What is the difference between No Welfare, High Welfare, and Highest Welfare when they all require animals to die? Only human comfort, NONE protect the actual animals. The most humane, ethical, and honest Webster-defined "welfare" is NOT exploiting animals - not using, not wearing, not eating, not killing - animals. The only meaningful position is vegan, everything else is just how humans euphemize animals' required suffering and violent deaths: no human exploits animals because they honestly believe that NOT exploiting animals is UNethical or INhumane.
Source VeganSidekick.com , All-Creatures.org
65 ridiculous justifications people use to harm and exploit animals followed by responses.
1 It doesn’t harm animals to kill them
2 It doesn’t harm animals to take their eggs
3 It doesn’t harm animals to take their milk
4 But cows need to be milked right?
5 It doesn’t harm animals to take their wool
6 It doesn’t harm animals to take their silk
7 It doesn’t harm animals to take their honey
8 I just like the taste
9 It’s my personal choice
10 Morality is subjective, you can’t prove it’s wrong for me
11 It’s just a matter of opinion like religion
12 It’s just a matter of culture
13 Our ancestors did it
14 We’ve got canine teeth
15 Lions do it
16 Circle of life
16b It’s natural
17 God put animals here for us to kill, bible says so
18 It’s been happening for hundreds of years
19 We have to eat animal products to survive
20 They’re bred to be killed so it’s fine
21 They wouldn’t have been born without farmers, we did them a favour
22 What about tribes who have to hunt to survive
23 What if you were on a deserted island
24 If you get bitten by a snake you’d take antivenom
25 Animals aren’t as intelligent as us
26 You’re humanizing animals, they’re not the same as us
27 Some animals are to be killed some aren’t
28 Humane slaughter
29 Grass-fed, organic, free-range etc
30 Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
31 The whole world will never be 100% vegan
32 One person can’t make a difference
33 You can’t be 100% vegan in modern society so why bother
34 If everyone went vegan, livestock would overpopulate
35 If everyone went vegan, livestock would go extinct
36 Those animals would just be killed in the wild anyway
37 You’re putting people out of jobs because of the effect on the industry
38 Vegans have no effect on anything
39 It’s unsustainable
40 It’s unhealthy
41 Protein
42 Iron
43 Calcium
44 B12
45 It’s expensive
46 Vegan food is all disgusting
47 Animals are killed in crop harvesting so vegans kill more animals
48 In Australia, grass-fed beef is more ethical than eating wheat
49 Plants have feelings
50 Don’t force your opinions on others
51 Stop judging me
52 A vegan was rude to me once
53 Vegans are closed-minded
54 I read about this couple who were vegan and they killed their baby
55 Hitler was vegetarian
56 You get your companion animals euthanized, that’s the same
57 We have to test on animals to make sure cosmetics are safe
58 We have to test on animals to make medical advances
59 But would you use medicine to save your life?
60 I’m a nihilist. I don’t care about anything apart from myself
61 Yeah but what do you feed your pets? I win
62 There are wars going on / people starving in the world
63 Yeah but sweat shops and slave labour
64 Vegan Sidekick’s comics are inaccurate / offensive
65 Yeah but there are other ways to promote veganism, this is ineffective
****
1 It doesn’t harm animals to kill them
The definition of harm is “Physical injury, especially that which is deliberately inflicted”. As such, firing a pneumatic bolt pistol into their forehead and then slitting their throat, shocking them with electricity and then slitting their throat, are done to deliberately inflict a physical injury. Regardless of the manner of execution, it is harm to kill an animal.
2 It doesn’t harm animals to take their eggs
In the egg industry, only females are required because males don’t lay eggs. As such, in the breeding process, the males and females are divided when they hatch, and the males are killed immediately as they serve no purpose. Subsequently, their sisters go on to be kept in captivity until their egg production is no longer profitable to the farmer, at which point they have their throats slit. This is generally at around one or two years old. The average lifespan of a chicken is eight years.
Yeah but what about free range?
Yeah but what about humane slaughter?
3 It doesn’t harm animals to take their milk
In the dairy industry, only females are required because males don’t produce milk. Like all mammals, cattle produce milk to feed their young once they give birth. It is a misconception that cows just produce milk non-stop, they do so only once impregnated. As such, when a male is born, he will be slaughtered. Either he is culled immediately, or he is sold into the veal industry and then killed after a few weeks of living in confinement, or he is sold into the beef industry and killed as soon as he reaches a profitable size, which will be about one year old. If the calf is female, typically she will be removed from her mother so that the milk can be stolen, and then she is used in the same manner. Once a mother’s milk production is less proftable, she has her throat slit. That generally happens after two milking cycles, when she would be around six years old. The average lifespan of a cow is about twenty years.
Yeah but what about free range?
Yeah but what about humane slaughter?
4 But cows need to be milked right?
Like all mammals, cows only produce milk to feed their young. In the dairy industry, the calf is taken away from the mother, and if male, killed. As such, the mother will be producing milk, and in the absence of her child, will “need to be milked”. This is no justification for the process of course. If you were to kill a woman’s baby boy while she was trying to breast-feed him, you could hardly claim to be doing her a favour by then stealing her milk because it “needed to be done”. The whole process doesn’t need to be done.
You’re humanizing animals, they’re not the same as us
5 It doesn’t harm animals to take their wool
In the lamb / mutton industry, the primary purpose of farming sheep is to kill them. They are killed when they reach a profitable size, which will vary from farm to farm, but like practically all farmed animals, it is done very early into their lives since animals become fully grown at a very early time in their life. The wool is taken and sold, and then the animals are subsequently killed. Buying wool funds this practice. Of course there are many other issues such as breeding animals into captivity for our own uses, and cruel treatment during the removal of the fleece and so forth.
6 It doesn’t harm animals to take their silk
Silk is made from the cocoon of a silkworm. The silkworms wrap themselves in a single strand of silk, and they live inside the cocoon until they develop into a moth. In the silk industry, the farmers require a single long strand of silk. If the moths are left alone, they chew through the cocoon to escape. So the farmers kill all of them, either by boiling them alive or by stabbing them with needles. Then the cocoons can be unravelled.
7 It doesn’t harm animals to take their honey
Honey is produced by bees so that it can be stored as a food source. On the most fundamental level, it is their property, taking it is theft. But beyond this there are a number of ethical issues. The standard practices for retrieving honey involve killing bees by incidentally crushing them. Bees are sprayed to subdue them while accessing the hive. When honey is stolen, it is then replaced with a syrup alternative, which is not the same as honey, and is essentially depriving the bee of their natural food. Bee hives are extremely sensitive and opening them up is highly unnatural for the bees, who work to keep a particular atmosphere inside, which gets disrupted. On top of this, selective inbreeding of bees has weakened the species as a whole, and transportation of bees to places and environments they’d not normally travel to means transportation of diseases that would not normally affect the local population of bees, which is hazardous to bees in general. It’s a misconception that honey farming is of benefit to the overall bee population. If you’d like more information please check this link:
http://www.vegetus.org/honey/ecology.htm
8 I just like the taste
Meat is often seen as just being a type of food. But it is a dead body, of a once living creature. To say “I just like the taste” is to say “Killing is justified if I like the flavour of the dead body”. If we follow through with this, then somebody would be justified in killing your pets if they liked the taste, which surely nobody would agree with. Or even extend it to humans and say that if someone likes the taste of human flesh, then it’s fine to murder people.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
You’re humanizing animals, they’re not the same as us
9 It’s my personal choice
It cannot be called a personal choice when it involves harming a third party for a trivial reason, which is your desire to enjoy eating them / their secretions.
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
10 Morality is subjective, you can’t prove it’s wrong for me
Even if you think that morality is subjective, your ethics should still be backed by logic. They are not random, nor are they plucked from thin air. As such, the question is simple – do you have any consideration for animals or not? Most people would say that they care about animals, or at the very least, would not like to needlessly harm them. Farming animals for our consumption is needless, and so all harm visited upon them including their slaughter, is needless also. So your own subjective view should be to avoid harming them – if you have any consideration for them whatsoever.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
11 It’s just a matter of opinion like religion
Religion is based upon ancient scripture, tradition, dogma and superstition. Veganism is based on having consideration for animals, and a desire to avoid animal abuse. Animal abuse is real, animals are being exploited and killed in their billions. It’s a reality, can be proven to you. You might say it’s a matter of opinion that we’d like to avoid it happening, but if you claim to have any consideration for animals whatsoever, then you will be in agreement.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
12 It’s just a matter of culture / social norms
Cultures and social norms develop over time. Whether it is slavery, women having the vote, or anything else, the fact that it was ever the norm or part of culture, is not a justification for it. If you think that culture is a justification, then if you look at other cultures, you must advocate every single practice that they do, regardless of how clearly unethical it is. That’s not a rational point of view. You should be able to form a view on a practice regardless of where it happens. So if you say that killing dogs is unacceptable because your culture says so, but you think that it’s fine if other cultures do it, consider the following: If someone is about to kill a dog in your culture, would you really say “Excuse me, can you please cross the border to that other culture where that kind of thing is the norm? Then I will stop caring about that dog”. This is about the victim, it doesn’t matter where it happens.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
13 Our ancestors did it
If you live in modern society and you’re reading this on the internet, clearly you must acknowledge that you do not live like your ancestors. Your ancestors did many things that you avoid, and you do plenty of things that they never did. Times have changed, we can choose to live non-violently and avoid harming those that pose no threat to us.
14 We’ve got canine teeth
Even if we had massive fangs, it wouldn’t justify killing animals for the enjoyment of eating their dead bodies. It is proven time and time again that we can live on a plant-based diet in great health, so the shape of our teeth puts us under no obligation to kill. But if we look at this argument more closely – firstly there are animals with far bigger canines than us who eat a plant-based diet, like primates and rhinos and so forth. Secondly, our own “canines” are only named that way because of their position and biological classification in our jaw. They have no similarity at all with true canines which actual carnivores have like lions. They are of no use in biting through raw animal hide, especially not that of a living creature.
15 Lions do it
Wild animals kill to survive. They must kill to eat, otherwise they would die. Whether they kill on instinct or are aware of their predicament is irrelevant, we are not in their situation. If you live in modern society and have access to crops, vegetables, fruit, grains etc, then you have no obligation or need for animal products. Also, lions exhibit all kinds of behaviour that you would seek to avoid, for instance, violent territorial disputes, and male lions will kill the cubs of a female he wishes to mate with because she won’t mate while she has cubs around. Lions are not good ethical role models.
