Animal Rights

I chose the stanza
“Arming himself with discipline
Seeing everything with an equal eye
He sees the self in all creatures
And all creatures in the self.” (69)
I understood this to be some sort of reference to equality not only between men, but between animals and men. As a vegetarian, I took this, combined with the stanza “Learned men see with an equal eye a scholarly and dignified priest, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and even an outcaste scavenger” (61) as not necessarily a promotion of vegetarianism, but of some sort of understanding between men and animals.
So I was able to use this stanza when my friend, luckily enough, asked me why I was vegetarian at lunch. Between bites of my salad, I explained to her that the meat industry was not only disgustingly unsanitary, but was also incredibly cruel to other living things for a purely monetary purpose. While I support animal rights in many ways besides vegetarianism, I think that it is one of the worst forms of animal cruelty because it is the most common. If people saw “the self in all creatures and all creatures in the self,” then the fur industry wouldn’t exist, the meat industry would treat their animals with love, and people wouldn’t abandon or abuse their pets. Krishna promotes a type of higher understanding – an understanding between those who aren’t able to communicate through words and people. This stanza reminded me of a quote by Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty: “We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”
My friend listened while she ate her hamburger.