Home / unitedkingdom / When farmers go vegan: the science behind changing your mind | Environment
When farmers go vegan: the science behind changing your mind | Environment
united kingdom January 30, 2019 unitedkingdom
A Farmer was recently on the road to the abattoir when he changed direction and drove his trailer full of lambs 200 miles to an animal sanctuary instead. Sivalingam Vasanthakumar, 60, from Devon, now plans to grow vegetables.
Vasanthakumar is not the only farmer to perform this kind of reversal. In 2017, Jay Wilde, of Bradley Nook Farm in Derbyshire, took his cattle to a sanctuary and decided to become a vegan farmer (the film telling this story, 73 Cows, has been nominated for a Bafta). In the US, Illinois-based charity Free From Harm has gathered tales of many farmers who have had epiphanies and switched to veganism.
Farmers know the job when they start it – so what brings about such a major turnaround? "What you are looking at is basic cognitive dissonance," says Fiona Buckland, a life coach. This happens when "the way you are living your life is no longer fully in line with the way you feel", and personal values ​​slip out of alignment with personal performance.
Cognitive dissonance builds until an individual can no longer sustain the resulting unease and instigates change. "It's the reason someone sits at their desk and thinks:" I can not do this anymore, "or walks out of a marriage," Buckland says. "The cognitive dissonance is too great. They have to get themselves into alignment. "
Even apparently snap decisions – changing destination mid-journey, as Vasanthakumar did – "percolate in our inconscious" for weeks, months or years. "Maybe he had taken himself to the abattoir too many times," Buckland adds wryly. She describes Vasanthakumar's rerouting as "a moment of creative problem-solving": here are some sheep I would like to keep alive, here is a sanctuary that will take them.
Stephen Palmer, a member of the British Psychological Society, points out that the year is still fairly new, and such decisions may be the result of some January stock-taking. Midlife, he says, is a classic time when people "search out a new purpose and meaning". But often these reflections do not come when humans sit and think, but embolden them while they fill the washing machine or queue in the supermarket.
"Your life perspective can take a sudden leap," psychologist Mike Hughesman explains. A person who had been inured to what they do suddenly realises they do not want to do it anymore. (Hughesman himself temporarily switched to vegetarianism when he could not face the fact that he was eating something sentient.)
"People need to think more and not get trammelled into routines. If something does not feel right, give it thought, "he says. "Sometimes you have to ask those pivotal questions."
Leeds United v Aston Villa
Climate change SHOCK: NASA announces a slower ice shelf in Antarctica Science | News
NetherRealm gives Mortal Kombat 11 crazy money to fight unlucky players, as Time Tower thinks controversial. Eurogamer.net
The worst known pain in medicine is that a young mother reveals that she is DECAPITATED at any time
The police investigated the bodies of young women and boys found at home
Netflix has called Drew Barrymore's Santa Clarita Diet for three seasons