16 Circle of life
I am not really sure what this means but I will try to cover it – if the suggestion is that “you live you die, therefore killing is fine” then this would justify killing companion animals and also humans. If the suggestion is “we kill an animal so that we can live” then this is false. Animals are killed for the enjoyment of eating their dead bodies. It is not a matter of survival, as proven by all the hundreds of millions of vegans in the world.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
You’re humanizing animals, they’re not the same as us
16b It’s natural
It is untrue that you only do things that you consider to be natural – you use the internet, you presumably use a car or a bus or a plane, and so on. You use modern technology, and do various other things that cannot be called natural. Likewise, there are other things that are natural that you avoid. Nature is pretty cruel, and we actually live life in modern society trying to avoid the perils of nature.
You might argue that anything is natural which humans are capable of. But if you argue that, then the justification “it’s natural” would apply to literally any human behaviour, and as such is ridiculous, since you would not say that any human behaviour is justified just because a human did it.
17 God put animals here for us to kill, bible says so
Regardless of what it says in the bible, you are not obliged to kill animals as part of your religion. Nobody would argue that the christian god would send you to hell if you are vegan surely. There isn’t a quota for how many animals you have to kill per day. So religion isn’t a factor here.
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
18 It’s been happening for hundreds of years
The amount of time that something has been happening is not at all linked with how harmful it is to the victims. Indeed, the fact that it has been going on so long just underlines how harmful it has been, because the death toll is so high it will never be calculated, and has been entirely unnecessary since we were able to harvest crops successfully. With this attitude nothing would ever change in society, and things that used to happen for hundreds of years like slavery and so on would continue today just because that’s what has been happening.
You’re humanizing animals, they’re not the same as us
19 We have to eat animal products to survive
This is false as proven by all the hundreds of millions of vegans in the world.
It’s unhealthy
20 They’re bred to be killed so it’s fine
Following this logic, if somebody has a dog living with them, and she is pregnant, then simply standing there and saying “When those puppies are born I am going to kill them all” would be enough justification for doing so. That of course is absurd. Basically, you are not in a position to determine the fate of an animal. If the argument is that some animals have been selectively bred for consumption, then again, that is not a justification. The entire process of selectively breeding them was done at the hands of humans, and all subsequent loss of life is at their say so and is entirely unnecessary.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
21 They wouldn’t have been born without farmers, we did them a favour
Bringing a life into the world does not justify taking it. And think this through – in the egg industry, as soon as males are hatched, they are killed. Immediately. Did you really do that chicken a favour by bringing them into the world, to then immediately be killed? Nobody can seriously say yes to this, but that is precisely what is going on every day, and you fund that if you buy eggs.
Animals bred for meat are killed as soon as they reach a profitable size, which will typically be a few months old, or about a year. You didn’t do that animal any favours.
Finally, let’s extend this to animals besides livestock. You have a dog, they’re pregnant. Does that mean you can slit the puppies’ throats, because you were the one who arranged for your dog to get pregnant? Of course not, it’s nothing to do with it.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
22 What about tribes who have to hunt to survive
If somebody has to kill to survive, then that’s their only option. Anybody who isn’t in that situation shouldn’t bring this up as it has nothing to do with them.
23 What if you were on a deserted island
If you are in a situation where you will starve to death unless you consume animal products, then that’s your only option. Thankfully you’re not in that situation and so it has nothing to do with anything.
24 If you get bitten by a snake you’d take antivenom
If your choice is to die horribly, or to take a cure, then it is totally understandable to take the cure. Consuming animal products for no other reason than the enjoyment of it, is not comparable to doing something which will save your life. Some might say that I am advocating the farming of snakes for their antivenom – frankly I have not looked into it, as I don’t live in a region where being bitten by a snake is an issue, and I choose to avoid such places.
25 Animals aren’t as intelligent as we are so it’s fine to slit their throats
Intelligence is not a valid justification for taking life. To put this as simply as possible, cats, dogs and hamsters are not as intelligent as us. But most people would be appalled to think of that as a reason to kill or harm them.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
26 You’re humanizing animals, they’re not the same as we are
Choosing not to harm animals is not the same as saying they are human or treating them as human. All animals are different, and require different treatment by us. It doesn’t make sense on a practical level to treat any animal as human, or to treat any animal as any other type of animal. But, that’s no reason to be harming them, simply because they are not human. Cats and dogs are not human, but it doesn’t mean that you have “humanized” them just because you didn’t slit their throat.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
27 Some animals are to be killed some aren’t
What is this based on? Let’s use dogs as an example as that’s the most commonly respected animal, in my experience.
– Dogs are our companions
Practically any animal could be your companion if you gave them the chance. People keep pigs as companions, and form bonds with them as strong as you can with a dog.
– I just like dogs, I don’t have a connection with other animals
That is not a justification for killing other animals. Somebody could equally say to you “I don’t have a connection with your dog, so I am going to slit their throat”. Just because of how you feel about an animal, doesn’t mean that animal is disposable, they are sentient beings.
– Dogs are intelligent, other animals are dumb
That is not a justification for killing them. Other animals such as cats, hamsters and so on could be said to be less intelligent than dogs, that doesn’t mean you think killing them is fine presumably. But as it happens, pigs are in many ways more intelligent than dogs, able to make connections and solve problems more advanced than anything dogs can do, and can interact on a higher level with video games, they can recognise human faces, understand reflections in a mirror, respond to commands and so on. If you have any serious consideration for animals, feel free to look up articles on chicken intelligence, cattle intelligence, sheep intelligence and so on. It is out of the question that dogs are alone as being intelligent animals.
– Companion animals are my property, like my TV
This is an absurd comparison. The reason why you’d be upset with someone killing your dog is not because they are your property, it’s because they are sentient beings, living their own life, and you don’t want harm to come to them. Damage to your TV is a financial loss, your companion animals are more than that surely?
– Just our culture, it’s actually fine to slit dog’s throats as long as it’s done in another culture not this one
That makes no sense at all. Following through with this statement, you’d be appalled if a dog was killed in front of you, but apparently if that same dog was transported to another country where it is culturally acceptable to kill them, then you’d say it was fine. Think it through – it’s the same dog, precisely the same thing is happening to them. Why does it matter where it happens?
– Dogs have been companions of humans for hundreds of years
That is just because humans have chosen for it to be that way, it isn’t the fault of other animals. You could make a companionship with any animal if you chose, there’s no reason to be killing them just because you chose not to make a friend of them.
– You can play catch with a dog and they do tricks
You can do the same with many other species. But why do you want to kill animals who don’t want to play catch? Most cats don’t want to play catch, they might do other things, but most don’t retrieve things and play catch like dogs do, but it doesn’t logically follow that you must slit a cat’s throat.
– Dogs are cute
Why do you discriminate against animals based upon what they look like? If you come across a dog that isn’t cute, are you compelled to slit their throat? If someone doesn’t find your dog cute, is it okay for them to slit their throat?
– Yeah but it’s because I have a connection with my animal, they’re like family. Killing animals outside my family is fine.
This is a direction comparison between humans and dogs. Therefore, you are saying that killing your dog would be bad because they’re like family. Killing anyone outside your family is therefore fine, would you apply this to strangers then? A human stranger is not part of your family, unlike your dog. The argument of “you’re humanizing animals” cannot be used, because you are the one humanizing animals in this case, comparing them to your family. Just because an animal or human is outside your family is no grounds to slit their throat. Also, think this through. If you have an animal that currently isn’t in your family, you’re arguing that it’s fine to slit their throat. But if you chose to instead adopt them, then immediately it’s abhorrent to slit that animal’s throat. It’s the same animal. Look at this from the animal’s perspective, not your own.
28 Humane slaughter
The standard legal form of slaughter for animals is for them to be “stunned” and then have their throats slit. For chickens and pigs, the stunning is generally done with an electric shock, and for other animals a pneumatic bolt pistol projects a metal rod into their forehead. It is claimed that this renders the animal 100% unconscious, but if you actually look into the facts, slaughterhouse workers will admit that there is no way to verify that this is the case for every single animal, and indeed the process doesn’t always work, isn’t followed routinely, and indeed, the “stun” can wear off while the animal is being killed.
But regardless of the fashion of execution, there isn’t a justification for taking the life. It is still taking the life of a sentient being, for your enjoyment ultimately. If somebody killed your companion animal, I doubt you’d say “that’s fine because you did it humanely” as described above.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
29 Grass-fed, organic, free-range etc
Regardless of the nature of their lives before slaughter, farmed animals get sent to slaughter. There is a misconception that animals get to “live out their lives” and then get killed. Animals get killed as soon as their purpose is served, or as soon as they reach a profitable size, which is at a fraction of their potential lifespan. The very definition of grass-fed/organic/free-range animals is actually very loose and can vary wildly. It doesn’t mean that the animals have any kind of quality of life necessarily, it just means the farm has to meet some arbitrary requirements to earn that title. That’s not to say that every single farmer treats their animals dreadfully while they live – some actually do give their animals a fair standard of life before sending them to have their throats slit. But it’s ignorant to think it’s the norm in the first place.
Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
30 Killing animals for no reason is wrong, but if you have a reason it’s fine
The reason for killing animals in modern society is for the enjoyment of eating their dead body. That surely is not a justification for taking life. If somebody killed your companion animal, I doubt that you’d say “It’s fine as long as you eat them”.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
31 The whole world will never be 100% vegan
The whole world is unlikely to ever be free from racism, homophobia or sexism, but that’s no reason for you personally to practice it. All anybody can do is take responsibility for themselves. The fact that other people are doing something that you consider to be unethical, isn’t a reason for you to copy them.
32 One person can’t make a difference
Everybody is responsible for what they are personally doing. The way for numbers to rise is for individuals to take accountability one by one. If you want for there to be multiple vegans to make a difference, then become one. There are hundreds of millions of vegans in the world, so we are not just one person. In the UK, 12% of people are vegetarian or vegan. If you look at the age range of 16-24, that ratio rises to 20%. It is completely worthwhile to do this and we are having an effect on the industries. Imagine if everyone who is vegetarian/vegan started buying animal products again – that would be a giant increase in demand. As such, we are keeping demand down by continuing to avoid animal products.
33 You can’t be 100% vegan in modern society so why bother
At this moment, animals and animal products are used in so many ways that it is near impossible to actually live in a way that avoids using any item, device or vehicle which has no connection with animal exploitation. But that difficulty is no reason to continue to be involved with the things which are extremely easy to avoid, and which form the bulk of demand for animal exploitation. Veganism isn’t about dogmatically and irrationally saying “I am perfect, I harm nothing”. It is about recognising the harm that is being done by our society, and trying to make a change, avoid being part of it – as far as we can. In future, as more and more people go vegan, there will be more and more alternatives developed because research will be put into new technology. Right now we are a minority, so why would giant corporations be saying “Hmm, what can we use in car tyres apart from this small amount of animal ingredients?” But as the world changes, those things will follow, and animal use will continue to decline, so it will be easier to avoid animal use in other areas of life.
