IF you have cherished all your life the image of a vegetarian as a peaceful soul much in the likeness of, say Mahatma Gandhi or Buddha, it is time to rectify your blunder. A movement of modern vegetables-only fanatics, called the ‘Vegans’, can often be as violent as a wild bunch of carnivores.

The fact came to light a week ago when a group of Vegans attacked in the northern city of Lille a restaurant named Canard Street, reputed for its variety of goose roasts and many other dishes exclusively cooked of duck meat. They shattered glass windows of the restaurant and wrote violent slogans on the walls in red paint. Many butcher shops and sea food delicatessen stores all over the country were also targets of similar assaults by the often well-armed Vegans.

When the mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry announced her determination to bring the aggressors to the court of justice, they briskly responded by organising successive protest marches in different cities, wearing blood red t-shirts and carrying banners demanding the closure of all animal slaughterhouses and butcher shops in the country.

Last Monday representatives of the French butchers’ association called on the Interior Minister Gérard Colomb requesting police protection around their shops. In their letter to the minister the owners of butcher stores and other meat sellers say: “If these so-called animal rights protests are allowed to continue, it is not hard to imagine what the next step by the Vegan activists will be, given the fact that they are coming out in increasing numbers brandishing arms, breaking windows, even attacking people. If this cannot be qualified as terrorism, we wonder how else to define their movement.”

Vegan dissent is not limited to meat sellers only as they are also crying foul against the woolen clothes fabricants, leather goods manufacturers, and yes the perfume makers whom they accuse of using mice to test products at the peril of their (mice’s) lives.

Regardless of whether you reckon it convincing or otherwise, this Vegan argument is certainly likely to bring a smile to your lips: “France is the biggest producer of cattle and bird meats as well as seafood in Europe with nearly a billion animals slaughtered every year. One of the videos filmed by our secret camera in a foie gras manufacturing plant clearly shows the ducks and geese with very sad and desperate expressions on their faces.”

In fact, among the many unusual promises made by a youthful candidate in last year’s presidential election was a project to install live TV cameras in all the slaughterhouses and to ban the sale of chicken eggs not laid normally in open-air spaces. Animal rights militants who had enthusiastically voted for Emmanuel Macron say he has forgotten all his commitments, now that he has become president.

Jean-Baptist Moreau, a member of the National Assembly who has his own sizeable cow farm in the Creuse region, qualifies the Vegan movement as “an extremist organisation using fascistic methods in its efforts to belittle the French farmers”.

But probably the weirdest example concerns a shocking terrorism incident last March when a solitary gunman attacked a commercial centre in the city of Trèbes in southern France and killed four people, one of the victims being a supermarket butcher.

A Vegan activist (not named by the media and only referred to as “she” in the newspapers and weeklies) was tried by court authorities recently for having posted an odious note on her internet site. She was given a suspended sentence of seven months in prison on the charge of justifying terrorism. Her message, word by word, reads as follows: “So what? Are you really shocked by an assassin himself being killed? Not me! I have zero compassion for butchers. Justice has its own way!”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2018