying someone else to do it so you can eat it. Pigs and cows are both smart with emotions, feelings, just like Kitty. So whether it's lentils or meat from ethical sources, change is overdue. All life is sacred, does our system honour or defile them? And in the process, does it honour or defile us?

By Angela Abraham, @daisydescriptionari, March 15, 2015.

Found in Are you awake yet? - first draft, authored by Daisy.