34 If everyone went vegan, livestock would overpopulate
Animals are bred by humans for consumption. As more people go vegan, less animals are bred for consumption. As such, if everyone eventually goes vegan (which may not even happen, and if it did, would gradually take place over many years), then animals would no longer be farmed. So their population would not be an issue.
35 If everyone went vegan, livestock would go extinct
Livestock animals have been selectively bred by humans to be of profit to us. They suffer all kinds of health problems because they are bred to be much bigger than their natural ancestors. Continuing to breed them serves no purpose, even if everybody was vegan there would be no logical reason to keep breeding these animals, knowing they will suffer health problems due to the manner of their selective breeding. But even if you disagree with that, and if you really think there should be these selectively bred species for whatever reason – that is no reason to also slit their throats. There are endangered species right now like pandas, tigers, rhinos, and so on. Slitting their throats is no part of their conservation, and to suggest doing so would be ridiculous.
36 Those animals would just be killed in the wild anyway
The suggestion is that vegans want all domesticated animals to be released into the wild. But that’s not what anybody is suggesting. You can’t do that practically because those animals are domesticated, and are not natural breeds, they were selectively bred. So it would be releasing billions of animals into eco systems which would cause so many unknown problems. What vegans want is for animals to stop being bred. It isn’t a question of – either they get eaten by wild animals, or by us. We don’t need to be breeding them at all.
If everyone went vegan, livestock would go extinct
37 You’re putting people out of jobs because of the effect on the industry
Just because a product is available for purchase does not make everybody obliged to buy it. This argument becomes clearly absurd when you apply it to anything else – if you stop smoking, you’ll be putting people out of jobs in the cigarette industry, so everyone has to smoke. Or, if you stop drinking alcohol, you’ll be putting people out of jobs in the alcohol industry, so you have to drink. It makes no sense at all. Industries exist to meet a demand, and to make money from people. If people don’t want those products, then that’s not their fault, consumers are not obliged to buy everything on offer and fund every single industry out there. If consumers’ money is not being spent on one item, it’s being spent on another, which means there will be greater demand elsewhere, so the industries change over time to accommodate what consumers want. It doesn’t mean job loss in the first place.
38 Vegans have no effect on anything
The less people who buy something, the less demand there is. Animals are not being bred and killed regardless of demand. If you have a country of 10 million people, do you think that in a country of 5 million people that the size of the animal farming industy is the same? Of course it isn’t. Likewise, if you have a country of 10 million non-vegans, do you think if that country instead had 5 million vegans and 5 million non-vegans, that the animal farming industry would be the same size? Again, of course not. Shops sell animal products, and then restock appropriately. If something isn’t selling as well, they will order less. As such, the warehouses they stock from will then have appropriately sized orders from those shops, and will stock less ingredients to make those products, which means ordering less animal products from slaughterhouses and farms, which means less demand for animals to be bred in the first place. It’s just simple maths.
39 It’s unsustainable
Over 50 billion animals are raised for slaughter each year. In order to feed them, it takes far more land, water and crops to feed them than it does to just feed us 7 billion humans on plants. The number of animals being farmed is unsustainable in fact, causing all kinds of pollution as a result of their manure and the greenhouse gases released, which is more harmful than all traffic pollution combined. Disagree with me? Please feel free to research it, but it’s by definition going to require additional farming, space, resources, water…
40 It’s unhealthy
You can meet all your requirements on a plant-based diet, there is nothing to fear. Indeed, many athletes take up a plant-based diet specifically because of the benefits.
Check out Julieanna Hever, a vegan dietitian
http://plantbaseddietitian.com/
Check out Dr. Greger, a vegan physician
http://www.veganmd.org
41 Protein
This nutrient is extremely easy to come across. If you are eating the correct RDA of total calories each day, then it is virtually impossible to be short of protein. Deficiency of protein is incredibly rare in modern society, and basically only affects people who are starving for whatever reason. It’s not a concern for those who are eating a normal amount. The world health organization recommends between 5-10% of your daily calories to come from protein. So many common plant-based foods are in excess of that, many fall within that range, and only a few things like fruit fall slightly beneath. This really is not a concern for anybody.
Watch this short video about protein and veganism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m4p8s7xskQ
Read more here:
http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/protein
42 Iron
You can get iron on a plant-based diet, it is in no way exclusive to animal products. Read more here:
http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/iron
43 Calcium
You can get calcium on a plant-based diet, it is in no way exclusive to animal products. Indeed, there are cultures who never had cow’s milk, and there isn’t a wave of osteoporosis. To take cow’s milk requires domestication of animals, and so by definition can only have been achieved relatively recently in human history – prior to that, did we all have osteoporosis? Milk is for infants, it is consumed by mammals during infancy, then there is a weaning process, and in adulthood mammals do not require milk, especially not of another species. If we really needed milk, don’t you think we’d keep on drinking it from our mothers? If that sounds weird, then consider that you’re just drinking from someone else’s mother when you drink cow’s milk – and not even of your own species…. Read more here:
http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/bones
44 B12
B12 is a vitamin which people associate with animal products. The fact is that bacteria produce B12. As such, it becomes a simple question of – are you going to get B12 from the bacteria in isolation, or are you going to exploit and kill billions of animals just to get B12 from the bacteria within their bodies? In addition, a B12 supplement is injected into livestock to keep their levels up due to top soil being too intensively used and lacking in certain nutrients. So the choice becomes even more absurd – either take a B12 supplement, or give an animal a B12 supplement then kill them. Why take the second option? Read more here:
http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/vitaminb12
45 It’s expensive
A plant-based diet can be as affordable as you need it to be. Common staples like bread, rice, pasta, beans, oats, vegetables are all going to be affordable. I have known people personally who have been made homeless who subsequently had to live in accommodation, who continued to be vegan. Indeed, many animal products are expensive. Some might say that vegan substitute meats etc are expensive – and while that can sometimes be true, they are entirely unnecessary for a healthy diet. If you want specific advice, please contact me, or any other vegan group for tips on cheap vegan food, but yes, you can do it!
46 Vegan food is all disgusting
The fact is that a high percentage of foods that everybody eats regularly are vegan. Bread, pasta, rice, cereal, soups, many brands of cookies, chips/crisps, fries, spaghetti, roast vegetables, baked potato, curries, stir fries, many pastries, donuts and so on, can all be vegan without you even realising. To discredit all food that does not contain animal products is ridiculous, come on. But on top of this, with a little research, you can find simple alternatives to anything you want, or just swap out a single ingredient in a recipe and you can continue to eat what you already were pretty much.
You might have tried a brand of non-dairy milk and disliked it – there are hundreds of brands of milks made of different things, almonds, rice, oats etc. Some are sweetened, some are not – but please try them in context. Whether that’s in your cereal or in your coffee, once it’s in there you will find that any difference is negligible. Similarly with any other substitute you may have tried – cheese, meat, anything. There are so many brands, don’t discount them because you had a bad experience.
Some people complain about tofu, saying it is bland. If that is your experience, then honestly it wasn’t prepared properly. If you take a handful of plain flour out of the bag and eat it, you shouldn’t be surprised that it’s disgusting. Does that mean you’re not going to eat bread, bagels, pasta, cakes or noodles anymore because you don’t like plain flour? Of course not. Read up on tofu recipes – or don’t even eat tofu if you really don’t want it. You don’t need it! Find foods that you do like, and eat those!
47 Animals are killed in crop harvesting so vegans kill more animals
To feed animals to the age of slaughter, it requires many times more plants to be harvested than if we just ate plants ourselves. You might argue that we could instead just eat exclusively grass-fed animals who do not require grain, but this is entirely impractical. Firstly, most “grass-fed” animals are not fed 100% grass anyway, and secondly, it’s not sustainable at all to try to feed 7 billion people exclusively on grass-fed beef. There isn’t the space available for such a thing, and good luck living exclusively off beef and nothing else.
Whilst there will be casualties in crop harvesting, and whilst vegans would prefer it not the be the case – it is the least harmful thing most people can do. Obviously, it would be even less harmful to grow your own crops on your own property and pick them by hand, without spraying, and without using machinery which can run down animals. But most people don’t have the space available to do that to feed themselves at all, let alone all year round every year. So out of all practical options available, it is least harmful – and hopefully in future, as people start to have more respect for animals and more accountability for how we treat them, more advances will be made in crop harvesting in ways that minimize casualties.
48 In Australia, grass-fed beef is more ethical than eating wheat
First, do you live in Australia? Because if you don’t then this argument is entirely irrelevant to your situation.
Second, hi, all, who are still reading!
Third, the whole argument being made here is that more animals die specifically in wheat harvesting than if you just ate grass-fed beef. The argument ignores the fact that there are other things to eat besides wheat on a plant-based diet. You could indeed not eat any wheat at all if you wanted, there are many people who already do that for whatever reason, health, allergies or indeed ethics. But on top of this, it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that you’d just be eating grass-fed beef and nothing else. Chickens, turkeys, pigs etc are fed on grains, not on grass, so you’d be just eating beef and no other animal products, and you’d not be eating wheat. Nobody does this in reality, so the claim falls flat. You don’t need to eat wheat if you really are concerned with the practices. You can eat anything else, it doesn’t have to be beef.
49 Plants have feelings
First of all, if you’re really serious about this and no amount of scientific evidence will sway you – then it purely comes down to numbers. If a blade of grass is of the same importance to you as a dog, then it makes no sense to feed up livestock on millions and millions of plants, and then kill the animal to eat. This would result in far more plant casualties, which you’d surely want to avoid as a dedicated plants-rights activist. Better to minimize those plant casualties by just feeding yourself on them, rather than feeding many times more to animals, right?
But let’s be sensible – plants lack brains and lack anything else that neuroscientists know to cause sentience. Some studies show plants to have input/output reactions to certain stimulation, but no study suggests sentience or an ability to “feel emotions”. You can plainly understand the difference between a blade of grass and a dog. Comparisons between the two are completely absurd.
50 Don’t force your opinions on others
First of all, I gave up trying to instigate conversations about animal rights years ago when I was about 10 years old. I realised then that pretty much nobody wanted to be told, and it was more hassle than it was worth and almost always just resulted in indignant arguments and excuses. So if you’re reading this, I can pretty much guarantee that I did not talk to *you* about this. Either I have redirected you here because that’s what you’ve accused me of and I didn’t do it, or somebody else has redirected you here, in which case, I can’t vouch for them and it’s not my responsibility.
