While veganism has grown in popularity, ethical vegans are still sometimes painted as bleeding heart hippies who should just shut up and eat a cheeseburger. But other than feeling like a bit of a hipster, or a little bit woke, what is the purpose of being vegan?
If you look closer, you see that going vegan isn’t just for people who love animals. Chances are high you don’t love every human you come across, but that doesn’t mean you’d be okay with eating their meat after someone takes a knife to their throat. Here are some other logical reasons in favour of going vegan.
Animals feel pain
Animals are sentient beings who feel pain. Apart from the science that animals with a central nervous system have pain receptors, anyone who’s had a cat or a dog or just observed an animal in distress knows this.
As fellow sentient beings who also feel pain, it is our moral responsibility as humans to abstain from causing violence to other animals. Currently, this violence occurs routinely in factory farms, not just during an animal’s killing but also their living.
All other ethical reasons for being vegan are secondary. Whether animals are smart, have the capacity for abstract thinking, are aware of their own mortality, or are equal to humans? It’s all irrelevant.
Here’s why. The reason I don’t poke someone in the eye with a stick is because it would cause them pain. It’s not because I think they are smart, or equal to me, can think abstractly, or are aware of their own mortality. It’s because it would hurt. I would then be morally responsible for this pain.
Also, human infants and people with severe intellectual disabilities may not have the capacity for abstract thinking or be aware of their own mortality, or may not be considered ‘smart’ by society’s standards.
However, we respect this vulnerability and use it as the moral basis to care for and protect these innocents; not to take advantage of it for our own ends. We do not imprison them, kill them then eat their bodies because we think they won’t know the difference.
What about the food chain?
If you put a human and a lion in the same space, and one of them gets hungry, it’s not hard to predict who’d come out on top.
The fact that humans have devised weapons to subjugate, control and kill animals does not justify murder. The human mind combined with human anatomy (our opposable thumbs) may be advanced. But just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should. Just because the atomic bomb was invented does not justify it being used to kill millions of innocents. Just because someone can pick up a knife and slit the throat of a person they can overpower, it does not mean they should do so. Just because a person can pick up a knife and slit an animal’s throat, it also doesn’t mean they have the right to.
Ignorance is an outdated defence
It would be harder to be ignorant to an animal’s fate if slaughterhouses were in the city and had glass walls. We would all have to see the price of death that comes with a Big Mac. It’s not cheap.
An animal’s death is loud; they scream, it is against their will. This is why slaughterhouses are tucked away in far-away rural areas; an animal’s death will 100% turn you off your food.
But the internet has made ignorance a bit of an outdated defence. Knowing the truth about something is a few clicks away. Bearing witness to an animal’s death (and their miserable factory farmed life) is a lot to take in. But the truth often is.
What we have done to animals is wrong. We think eating meat is normal. But is this normal?
- Forced artificial insemination, e.g. female cows have long steel tubes called ‘insemination guns’ painfully shoved into their privates,
- Chopping off body parts without anaesthetic (like debeaking and tail docking)
- Ruining their connections with other animals (chickens can try to cannibalise each other because they go crazy in factories)
- Taking animals’ babies away from their mothers to make them meat
- Drastically reducing their lifespan (chickens live 8% of their natural lives, 38 days compared to 12 years in the wild)
- In the end, killing animals, so we can put their flesh in our mouths. We don’t need their flesh to survive, or to be healthy. But animals do need their lives to survive.
Veganism as a neutral position
Lastly, some people say that veganism is not kind; it is simply a neutral position. When you pay for products or services that contribute to animal cruelty, you are using the capitalist model to use your money to support cruelty to animals. When you stop paying for this, you are not actually being kind, but removing your support. You are being ‘neutral’ – neither contributing to harm nor actively stopping it.
While I understand how this last point makes sense logically, at this stage of our human evolution being vegan must be seen as kind. When it is the default position to eat animals and use them as means to an end, there must be some incentive to go vegan. Abstaining from cruelty when it is not the norm is kind.
And while it is extremely logical to go vegan, it also helps me be at peace with myself. In the words of a great writer, Franz Kafka, who said this after going vegetarian and gazing at a fish: ‘Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.’
