從愛心出發

Q: Being veg to save our planet is the most urgent and feasible action we can take. However, we should also care for the livestock raising industry, non-staple foodstuff industry, and related businesses like transportation, wholesale/retail, catering, and others who have established vested interests in the business. The impact and change might be great for them. Even if the government is willing to put aside economic considerations, some people may still have a hard time coping with the shifts in their area of expertise, investments, habits, etc. I would like to ask Master, what can be done so that they will be able to restart a new business and be willing to change?

SM: Thank you! Thank you for your question, and thanks for your consideration for others. It is true, that we have to take into consideration those people who are in the businesses that you have mentioned and how they would change their lives. But it’s not difficult.

First of all, we have to know that we have no choice but to change. We have no choice—either that or the planet! Either we change, or we will all go. There’s no choice anymore. If we don’t stop the livestock-raising and meat-eating practices, we will not be able to save the planet, including them and their meat business. So, I think we have to choose between our lives and a career. We have to survive first. We have to think of the planet’s people as a whole, not just some business. It is truly that urgent.

Given this critical necessity, those people who are economically tied to the meat industry would be willing to change, if they were properly informed and know how important it is to change their lifestyle and their career. They have many strong motivations. For example, the first is to save the planet from a climate catastrophe, to save all lives in this world. If we don’t stop it, we will continue on a course towards total disaster and mass extinction, affecting everyone, whether you are in the business of meat, transportation for it, or other jobs related to the meat industry or not.

Meat Business is a Losing Business

Second, the industry that we are talking about is a bad business. It is not lucrative at all for the whole planet, or for anyone. It’s a most inefficient business. In Chinese, we would say “a losing business (‘Kui Ben’).” Now, the meat industry is not a very lucrative business, with very high production costs for electricity, water and grains that have to be wasted to produce the same amount of so-called “food,” which is replaceable and better. We have better food than meat. If the government didn’t give the meat industry any subsidies, then the hamburger that some people eat—produced by clearing forests in India alone—would cost US$200! Not just 99 cents like you buy it in some shops. It would cost US$200—the real cost of a hamburger.

Now in the US, even before the swine flu impacted the pig farming business, the pig industry was losing billions of dollars. Why? Because they could not afford the grain to feed their livestock due to the high food prices; and the food prices are getting higher and higher nowadays. So how do they survive? Your tax money goes to the government, the government subsidizes them—that’s how they survive. So it’s a losing business. Everywhere, from the US to China, the government has to subsidize animal farmers by paying them at least tens of billions of US dollars every year! Tens of billions of US dollars every year for the meat industry! And where does the money come from?

Audience: Taxpayers!

SM: Taxpayers, yes, correct! You are so smart. Your money! Your money from your hard-earned daily, sweating, and tears to earn that precious substance that we call “money” to feed yourself, to take care of your family, to protect your children, your relatives and friends. This money has been draining into the meat industry in order to keep them alive, and then when you buy some piece of meat you think, “Wow! So cheap! A hamburger—99 cents! My God!” Then you keep going to the hamburger shop. But that’s your money that you’re eating.

Meat Eating Is Detrimental to our Health

SM: If you could eat that and be healthy and happy, then it would be reasonable. But it’s not. These hamburgers and beef burgers contain all parts of the animals that you don’t know where they even come from, and contain all kinds of bacteria and all kinds of diseases.

If you want information from the medical journals or medical scientists, they will tell you all this. Not only do we pay a lot of tax money into subsidies for the meat industry, we pay a lot more tax money for the hospitalization, for the burying of our loved ones, for the heartache that we have to bear our whole lifetime for losing one of our dearest, or many of our dearest. Okay, life and death we can’t avoid, but the suffering in between—the hospitalization, the poking, picking, injecting, breathing machine, oxygen supporter, etc.—all this suffering is unnecessary for our fragile body to bear. If we avoid meat, we will avoid all that, the money for hospitals and medicine.