But, in either case, even if somebody did start talking to you about veganism, is it really “forcing” their opinion on you? To simply say “please consider not stabbing animals” is a very reasonable suggestion, is it not? Nobody is in a position to “force” you to do anything, if you want to keep stabbing animals, I am not in a position to prevent you.
Indeed, from a non-vegans perspective, your opinion is that animals should be stabbed in the neck. To me, that is a far more forceful application of an opinion than simply asking someone to re-evaluate their position on something politely.
51 Stop judging me
To offer an alternative to animal abuse is not to judge you. Indeed, if somebody is talking to you about the subject, it should suggest to you that they think that you *do* care about animals, and so their judgement of you is positive – they are saying “Surely you wouldn’t want to be involved with this?”. If they had a negative judgement of you, they wouldn’t even bother with you, and would assume you have no compassion for animals, which surely isn’t true right?
52 A vegan was rude to me once
Sometimes people are rude. This is nothing to do with veganism – anybody could be rude, vegan or otherwise. If a man is rude to you, do you have a problem with all men? If a person of a particular ethnicity is rude to you, do you have a problem with everybody of that ethnicity? Of course not. The actions or behaviour of a single vegan should not encourage you to dismiss veganism. Veganism is just wanting to avoid hurting animals. Why would you want to hurt animals just because someone was rude to you? I am not saying that anybody should be rude to you, it’s not justified. But don’t let it cloud the issue.
53 Vegans are closed-minded
Most people are not born vegan. I wasn’t. I was raised in ignorance of what goes on in animal agriculture, especially regarding egg and milk production. When I learned more, I had an open mind, and took accountability. And I continue to do that today. Veganism is actually about being open to new information, rather than ignoring it and trying to feel blameless.
54 I read about this couple who were vegan and they killed their baby
The reason that baby died is because of starvation. Veganism isn’t about starvation or malnutrition. Just because a family abused their child, doesn’t mean that it reflects on everybody else who is vegan. Likewise, there are non-vegans who starved their children to death. That has nothing to do with every other non-vegan either. These stories get hyped because the media has whatever agenda they want. In a story where a non-vegan starves their child, it won’t say “Meat-eaters starve child!” will it? But if a vegan does it, that gets brought up, even though it’s nothing to do with it. They didn’t starve their child *because* they are vegan.
55 Hitler was vegetarian
There is evidence to suggest that he wasn’t. But let’s just skip all that and pretend that he was a vegetarian for the sake of your argument. Presumably the point is, anything that Hitler did, we should all do the opposite. That obviously makes no sense, because as hideous as Hitler was and what he did to jews and other minorities, it does not mean that every single action he did can be compared to that or is even related.
In addition, why are we singling out Hitler? If you look at all dictators, serial killers, rapists, and tyrants throughout history, you can be sure that the vast majority are actually meat-eaters. So if the behaviour of heinous criminals dictates that you do the opposite, then why are you ignoring all of them and only talking about Hitler?
56 You get your companion animals euthanized, that’s the same
When an animal is suffering horribly, and you can see that their quality of life is reduced to zero, and a medical professional tells you that there is no hope of recovery and that every moment is a misery, then it makes total sense to have that animal put to death under anaesthetic and with a lethal injection.
By comparison, taking a completely healthy animal at a few months old and killing them because you feel like eating their dead body, makes no sense at all if you claim to have any consideration for animals. There is no comparison to be made here.
Put yourself in this position – you are suffering horribly and you know you will never survive. Would you consider taking death? Maybe. But if you’re living your life in your youth, would you consider it as even remotely comparable to just being murdered because someone felt like it? No.
Yeah but some animals are to be killed some aren’t
57We have to test on animals to make sure cosmetics are safe
At this stage, we have pretty sound knowledge of so much in chemistry, most research is redundant actually and is only going on in the same way because of outdated laws stating that it must take place. It’s essentially ridiculous bureaucracy perpetuating what is clearly unethical at this time. Many products are no longer tested on animals, some countries have outlawed it entirely for cosmetics, and it is no problem. There are alternatives to animal testing.
58 We have to test on animals to make medical advances
Many people like to make the argument that X people will die unless we experiment on Y animals, therefore it’s justified as human life is more important, and if you outlaw animal testing then you have essentially just killed X people.
It isn’t as simple as that, because actually animal testing has alternatives. Companies like http://www.drhadwentrust.org are working to continue medical research, without having to torture, exploit and kill animals.
There is another question – is animal testing even useful to us, as we are very different to animals? Read more here to learn more.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aysha-akhtar/why-animal-experimentatio_b_3997568.html
59 But would you use medicine to save your life?
I don’t know because I’ve never been in that situation, but it is highly likely that I would, yes. Putting me in a position where I would actually die, means that my decision making is going to be based around survival, probably to the exclusion of others entirely. Put a gun to my head, I might do anything which I’d otherwise say is unethical, to avoid being shot. That does not make the action ethical outside those circumstances.
On another note, if a cure already exists, then not using it on principle because of the way it was discovered, it’s questionable in terms of its effect on anything. It might make a good final statement before you die from the condition if you could get news coverage, but ultimately I think it’s understandable to take that cure to save your life because of the situation.
But, if we look at it in terms of ongoing research on these animals, if you have a condition and at the time there is no cure – would you volunteer your companion animals to be tortured and then killed as part of the research? Or would you say, they are nothing to do with it, and you’d rather accept your situation than have them experience hell so you can potentially find a cure? I know that I wouldn’t want it to happen. But luckily, it is not an either/or situation because there are alternatives to animal testing like http://www.drhadwentrust.org
60 I’m a nihilist. I don’t care about anything apart from myself
I find that highly unlikely. But even if that is true, a plant-based diet has many health benefits, and animal products are linked with all kinds of health problems. In addition, animal farming is not sustainable and will have to come to an end as the human population expands, it’s simply illogical to feed billions of animals as well as ourselves. We don’t have the space to do it. The vast overpopulation of these animals is also harming the environment, poisoning water with manure, and releasing tonnes and tonnes of greenhouse gases. So this will affect you directly, as selfish as you claim to be, it makes sense to look after yourself doesn’t it?
61 Yeah but what do you feed your pets? I win
Whatever a person chooses to feed their companion animals has absolutely nothing to do with what they choose to eat themselves, and what else they choose to boycott. So whether or not you feel that your companion animals require meat to live healthily should have no impact on whether you buy animal products outside of that.
There are only two ways of looking at it. If you feel that your companion animal does not need meat to survive, and that there are alternatives that would allow them to live absolutely healthily – then it just makes sense to do that. But if you disagree, and you feel that it’s 100% necessary to feed them meat, then in order to care for that animal you’d have to do that. The alternative is ridding yourself of that animal, which most people wouldn’t want to do.
Fundamentally, these domesticated animals are being bred for our enjoyment, and then once they’re born, they can create a burden on the meat industry. The breeding of the animals in the first place is the core of the problem. That should stop, and I encourage people never to buy from a breeder. Adopt from a shelter. That way you are not contributing to the overpopulation of domestic animals in need of a home.
62 There are wars going on / people starving in the world
Wars and starvation are terrible – but they are not aided by you funding animal abuse, and so I fail to see the relevance. In fact, as it requires more crops and resources in general to farm animals, it could be argued that it is more wasteful and therefore more harmful to those starving, to be using the earth’s resources in this manner when it’s entirely unnecessary and could be better used.
63 Yeah but sweat shops and slave labour
Funding animal abuse does not help those stuck in slave labour, or working in sweat shop conditions. It’s a separate issue, and the fact that anybody funds slavery or sweat shops does not mean you must also fund animal abuse.
But, if you are against slavery and slave labour, it makes sense to also avoid funding them when possible. Many people seem to have the attitude of “well all kinds of bad things are going on in the world, so I give up”. That attitude doesn’t help anyone. Take responsibility for what you’re doing, and find alternatives where you can, if you feel strongly about these subjects. Buy second hand clothes and second hand technology where you can, so you don’t fund these practices. Buy items manufactured in your country where slave labour is illegal. Look into companies which are working in other countries to help those who are being exploited, offering them fair employment.
64 Vegan Sidekick’s comics are inaccurate / offensive
The comics are not a representation of every single person who is not vegan. Each comic deals with a particular explanation for animal abuse which vegans frequently hear and deal with, or shows what happens in animal agriculture. Nowhere on any of my images do I call anybody stupid, dumb, a monster etc. I just show what certain people say, and how certain people defend what goes on. If you think that what happens in animal agriculture is stupid and monstrous, then it’s your call to stop supporting it.
If you have never said anything that is depicted in a single one of my comics – then they surely aren’t about you.
I have non-vegan friends, they follow my page, understand what I am saying, and don’t take offense. They’ve never said this stuff to me. But, there are many people who do say these things, and my images attempt to show the absurdity of defending animal abuse.
Yeah but it doesn’t harm animals to kill them
65 Yeah but there are other ways to promote veganism, this is ineffective
The Vegan Sidekick comics exist to make people laugh and reconsider their position. Some people will not find it funny, some people won’t connect at all. There is no form of outreach which is 100% effective – if there was, then that’s what everyone would be doing. I know that the comics do have an impact, because I keep getting people writing to me to say they’ve gone vegan after really thinking about it since seeing the comics. I make them this way so they’re accessible and simple.
But more importantly – if you aren’t vegan and you’re trying to tell me how best to get the message across – then just tell me what to say to you, and I’ll say it back, and then you’ll go vegan right? 🙂
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Twist turn rationalize
We the humane see through
All your lies
Amazon Fires Aug 15-22. NASA/Earth Observatory, Source Sentient Media
The Amazon Rainforest is burning and the world is finally paying attention.
The rates of deforestation have been soaring under the new far-right government and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who sees the Amazon as not much more than an opportunity to raise more cattle and plant more soy.
In fact, Bolsonaro joked in an interview with Reuters saying “I used to be called Captain Chainsaw. Now I am Nero, setting the Amazon aflame.”
Bolsonaro, who has promised to bring prosperity to the people by ruling with the iron fist that is popular among populists, has been doubling down on agriculture, the strongest performing sector in Brazil in recent years. It is this economic interest combined with a complete disregard for the environment that is now burning down the rainforest.
The Amazon, unlike many other forest types, rarely burns naturally even in the dry season. There are many indicators that the majority of the fires have been started intentionally. Folha da Progresso reported that farmers and ranchers in the state of Pará had organized a “fire day” for August 10th to start clearing the land.
According to Inpe, the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, fires in the Amazon have increased 84% in comparison to the same time period back in 2018, before Bolsonaro took office. Infamously, Bolsonaro has discredited the data, up to the satellite imagery showing the extent of the damage. He fired Ricardo Galvão, the head of the agency last week because he claims the agency is trying to undermine the government by publishing fake news.
Meanwhile, the smoke from the fires is reaching as far as São Paulo, 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) away, darkening the daytime skies.
The Amazon is being cleared to grow soybeans. That soy is almost exclusively harvested and exported to feed livestock on factory farms around the world, an easy and cheap way to feed animals and get them fat for slaughter quickly.
It is the world’s appetite for beef that is fuelling the fires in the Amazon.
Bolsonaro may not be to blame for every single fire that’s burning in the Amazon, but it is now easier for cattle ranchers and loggers to get away with criminal arson when they know that their current government is not going to step in.
With the current international attention being drawn towards the catastrophe, Bolsonaro announced a “zero tolerance” towards environmental crimes and said the army would be deployed to fight the fires. But he never wavers from his line that the Amazon is Brazil’s to do as they please and to provide for “economic opportunities” for the population. He has said numerous times in the past that the Amazon needs to be privatized and exploited in coordination with major industries and other countries in order to turn larger profits.
There is no overstating how much less Bolsonaro cares for the environment – let alone the global climate – than he does for short-term gains in productivity of the exploitative industries that supported his rise to power. And it is crucial to understand that while the regime favors developing land for production, up to 80% of the deforestation going on is illegal, even under the country’s own current laws, but the government is turning a blind eye to this. Earlier this year, the military police detail that this far accompanied the inspectors looking for violations was removed. This makes the work of inspectors so dangerous that it might as well be impossible to monitor the vast rural areas of Brazil.
Jair Bolsonaro does not take the threat of climate crisis seriously or the mounting evidence that the Amazon Rainforest may be reaching a tipping point of runaway deforestation as the region’s ecosystem falls out of balance: mega-droughts alternating with major flooding. He infamously stated that if people want to make a positive change for the environment, they should “poop every other day” instead of on a daily basis.
Why is the forest being cleared in the first place? Logging, mining, and cattle ranching are often mentioned, but this doesn’t get to the root of the problem. Mining, first of all, does not take large amounts of land compared to the other types of natural exploitation. Cattle ranching needs much more land, but while Brazil is infamous for producing livestock and beef cows, it is not even ranching that is really driving the current momentum. Logging has traditionally been thought of as the scourge of forests, but logging makes a quick buck, and then you’re left with a lot of cleared land (also, if you’re planning on exploiting the timber in a forest, burning the trees doesn’t really make sense). So what’s going on, really?
The Amazon is being cleared to grow soybeans. That soy is almost exclusively harvested and exported to feed livestock on factory farms around the world, an easy and cheap way to feed animals and get them fat for slaughter quickly.
It is the world’s appetite for beef that is fuelling the fires in the Amazon.
While most soy typically comes from different areas of Brazil, most notably the Cerrado region, that doesn’t mean that planting soy in the Amazon doesn’t happen. And with a government that encourages the exploitation of nature to turn a profit and a soy-hungry China increasing their demand for Brazilian livestock feed, it’s no surprise that the Amazon is burning.
Bloomberg reported on August 15th that China has increased purchases of Brazilian soybeans after freezing the US trade of the crops. In tandem, Argentinian farmers have been holding back on sales due to currency instability. That leaves the giant, Brazil.
2019 started off with a decrease in Chinese imports of Brazilian soy, a 13% drop in the first four months from the previous year. However, as Washington and Beijing continued fighting and have been unable to work around the bickering between leaders, the demand from China has increased. If it wasn’t for the African Swine Fever having reportedly infected and killed as much as a quarter of China’s pigs being grown for pork, Chinese demand for feed could be even higher.
The environmental catastrophe is ringing the alarm bells in Europe where countries in the G7 summit in France have planned for both carrot and stick to Brazil. Any sanctions or demands may throw a wrench in the near-concluded Mercosur negotiations between the EU and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. France and Ireland have already declined to sign the Mercosur contract if the Amazon fires are not curbed. If that happens, then Brazil will increasingly be aligned with China buying its crops to feed the meat-hungry population.
With these dynamics, the European Union may yet find itself in a power position. For the remainder of 2019, the Presidency of the European Council is with Finland, and the country is pursuing an EU-wide ban on Brazilian beef. The Commission is expected to take action later this week.
The world is finally waking up to the existential planetary risk that animal agriculture poses. It is not just the climate emissions, or deforestation, or disruption of the water cycles. It is an ecosystem-destroying combination of all of these things, critically demonstrated by the Amazon Rainforest fires. Whether or not they will be put out in time, the Earth will not have dodged the bullet yet.
What can you do to help? You can donate to charities working to control and mitigate the damage. You can share this article and the linked resources. And you can stop eating meat.
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You are the heart of our earth
The flowing blood of all
That we keep
Now,
We weep.
You are the heart of our lives
Each breath each step
Each moment
before
You are the everything
That makes everything
Fall into place
The sun in the darkness
You light our earthspace.
You are the essence
The center
We must find a way
To honor and keep
With us forever
And
A
Day.
Our amazon.
Photo by David Taffet, Source Free From Harm
Slaughterhouses prey on the most vulnerable beings in our society; this includes not only the billions of helpless animals trapped in our violent food system, but also millions of vulnerable humans trapped in the only jobs they can secure. What many don’t know is that slaughterhouses deliberately and knowingly employ — often even recruit — high rates of undocumented workers in order to fill low-paying jobs that entail such undignified and dangerous working conditions, and require such horrific routine violence toward animals, that only humans in the most vulnerable and desperate of circumstances will typically take them.
The recent ICE raids in Mississippi are a devastating case in point. For the 700 undocumented workers arrested by ICE at chicken slaughterhouses across Mississippi, “the trouble is just beginning,” writes Gaby Del Valle. “They don’t just have to fight to stay in the country. They also need to figure out how to afford rent, bills, and groceries for their families while they wait for their cases to be completed. That could take months or even years.”
In 2013, an estimated 38 percent of slaughterhouse workers were born outside the U.S. According to author Mark Hawthorne, most of these are economic refugees in desperate circumstances, usually with families to feed, “and the ever-present threat of deportation keeps many of them, for whom even a bad job is a job, silent and disempowered… they do not understand they have rights, such as workers’ compensation benefits to cover work-related injuries.”
Dr. Michelle Martin, professor of Social Work at California State University, asserts that as many as 70% of the roughly 2.5 million farm workers in the U.S. are estimated to be undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants who were recruited by U.S. agricultural companies from across the border:
“Most undocumented Mexican immigrants came to the United States about 15 to 20 years ago during what’s called the “Chicken Boom” – a time when people cut back on eating red meat and started eating more chicken…
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A bloodsoaked broken metaphor
For the all too many horrors
That we abhor
2018 marked the 20th anniversary of the first We Animals photo and a year of tremendous achievement in the world of animal photojournalism.
We Animals Media Mission
We Animals Media recognizes the invisibility of animals in our world and seeks to give their lives and stories a place in the public conscience.
Through compelling photography, journalism, and filmmaking, We Animals Media illuminates the lives of animals used for food, fashion, entertainment, work, religion, and experimentation. We are committed to telling these stories through an empathic lens – collectively widening our circle of compassion to include all animals.
We Animals Media also seeks to mentor the next generation of media makers, create bridges between social movements, and inspire solutions that will result in a kinder and healthier world for all.
Thousands of photographs and videos are available to individuals, organizations, and media outlets around the world via our We Animals Archive.
See more
Our Work
We Animals Archive
Learning
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Our world could really be an eden
A magic place where other species
Are not eaten.
An orb of beauty, hope,
Peace and feelings.
Time is now to
Start the healing
Please watch, not “physically” graphic: Watch this baby fight to get back to his mother. Source Kinder World, YouTube
“It would be funny,” writes Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, “if it weren’t so sad – to continually witness how desperately we try to paint a happy picture of what is inherently violent and utterly unnecessary.
Exploit females’ reproductive systems and breed them at our will, but look! They’re happy! Take away their babies, but look! They’re happy! Take the milk of the females and kill them when they’re no longer “profitable,” but look! They’re happy!
The nutrients we need are plant-based; we get calcium from cows’ milk because they eat calcium-rich greens. We can stop going through the “middle cow” and go directly to the source ourselves: calcium-rich greens.
And we skip the saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, animal protein, and lactose, which we’re not supposed to be consuming into adulthood anyway! We’re supposed to be weaned – just like the calves get weaned – and move onto solid foods. We don’t drink our own human milk into adulthood, and we – just like every other animal on the planet – have NO physiological need for human OR non-human milk once we’re weaned.
When we stop trying to go backwards and actually move forwards, we’ll stop seeing desperate attempts to make the ugly palatable. I look forward to that day.”
Profitable dairy production depends on a constant cycle of forcibly impregnating cows to keep them at peak lactation, then stealing the calves for whom the milk is intended, typically within the first few hours of birth. Many dairy farmers like to say that mother cows don’t care if their calves are taken, but off the record, workers report that cows cry and search desperately for their stolen babies. Researchers who have studied cow-calf relationships in semi-wild herds and in domestic cattle observe the same pattern: the strongest and most lasting social bonds among cows are between mothers and their offspring, and these relationships persist long after the calves have matured.
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a mother is a heart that beats a soul that lasts a life that cares a silent comfort only she can give.
a mother is not defined by blood but by the nurturing blanket that is she.
There are more chickens than any other farmed animal on the planet. Their suffering on intensive farms continues to be widely exposed, yet the free-range broiler industry has been relatively hidden from scrutiny. Until now…
Animal Justice Project spent three months inside free-range and so-called ‘high welfare’ broiler chicken farms. It is a shocking reminder that you can’t trust The RSPCA, Red Tractor, the government, or the supermarkets when it comes to protecting animals.
We filmed day-old chicks being thrown out of crates from four foot in the air and onto the hard floor.
On the same day, the worker walked through the shed, kicking and treading on chicks as she walked. Our cameras documented a baby chick suffering for over eight hours on the floor before finally succumbing to its injuries. Chicks who were found by the worker were killed by having their necks broken on feeder lines.
In one week alone, almost 500 chicks died. Chicks often die within the first few days at farms due to stress, neglect or maltreatment.