Not only that, before we get the medicine, we make more animals suffer by experimenting with them—by vivisection, by injecting chemicals into their bodies, by making them suffer, torturing to no end—just to obtain the medicine that we feel is safe for human use. And again, it’s still not safe for human use. All this suffering, all this tax money, paying again and again; and you’re working day and night to make ends meet, just to survive, and all this money goes into different directions. It doesn’t help you at all. It’s just wasting resources, finance, national strength, and human health and happiness. It’s just a waste. It’s just a very, very bad business.

So, you see, the meat industry is terrible, terribly harmful to us in every imaginable situation, in any imaginable aspect. Now, if the subsidies stop going in support of them, the farmers of the animal-raising industry could not make ends meet with their business. They would have gone out of business already. So, I suggest the government not give any more subsidies to the animal-raising industry. Instead, tell them to convert to vegan farming.

Now besides all that, for the majority of the workers in the meat business, it’s not a safe workplace either. It’s one of the most dangerous jobs with some of the highest rates of injury and exposure to chemicals and diseases, like influenza, swine flu, bird flu, etc., and mad cow disease, which is always fatal, always deadly. Mad cow disease, up to now, we can’t even cure. For anyone who contracts mad cow disease, their life is terminated.

Now we have to ask ourselves: Is it all worth it? This is not to talk about the effect on the meat consumers in terms of all the sicknesses—cancers, diabetes, heart disease and other health problems. Almost all diseases that you can name come from the meat diet or related industry. So, given a better choice of livelihood, wouldn’t we choose the one that helps ourselves and others stay healthy, over a profession that makes people and ourselves sick and die young? Would you say yes or no?

Audience: Yes!

SM: Thank you. Thank you so much.

SM: I have suggested before that we should talk to the farmers—write to them, even go to them one by one if you can afford it—to try to show them that there are better alternatives, such as growing organic vegetables. Nowadays, organic food is very much in demand, very “in.” Many people turn into vegetarian or vegan now. And everyone knows organic vegetables are very healthy.

You see, if you eat organic vegetables, you will hardly have to go to the hospital, and all that money we can save for better education for the children, for better care for the elderly, and for building more beautiful roads, more equipment, inventions, and use it more for sustainable energies for free for everyone. Free energy for everyone, free education for all the children, free care for all the elderly, and free food for all the one billion, at least, hungry people in the world. The benefit has no ends. I can write 10 thousand books about the benefits of the vegetarian diet and the harms of the meat industry. But I’ll let you do the research a little bit, because you know all the good techniques nowadays with computers and information on the Internet.

You mentioned that we should also care about the people who have been in the meat industry and that it may be difficult for them to change. It’s not so. There are many who are converting themselves into organic farmers right now. In Ireland, the Agriculture Minister even wrote to all the farmers in Ireland to tell them to convert themselves to organic vegetable farming, and they’ll even subsidize them. Right now, there’s a huge percentage of farmers converting to organic farming. I am so happy for Ireland.

Now, as another example for your reference, there was one American pig farmer who had owned many pigs all crammed into a filthy factory farm. After being visited by the famous vegan author John Robbins—you probably know him, the famous ice cream heir who left his father’s multi-million dollar ice cream business in order to go into a vegan direction—this farmer suddenly remembered that in his childhood he truly loved one pig as his close friend and companion. But he was forced to deny and forget this loving feeling due to the pressure of his family and society . . . you know, tradition, business from the father. But after realizing it, he could no longer abuse the gentle pigs one second more. He decided to quit. So instead of raising pigs, he bought a small organic farm and sells organic vegetables; and he’s doing fine! He’s still alive! And his heart is still more alive than ever, I guess. As a side job, he brings his10 pet pigs—he has 10 as his pets that he kept from his old farm—and often visits schools now, to show the children how intelligent and friendly pigs really are, so the children will not eat the pigs, for example. Not only does he not raise pigs anymore, he goes in the opposite direction to protect the animals.