We found lame and injured chickens in the sheds during the investigation – some of whom were left to die over a period of days which indicates negligence by workers, going against Red Tractor standards. One bird we found had been clearly left stuck inside a feeder for some time. Our investigators said that she appeared to have “grown into it”. We filmed birds dehydrated, exhausted, and clearly in a lot of pain. It is standard on chicken farms to kill sick birds – none are afforded medical treatment. Birds on the farms we visited were forgotten amid careless and insufficient “welfare checks” by workers, whilst dead, lame, deformed, injured and dying birds lay on the shed floor. Workers were filmed daily on their phones, sitting down, and urinating on shed floors when they should have been health checking the birds. One lame and clearly sick chicken was left to suffer for at least two days, unable to access food and water, before finally dying.
The RSPCA Assured Guidelines state birds must be given access to natural light as soon as possible and at least within seven days.
During the entire 28 days chickens were inside one farm we visited, no natural light was provided. The RSPCA state that chickens should have natural daylight from at least seven days old. On the converse, periods of 6-12 hours of darkness must also be given yet our cameras revealed that the artificial lighting was kept on for a period of over 52 hours, which also counters Red Tractor standards. This means chickens are not able to adequately rest.
Keeping lights on unnaturally stimulates chickens to eat more food and grow even faster.
Chickens were afforded scattered wooden structures and bales of chopped straw (often left still in their plastic wrapping). Food and water sources were broken or contaminated with sodden litter and ‘enrichment’ was in the form of old plastic bottles hanging on feeder lines, some with ‘cola’ drink still inside.
This is a huge contrast to the picture painted by Red Tractor, The RSPCA and other ‘high welfare’ labels.
Inadequate enrichment means chickens – who are highly sensitive and intelligent animals – become bored, frustrated and unable to carry out natural behaviours. This can lead to an epidemic of feather pecking inside sheds.
The ‘slow growing breeds’ on the farms we documented – in other words chickens that go to slaughter at around nine weeks – are promoted as being ‘high welfare’ by NGOs and the industry alike, but still suffer the same health problems as faster-growing breeds. They experience lameness, heart problems, leg deformities and hock burns.
As birds grow, the sheds become even more crowded. Excrement and burning ammonia levels rise. The increasing concentration of ammonia causes respiratory, skin and hock burns. The litter, which should be kept fresh, quickly became heavily soiled and damp. The inability of birds to find clean, fresh bedding caused them to lay in their own faeces, which causes the health problems mentioned.
During the investigation, one worker carried up to a dozen injured and sick live chickens upside down in his hands by their legs as he walked through the sheds before finally breaking their necks and throwing them still conscious onto the floor. These chickens were not checked afterwards to see if they were still alive which is against RSPCA Assured Guidelines. We filmed birds convulsing on the ground, flapping around in circles. One worker even threw a live but seriously impaired chicken into a bucket of his urine.
High welfare’, free-range and organic chickens are not transported any differently to standard intensively-reared birds. We do not believe our investigation shows anything out-of-the-ordinary with regards to the extreme abuse and cruelty towards chickens being caught for slaughter.
The catching of chickens caught on our cameras was disturbing and abhorrent.
Workers grabbed many birds by their feet before throwing them into crates so hard they were pushed out of the top. Chickens had their heads, legs and wings trapped which would have caused great distress and likely severe injuries. The stress continued as workers kicked, swore at and yelled at the chickens who desperately fought to upright themselves and escape the crowded plastic crates. All in full view of others waiting for their turn. Both RSPCA Assured and Red Tractor guidelines were broken with regards to sound levels being kept to a minimum and just a few workers, 4,750 chickens were caught in one hour – there was nothing “humane” happening at these speeds.
After an agonising ordeal of being thrown into plastic crates, the crates were forklifted out. The uneven shed floor caused crates to knock around, further prolonging the chickens’ stress. Around 45 birds have been crammed into each crate at the farm we filmed at.
After the horrendous and terrifying ordeal, the chickens were transported in a large lorry to Traditional Norfolk Poultry where they will be gassed to death. Transportation is highly stressful for chickens, especially when they have been injured by catching teams like those we filmed at the RSPCA Assured farm.
A brutal and shocking end for ‘high welfare’ chickens.
This is The Foul Truth.
‘Higher welfare’, free-range chickens lead stressful and painful lives. The Foul Truth is an industrialised secret; it is 100% Harm Assured. YOU can help us end this abuse: Broaden your compassion to ALL animals by choosing vegan!
Whether factory-farmed, free-range or organic, we can guarantee it is 100% Harm Assured.
Choose Compassion. Choose Vegan!
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animals are here WITH us, not for us.
wake up humans because soon there
will be no more us!!!
Source Free From Harm
We’re taught to think of animals raised for food — if we think of them at all — as an abstract category: “farm animals”— the nameless, faceless herds and flocks whose generic characteristics are merely recycled through an endless stream of indistinct entities. But farmed animals are individuals with unique personalities and emotions, just like cats and dogs. They feel joy, affection, and pleasure, as well as fear, grief, and pain. Like us, they form deep friendships and emotional bonds and like us they seek to preserve their only lives, which they cherish.
It is a common misconception that animals are not harmed in the production of eggs and dairy. In fact, the egg and dairy industries cause enormous suffering and kill billions of hens and baby chicks, and millions of cows and calves, every year.
In nature, wild hens lay only 12 to 20 eggs per year. But domesticated chickens have been genetically manipulated to produce between 250 and 300 eggs annually, leading to painful and often fatal reproductive disorders. More than 95% of chickens used for eggs are confined in cages so small they cannot even spread their wings, and the majority of “cage-free” and “free range” eggs come from miserable hens packed inside filthy warehouses by the thousands. Most hens used for eggs have a portion of their beaks painfully cut off to prevent nervous pecking in overcrowded conditions, and at the hatcheries where new hens are hatched to be sent to egg farms — including humane label farms, small farms, and backyard hen operations — 6 billion male chicks are destroyed every year by being suffocated or ground up alive.
Similarly, all dairy farming depends on the exploitation of female reproduction, and on the destruction of motherhood. Like all mammals, cows only make milk to feed their babies. On dairy farms, including small and humane label farms, calves are permanently removed from their mothers within hours of birth so that humans can take the milk intended for them. Male calves are slaughtered for veal or raised for cheap beef. Female calves spend their first 2 to 3 months of life isolated in lonely hutches, with no maternal nurturing during the time they seek it most.
Hens used for eggs and cows used for milk are also slaughtered when their production declines, at only a fraction of their natural lifespans.
Learn more about the hidden harms of eggs and dairy, even on so-called humane farms, at our features Eggs: What Are you Really Eating? and 10 Dairy Facts the Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know.
A well-balanced vegan diet can easily provide all the nutrients we need to thrive. Government health experts worldwide are finally catching up with the large body of scientific evidence demonstrating that a vegan diet is not only a viable option for people of any age, but that eating plant foods instead of animal-based foods can confer significant health benefits, including reduction in incidence of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attack, stroke, and some types of cancer.
In their official position paper on vegetarian and vegan diets, the American Dietetic Association— the U.S.’s oldest, largest and foremost authority on diet and nutrition— states that well-balanced vegan diets “are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases,” and that they are “appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”
Learn more at our features Catching Up With Science: Burying the “Humans Need Meat” Argument and Vegan Diets: Sorting Through the Nutritional Myths.
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ALL lives matter
ALL have a right to live
animals are our heartbeats
and each beat has so much
to give!
Over the last few decades, there has been an general increase in our compassion towards other animals. Animal-exploiting industries have tried to capitalize on our empathy and awareness by attempting to sell us the myth of humane animal exploitation.
The very existence of the concepts of “humane slaughter” and “humane animal products” is testimony to the increasing awareness about nonhuman welfare and suffering. Industries are responding to the fact that more and more humans are starting to care about other animals. However, this form of exploitation, however “humane,” falls short of providing any meaningful welfare reforms to enslaved animals for the reasons discussed below.
Even if we assume that some exploiters treat nonhuman animals compassionately before killing them, it does not make the concept any less cruel. Imagine a guardian or a parent killing a human child after giving them a very happy life – would we consider that humane? Killing someone who trusts you to take provide them care and love is a violation of that trust. “Humane slaughter” is not loving or kind, it’s betrayal.
Speciesism, like other forms of bigotry and discrimination, is unjust and unethical. If we would not enslave humans for food, there is no rational reason to do it to beings of other species. All sentient beings deserve the right to not be treated as objects.
Multiple investigations into “humane farms” have shown widespread cruelty and abuse. It is very clear that many corporations use the humane myth to exploit our empathy and compassion towards other animals. If corporations really cared about animals, they would completely stop exploiting them for food.
The root cause of animal abuse in “farms,” labs, circuses, and zoos is that animals are there in the first place. Whenever we see other animals as commodities to be used, abuse naturally follows. Why should we expect animal exploiters to be kind to those they profit off of? Why should we expect anything but abuse from those who imprison and murder animals?
Animals are sentient beings who want to live free with their friends and family. There simply isn’t a humane way of killing someone who does not want to die. And there isn’t a humane way of enslaving someone who wants to be free. Animals deserve more than “humane” exploitation. All animals deserve to be happy, safe, and free.
We can keep trying to find right ways to do the wrong thing or we can reject nonhuman exploitation completely. The answer to the widespread and systemic abuse of animals does not lie in bigger cages, longer chains, or larger tanks; it lies in the absolute rejection of nonhuman commodification. It lies in the total liberation of nonhumans animals.
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just by its definition
exploitation is not humane
and anyone who thinks so
is really quite insane!!!!
A sign posted inside the farm read, “What happens in the barn, stays in the barn,” an explicit reminder of the industry’s aversion to transparency.
At 6 a.m. on Sunday, April 28, a group of 50 Meat the Victims animal rights activists entered Excelsior Hog Farm, owned and operated by a board member of the British Columbia Pork Producers Association in Canada. Once activists were inside, Meat the Victims organizers reported that the facility promptly went on lockdown. The activists didn’t budge. They stayed to bear witness, pleading with farmers to help the distressed animals, many of which were found pregnant and dehydrated.
Meat the Victims protests are part of the animal rights movement’s effort to create more transparency and accountability in the animal agriculture industry, not just in Canada, but the United States, Australia, Britain, and anywhere there are farm animals suffering. Check out footage of the unprecedented demonstration at Excelsior Hog Farm here.
Nearly 200 animal rights activists gathered outside of an industry-leading pig farm in an industry-leading country: to bring awareness to the crimes of animal agriculture. On the back of the shirts worn by the demonstrators, Meat the Victims adorned this simple truth, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
In a sweeping act of defiance, activists can be seen sprinting past the “No Trespassing” signs and attempting to gain access to the pig farm. In doing so, they put themselves at certain risk of facing criminal trespassing and breaking and entering charges. “That’s okay,” said Amy Soranno, a spokesperson for the group of activists who made it inside the facility. “We’re challenging the law. That’s what we came here to do.”
Soranno was later taken into custody. The rest of the activists walked peacefully off the property, many with tears streaming down their faces, holding peace signs and white flowers in their hands.
Excelsior Hog Farm is located in Abbotsford, British Columbia, a community that earns a higher dollar per acre of agricultural land than any other city in Canada. More than 1,000 pigs are currently being held at the facility.
The following excerpt is from a statement released by Meat the Victims activists (May 4, 2019):
“Once we arrived at the farm and began filing out of buses, we could hear dogs barking and sirens blazing in the distance,” stated a Meat The Victims participant. The group jogged down a long path, heading for the back of the farm, stating what they saw when they arrived was just the beginning of a “horrific nightmare.” “The first thing we saw was dumpsters full of dead rotting pig carcasses, my heart was racing, and hands were shaking, I didn’t have any fear of being caught, but was so terrified of what we were about to witness inside.” Due to the secrecy of animal agriculture, many people have never seen inside an industrial animal farm. The group’s goal was to bring the truth to light.
Soon after the group arrived, around 140 activists formed a protest outside of the facility, and 65 activists (fully dressed in biosecurity suits, masks, and booties) attempted to go inside. Of the 65 activists, 50 successfully gained access into the farm. “As I stepped inside, at first all I saw was darkness, but as my eyes adjusted, I began to see hundreds of eyes curiously looking at me, my stomach sunk.”
The activists inside occupied a room full of gestation crates. “Gestation crates are used to immobilize pregnant pigs for weeks on end,” stated an activist, continuing “we occupied an entire row of crates and documented the animals’ heartbreaking existence. The air was nauseating, the concrete slatted floors were cold and filthy, many of the pigs could barely fit into the crates–with their legs, tails, and noses hanging out, pushed against the metal bars. All of these pigs had various cuts and sores, and were conducting unnatural repetitive behaviors, showing signs of insanity.” At least one pig appeared to be lying in a pool of her own blood, with a severely bruised face, and the group witnessed a pig having a miscarriage. “The hundreds of pregnant mothers had a variety of different markings spray painted on their bodies, one row of females in particular really struck me–the pigs were all facing the concrete wall, unable to turn around,” stated an activist.
“This just goes to show that there is no right way to do the wrong thing. This farm is as good as it gets.”
The activists refused to leave the facility until the owner of the farm agreed to allow accredited media inside, to which the farm eventually agreed. Based on information passed between the outside and inside groups, the media tour was delayed by three hours while the farm cleaned-up specific areas and decided who would be allowed in. Eventually, five out of the 11 news outlets were approved. The investigative outlet The Intercept and CTV News were of the group who were removed from the tour. We had full bio suits available for anyone entering the barn, but the farmers were not concerned about this. Therefore media, farmers, police, and even the vet went in without any protection.
Throughout this delay, activists begged the farm to help the most distressed animals. “In exchange for immediate veterinary care, we agreed to leave the gestation room, but the vets who arrived only took a brief look at any animals,” stated an activist who was inside. The activists also pleaded with the farmers to give the pigs water, of which their trough was empty upon the activist’s arrival. “These pregnant pigs were so dehydrated, desperately nudging their trough and frothing at the mouth.” The farmers eventually agreed to give the pigs water.
The media tour went roughly as the Pork Producers Association wanted it to go, but nothing could hide the cruel reality of animal agriculture. Excelsior hog farm is owned and operated by a board member of the BC Pork Producers Association, and Excelsior is considered an industry leader. “This just goes to show that there is no right way to do the wrong thing,” stated an activist. “This farm is as good as it gets.”
A sign posted inside read, “What happens in the barn, stays in the barn,” an explicit reminder of the industry’s aversion to transparency.
Since the negotiations had been met, the group of activists inside agreed to leave. The police informed them that they were all under arrest for trespassing and breaking and entering and that they could possibly be charged eventually, but would otherwise be free to go.
“We celebrated our accomplishments,” stated one of the activists. “But none of us will forget those we left behind.”
Read Sentient Media’s breaking news coverage from Excelsior Hog Farm.
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pigs are pigs but man is the swine!
For its third consecutive year, animal liberation groups around the world have coordinated the release of a brand new video giving you a look into the growing movement for animal rescue – and introducing you to nine animals whose lives have just changed forever.
See more:
Blog
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can you feel our hearts
see our fear
as in sorrow
we sit here
can you see our lives
broken and shattered
will you save us
ALL lives matter
On June 4th, 2019, ARM released disturbing footage of one of its most grueling factory farm investigations to date. Initiating in 2018, an ARM undercover investigator captured surveillance evidence of the systematic and horrific animal abuse that is occurring at the Fair Oaks Farm’s Dairy Farm Adventures, located in Indiana, USA.
Owned and operated by Mike and Sue McCloskey, under the Fair Life Corporation, Fair Oaks Farms not only stands as one of the largest dairy farm corporations in the United States, but it has also repeatedly and publicly, prided itself as ‘acting as a window to the agriculture world’ by providing complete transparency into the everyday operations of a dairy farm.
Every year, Fair Oak Farms educates millions of people and provides public tours of the entire process dairy process of farm to table. On the Fair Life website, it states that (the animals are) “Always in Good Hands”. Despite these claims, ARM revealed what it considers to be, the first realistic and honest audit of the Fair Oaks Farm and Fair Life Corporation’s operations, including the daily mistreatment of the resident farm animals. Information that has been hidden from the public.
ARM’s investigation of Fair Oaks Farms Dairy Adventures also exposed a connection to the cruel and inhumane veal industry where male calves are transported to locations in North Manchester from Fair Oaks Farms.
Fair Oaks Farms is one of several dairies belonging to Select Milk Producers Inc, who is also the producer of the Fairlife label. Fair Life and Coco-Cola additionally have a joint venture with Select Milk including Fair Life Milk, Core Power and YUP dairy products which are sold in major grocery chains nationwide.
Click HERE to read ARM’s Entire report to learn more about the animal cruelty and abuse that the dairy cows of Fair Oaks Farms are subjected to on a daily basis (or see below).
As consumers, you can make your voices heard by contacting Fair Oaks Farms, Publix and Coca Cola and demand that these products, and companies cease supporting this incredibly cruel treatment upon dairy cows.
One of the most significant ways that the public can contribute to change in this industry is to choose plant-based choices and discontinue the consumption of dairy products.
Click HERE for dairy-free alternatives.
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please we pray
pain go away
we want to live
another day.
ALL animals facing slaughter
Why do we hide our heads in the sand when we get confronted with a challenging reality? Ed explores what truths we hide from ourselves by drawing on his experience as a documentary maker and activist. Ed Winters or “Earthling Ed” devotes his life to be a voice for the voiceless as an animal rights activist. He went from a meat-eater to vegan, and as a social media phenomenon, regular visitor on major new channels such as BBC, he advocates for animals using discussion and debate.
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we try to hide,
under cover we run
we try to deny
lifetimes go by
but eyes of the
heart,
when open
can see
and know that which
is reality!!!
Source Mikko Jarvenpaa / Sentient Media. Author (on the left) with a friend.
In a world rife with human suffering and problems, why should one focus on animal rights and animal suffering? My answer is at once moral, emotional, and rational.
In retrospect my personal path to animal rights has been both obvious and meandering. It consists of both emotionally charged experiences and cool-headed rational thought.
But it has been far from obvious to many of my friends why I would make the change from tech entrepreneurship into something that has a more positive impact on the world, and end up dedicating my efforts to animal rights. For their and my benefit, I wanted to chart my course briefly, lest my friends explain this all away with my never-too-latent rebellious tendencies, or by just having stayed in Northern California for too long.
I was born and grew up in Eastern Finland. As long as I can remember, my father had the hobby of keeping sheep. I call it a hobby because it wasn’t for economic gain but for reasons of self-reliance with meat – and wool, which my mother used as materials for her art. For me, the sheep were at least as good as pets, nearly friends.
Sheep are actually pretty amazing. The common misconception is that sheep are stupid, easily freaked out, and just, in general, pretty sheepish animals. But that’s before you get to know them. Yes, they certainly have strong herd instincts and can all bolt pretty easily if even one sheep feels threatened. But once you get to know them and they accept you into their herd, you learn their individual characteristics. Some are more playful than others. Some are entirely food-motivated while some will just want to get scratches. Some are devious and try to come up with different ways of escaping. They often collaborate, for example, by leaning against bushes to push them lower for others to eat.
I didn’t have too many human friends growing up. There were no kids within walking distance until I was seven or so. So the sheep were doubly important to me. We’d sometimes keep them over the winter, and my brother and I would often be responsible for bringing them fresh water and feed in their winter shelter. I took part in all parts of their lives, except the very last.
In the fall, the men would come. I don’t remember what they looked like, but I remember what I felt like. My dad told me not to come over to the sheep enclosure that day. I stayed indoors and played the radio loud to drown any sounds. Whether there were sounds from the slaughter, I don’t know.
After the men left, I would sometimes sneak into the small garage in the enclosure where the slaughter had taken place. The floor was always stained with blood and I seem to remember seeing the implements of violence, though I don’t remember exactly what they were.
What I do remember, though, is the tremendous sense of loss. Loss of lives that didn’t want to die. Loss of beings that were close to me and that I was close to. And most harrowingly, the palpably present sense of loss by the animals still left behind to kept over the winter. They had lost their young, their parents, their friends, the only other beings that could give them a sense of safety. The sheep I remember well, huddled together at a safe distance, all tense, staring at me, the person who used to be there for them.
Betraying the trust of the innocent is the worst feeling I know.
Since the age of 15, I was vegetarian, on and off, for a long time. Even in my off-times, I never felt right about eating mammals: cows, pigs, and sheep always felt too close to human, too close to eat. For a long time, I tried to consider birds and fish more biological robots than sentient beings (and I was badly wrong in this). It took nearly 20 years from first going vegetarian for me to piece the puzzle together and take action that was consistent with my ethics.
The key to taking that action is suffering – realizing that it is suffering that I most oppose, not the loss of life, or the act of killing, or even the system of speciesist exploitation.
I had to go deep for this realization. I went back to school at the ripe age of 30 and completed my Master’s in Philosophy of Social Sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I focused on the philosophy of biological and cognitive sciences with an interest in ethics and the evolution of morality.
To summarize in three very broad strokes: first, understanding the suffering of others makes evolutionary sense for any animals that live in groups and have the capacity to do so (assume this holds at least for all vertebrates: mammals, birds, and fish, to mention the most exploited classes of the animal kingdom). The subjective experience of suffering is more obvious, but that also makes a lot of evolutionary sense: pain is a harm-reduction mechanism. Practically all animals with a spine feel and “understand” each others’ pain (quotes only to emphasize that their understanding may be very different from our verbal understanding). Considering a non-human animal’s mental suffering is just as valid as considering the mental suffering of a human animal.