There was a rancher, he’s a Texan. In Texas, they raise a lot of cows and that’s where the word “cowboy” comes from. He owned a big ranch of cows but then suddenly he changed because he had cancer from meat. After he treated himself, he became vegan, and now he’s an animal advocate. He goes everywhere lecturing, telling people the truth, the real truth, the cruel truth and the bad business truth about raising animals. He’s a very staunch advocate for animals. His name is Howard Lyman. He’s from Texas. He was a guest speaker once or twice on Supreme Master Television. You can download his interview again. It’s still in the file to download if you want to know about him.

Recently in Iran, there was a dairy cow farmer—he even wrote to us telling his story—who also decided that he needed to change his career to help the planet and his own conscience. So, he made sure all his cows were adopted into good, safe homes to live the rest of their dignified lives. Now, he works at a vegan restaurant.

Another story comes from Formosa (Taiwan) where a pig farmer just became vegan after watching Supreme Master Television and realizing that he wanted to protect the environment and avoid bad karmic retribution for himself and his family. So right now, you know what he is doing? He is keeping all his pigs as spoilt family-member pets, for life; and he is switching to a different kind of farming.

In all these cases, the people involved are doing just fine, even better than ever before. But I suggest that all the people who keep their pigs or cows as pets, I think we should sterilize them so that we don’t continue to breed too many animals, because then we would be in the same position as right now, or even worse if they keep multiplying. It took a great amount of courage in the beginning to change their whole life career around, but all of them would guarantee that it was worth it, more than worth it. It’s worth the great freedom of their heart, their spirit, and happiness of their family as well, and health.

Nowadays, there are more and more good opportunities for the farmers, retailers, transporters. They just do the same: instead of transporting pigs, they transport organic vegetables. The farmer retailers could switch from the meat business to organic vegetable farming. Returning to traditional organic farming methods is already proven successful in Africa, for example, and in some places like the Americas, Europe, and Australia. Organic vegan farming is growing very, very fast, and is very, very profitable right now, because there is a growing demand. People are more informed about the harms of meat and more informed about the benefits of a vegetarian diet. So organic vegan vegetable farming should be very, very good for anyone who wants to switch business. On Supreme Master Television, we also feature a whole section about organic farming, on our website as well, at www.SupremeMasterTV.com. On this website, we share a lot of info about how to do organic farming, which is very profitable, uses less water, is a lot less work, and is very beneficial to our health, to the workers and to the planet. So please, feel free to take a look and discover for yourself the great benefits of harmonious farming.

It’s high time we turn away from the harmful, unsustainable meat business and move toward a more civilized, more efficient, more sustainable, more humane means to earn a living, namely organic vegan farming, vegan restaurants, vegan products, vegan product selling, etc. Everything to do with compassionate living is good for you and it’s pleasing to Heaven. And it will save the planet. It’s not just good business, it will save the planet, and it will save countless lives, now and in the future, including the ones involved in the meat business. That’s why the Buddha named the meat business as one of the five businesses that people should not engage in. Do you want to know the other four as well?

Audience: Yes.

SM: The other four are: business in weapons, business in human trafficking, business in intoxicants and business in poisons. All these harmful businesses are bad for you, now and in the future.

If you believe in the life hereafter, if you believe in Heaven and hell, you should stop the meat business immediately, like yesterday, because nothing good awaits you in the life hereafter if you cause suffering to others, be they humans or animals. You will have multiple suffering in return, and for a long, long time. So instead, these people in the meat industry should join in the trend, which has already begun and expands hugely every day, I am happy to say. Thank you. Be Veg! Go Green! Plant Organic Vegetables!
 

To watch the Supreme Master Television’s coverage of this videoconference, please visit: http://video.Godsdirectcontact.net/magazine/WOW1163s.php

Master Says