Second, reduction and elimination of involuntary suffering is perhaps the most universally appealing goal across most ethical frameworks. Some moral codes allow for causing harm or having a neutral stance on it, but in my view none of them are intuitively or rationally appealing. Everybody wants good things, and involuntary suffering is not a good thing.
And third, to have an impact one needs to focus on things that are most neglected. This idea stems from utilitarianism, though I’m not a total utilitarian in my views. This is also what lead me to put theory into practice.
Based on these premises, though considered in much more detail, I realized there is an urgent need to focus on the suffering of animals. We keep producing more animals into lives systematically filled with physical and mental suffering. In factory farming for meat, eggs, and dairy, we do this to billions of beings and we cause them to suffer. We do this needlessly, and we do it willfully. Importantly, we do it as a part of a self-enforcing system of economic and cultural structures.
Ok, you may say, animals suffer, but why would someone concerned with suffering focus on animals in a world with so much human suffering to go around? Surely human suffering ought to be addressed before taking up the fight against animal suffering?
Personally, I subscribe to the view that human life and human experience is indeed more valuable and more desirable than a non-human animal experience of life – but not incomparably so, and certainly not indefinitely so. This doesn’t mean there has to be a certain number of animals that are morally equivalent to a human. I believe comparisons can be made even though they be theoretical and uncomfortable, while at the same time I do not desire there to be a moral calculus that would tell us how many B-lives are worth one A-life.
For example, if I was forced to cause a proportionally similar amount of suffering to a chicken or to a pig, say, suffering equivalent to that of a lost limb, I would choose to cause the suffering to the chicken because I assume that action to cause less suffering both in quantity and – perhaps more controversially – in quality. This disagreeable example (and there are much worse thought experiments used by experimental philosophers) may seem intuitively sensible, but in addition to pure intuition we may also attempt to approximate the probability of the volume of suffering experienced by things like the complexity of the animal’s neural and cognitive systems. Yet even this is done not ever knowing the subjective experience of suffering of another being. And, yes, I may well be wrong with this example and future evidence shows that avian suffering is actually more intense and severe than the suffering of large mammals, in which case I ought to adjust my response to this thought experiment accordingly.
Extending comparisons from animal suffering to human suffering seems like a very bad idea. Almost taboo. Surely some things are black and white – animals are animals and humans are humans? The same person who finds that intuition to be common sense may also be a dog owner who loves their canine companion dearly. That person may well value the life of their pet much higher than that of a human stranger on the other side of the world. In doing so, they are actively making cross-species ethical comparisons that they intuitively agree with. But we are experts at living with moral inconsistency. We are forced to be such experts because human intelligence is limited.
Without going into detail of how comparisons should or even could be made, let’s just assume that sentient suffering is somehow comparable, contrastable, even if human suffering should be orders of magnitude more important than the suffering of the next most intelligent exploited animal. Which is the pig, rather uncontroversially. Yes: bacon, ham, pork chops – all made of intelligent, socially complex, family-centered animals who suffer insanely in the process. Hundreds of millions of such sentient beings every year.
Before taking a closer look at animals, consider just a sampling of the dizzying extent of human suffering in the world today.
There are 70 million forcibly displaced people in the world according to the UNHCR due to wars, persecution, and other upheavals. In 2015, 736 million people lived in extreme poverty (under $1.90 per day), and 3.4 billion people still struggle to meet basic needs, living on less than $3.20 per day in lower-middle-income countries or under $5.50 in upper-middle-income countries according to the World Bank. In the US, more than 10 million women and men are subjects of domestic violence every year. The WHO estimates that over 200 million women have been subjected to female genital mutilation. And I could continue this list for hours.
It’s not that I don’t care about human suffering. The degrees and types of cruelty, neglect, inequality, terror, and other sources of human suffering are mind-boggling and too frequently horrifying.
So the question remains, now stronger than ever – why animal rights? My answer is the proportional neglectedness of farmed animals: no matter how you look at things, animal suffering is incredibly neglected.
Let’s take a couple of proxies to quantify neglectedness. In 2017, Americans gave $410 billion dollars to charitable causes. For 2015, Animal Charity Evaluators estimated the top 10 farmed animal outreach organizations to have budgets of $20 million. Let’s assume they count for 50% of the total budgets, and call it $40 million in total to get a conservative overestimate. Note that this would also include governmental grants which are not included in the $410 billion giving figure. Yet to remain conservative, other causes (which are primarily human causes) get approximately 10,250 times the donations that farmed animals do in the US.
There are over 9 billion farmed land animals killed every year in the US (and probably tens of billion of fish). Without exaggeration, 99% of these farmed land animals are born into the factory farming system where suffering is the norm, not the exception, and where cruelty is sanctioned.
Therefore, if we accept that animals can suffer (they can), that we are causing their suffering (we are), and that we should focus our efforts on targets that need the most help (and as I’ve argued, yes, we should), then focusing on animal rights is rational. Even if you wanted to claim that human experience of suffering is 100,000 times more valuable than an animal experience of suffering for purposes of allocating resources, you’d still be left with the equivalent of 90,000 violent human deaths that capped lives of near-constant suffering. As violent and unequal as the US is, there are less than 20,000 violent human deaths per year with billions of dollars in private and public funding aimed at addressing those deaths, as opposed to the $40 million for the suffering of farmed animals.
And very importantly, there are many powerful people and well-funded organizations seeking to eradicate diseases, to alleviate poverty, and to put an end to cruel traditions where humans suffer. Animals have very few such friends, especially in proportion to the problem. While human suffering is very real and horrible, human suffering is not nearly as neglected as animal suffering.
For another angle of how neglected animal suffering is, consider how often you see animal rights discussed in the media. We should be surprised that the constant suffering of billions of our fellow Earth-dwellers in the hands of our fellow humans is not perpetually in the news. But still today the opposite holds: people are surprised and even dismayed that they are asked to question their beliefs and behavior when it comes to their lunch. The rare occasions that animal suffering is discussed in media, it is mostly on topics of outright animal abuse and neglect (usually of dogs, cats, or horses), or the use of animals in entertainment or laboratory testing. As horrible as those cases are, they pale in volume to the suffering on factory farms: in the US, there are 500 animals used and killed on factory farms for every one animal used in a laboratory.
No matter how you dice things, it is especially farmed animals who are neglected and whose suffering challenges us with its moral urgency.
My reasons for focusing on animal rights are both emotional and rational. There is much more to my personal experience and rationale than what I presented here. And I didn’t even get to mention the climate impact of animal agriculture (at least as big as that of all global transport), human health (from carcinogenic meat to health risks of dairy), or existential threats of animal agriculture (a promising breeding ground for antibiotic-resistant pathogens).
But there is one more thing to mention when focusing on animal rights: tractability.
I believe we can make a major positive difference for farmed animals within my lifetime. We may not eliminate animal farming within decades, but it will become undesirable, unprofitable, and widely morally questionable. Within one generation, eating animals and animal products like dairy and eggs will be viewed like smoking is generally viewed in the US today – pretty disgusting but somewhat tolerable. Within two generations, the same practices will be viewed like public executions are viewed today – morally reprehensible, barbaric, still done in some places in the world, but something that ought to be confined into the annals of history.
The issue is tractable because people care. Animals are powerful allies. They are relatable, cute, friendly, and wholesome. They are our link to nature and natural things. They give us support and happiness while our social ties erode and become fewer.
The vast majority of meat eaters care about animals. Many are even a little annoyed by suggestions that they are doing something wrong, because they know they well might be. I know I was.
And back in Finland, on some years there are still sheep at the house I grew up in. If I go, I still meet them and watch them play, graze, and socialize. But I don’t stay for the fall.
Please reach out to me on Twitter with any comments or questions.
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Our animal brothers are not menu choices
We the compassionate will be their voices
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Want to do more than go vegan? Help others to do so! Click below for nominal, or no, fees to vegan literature that you can use to convince others that veganism is the only compassionate route to being an animal friend:
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❤ the sum of kindness is even greater than our hearts ❤
Not graphic, one minute, please watch.
The town of Asheville, North Carolina, has been called the “Progressive Mecca of the South”. And while it is home to a lot of liberal-minded people and activists, there’s one form of oppression that many of the most left-leaning advocates still happily support and celebrate, and that is animal exploitation and slaughter.
Sure, Asheville has a large vegan community and lots of vegan-friendly restaurants, but, as Free from Harm has previously written, it is also a hotbed for the humane animal farming myth. The town’s cafés, restaurants and farmer’s markets regularly boast of their “ethical meat” and milk and cheese from “happy cows” on “family farms.”
I recently had occasion to visit one such celebrated “family dairy farm,” Maple View Farm, just outside of Chapel Hill, NC. Maple View supplies many local businesses in the Triangle area, and it also supplies the Asheville milk delivery company, Farm to Home. The Farm to Home “milk man” describes his job of delivering this milk as doing something “ethically” and with “integrity.”
As I walked through this esteemed family dairy that is favorably known in the community, I was astonished by what I saw and heard. In the dairy industry, female cows must be lactating to produce milk. That means that they are forcefully impregnated over and over through artificial insemination, without their consent, so they will give birth and begin lactating at optimal yields. Their bodies are pushed through this stressful and wearing cycle every year so that they will produce as much breast milk as possible. I learned that on this farm, mother cows are slaughtered after several years once their milk production declines. This is true of most cows in the dairy industry, who are killed at only a fraction of their natural lifespan when their output slows down and they become less profitable.
In addition to this tragedy, once cows used for dairy give birth, their babies are taken away from them. The farmer himself told me that the babies on his farm do not once drink the milk straight from their mothers’ udders, and never will. Instead, they receive their first life-giving fluids from a human hand and plastic bottle.
Order a FREE vegan kit: http://www.peta.org/living/food/free-vegan-starter-kit/
Take PETA’s Cruelty-Free Shopping Guide along with you next time you head to the store! The handy guide will help you find humane products at a glance. Order a FREE copy HERE
Searching for Cruelty-Free Cosmetics, Personal-Care Products, Vegan Products, or more?
Click HERE to search.
Want to do more than go vegan? Help others to do so! Click below for nominal, or no, fees to vegan literature that you can use to convince others that veganism is the only compassionate route to being an animal friend.
PETA: http://www.petacatalog.com/catalog/Literature-39-1.html
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Have questions? Click HERE
a truth denied
is a truth that remains.
no amount of denial
can end the suffering
and pain!
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