Why I Decided to Go Vegan
A Personal Transition
I never thought I would become vegan.
I thought veganism was a cult, meat is best for your health, and the vegan diet was inferior in many respects.
It wasn’t until I sat down with non-dogmatic vegans and listened to the ethical arguments concerning veganism that I changed my mind.
It’s difficult to change one’s mind and even more difficult to change the way one lives. But in order to grow and in order to progress one must question the basic assumptions one has.
We have this assumption that we need meat, we have this assumption that animals are somehow less than us, and we have this assumption our current practices of animal farming are justified.
These assumptions need to be questioned and that’s the point of philosophy.
As Bertrand Russell said:
“The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.”
When have we deliberately reasoned about our consumption of meat? How many times do we just put chicken, beef, and pork on our plates without batting an eye?
Here are three considerations I made and hope you make if you are deliberating on whether to follow me on this journey.
The three considerations are:
Sentience
Our Current Treatment of Animals
The Environment
Sentience
What is sentience? Sentience is the ability to have subjective experiences such as pain and enjoyment.
I cover the basics of sentience in my Instagram post as well.
The conception of sentience comes from philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation.
The basic idea is animals, like humans, can have a subjective experience of pain and pleasure. Therefore, animals can suffer due to this ability to feel pain.
Singer argues that this capacity to suffer means that animals should have equal moral consideration. We should think deeply about our treatment and attitudes toward nonhumans.
The fact that humans discriminate against animals or nonhumans based on species alone is a form of discrimination akin to racism and sexism… it is dubbed speciesism.
But how does sentience change my perception of consuming animals? Simple, think of your dog or cat.
For instance, a dog and a pig are both sentient, both have comparable intelligence, and both can be kept as pets. So, why is it okay to slaughter one for meat and not the other?
The rebuttals might include the fact one is bred to be a companion and one is bred for food, but in other cultures, dogs are also produced for food and numerous people see this as morally reprehensible. So, does culture dictate what sentient beings live and die?
This is an arbitrary distinction, both dogs and pigs can suffer. But since we are culturally conditioned to see one in a different way than another we accept this arbitrariness. However, this distinction is not profound.
If the bases for moral action were cultural conventions alone, then we can hypothetically consume any sentient being even infants by establishing it as a cultural convention.
Why not just bred children into existence who will be consumed for our pleasure? We could put them in gas chambers just like pigs, hand them upside down and slice their throats, and dip them in boiling water to make their skin easier for peeling.
If the idea of dog meat repulses you, then why still eat bacon?
Any sentient being regardless of perceived intelligence, cultural convention, tradition, or any other arbitrary trait of distinction deserves moral consideration. We should question the fact we breed animals into the billions just to be slaughtered, exploited, beaten, and raped.
Our Current Treatment of Animals
In the United States alone millions of livestock are killed per year and billions of poultry. One can only guess how many animals exactly are killed in animal agriculture overall but we can comfortably say it’s in the billions.
We test on millions of animals for medical research, we breed millions of animals to take their fur, and we constantly hunt endangered animals for sport.
Why can humans treat non-humans this way?
I’ve heard numerous excuses and attempts at justification for this question.
It typically revolves around a distinction between humans and non-humans. Humans are seen as privileged because of x attribute or are allowed to commit these acts because they can.
But the arbitrary distinction between humans and non-humans as a means of discrimination against those outside the human species is the very definition of speciesism.
speciesism, in applied ethics and the philosophy of animal rights, is the practice of treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species; also, the belief that this practice is justified.
Because non-humans are sentient they deserve equal moral consideration. The distinction between non-humans and humans does not negate this consideration.
For example, if there were a person with the comparable mental capacity of a cow would we then be justified in slaughtering that person and turning them into a burger?
Think of it this way, am I morally justified in beating my cat or dog because I am more intelligent than them?
If not, then why is it morally permissible to slaughter billions of animals because of my intelligence? Not only slaughter but breed them and put them in confined spaces with their own filth and in many cases beat them.
Animals should have the right to live and not have their lives dictated by humans. Philosopher Tom Regan suggests animals are subjects of a life, this means animals are not mere objects to be used by us but live their own lives independent of us and would most likely want to preserve that life.
So, who are we to breed animals into existence in order to be exploited, suffer, and ultimately killed because we deem it so?
There is no such thing as “humane slaughter” as there is no such thing as “humane domestic abuse”, “humane rape”, and “humane molestation”.
The Environment
Animal agriculture takes a major toll on the environment.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of land use in agriculture which means biodiversity loss, emitting more greenhouse gas to produce per kilogram of food product, taking up a lot more water to produce, and a good portion of the world’s cereal production goes to animal feed.
Essentially, raising non-human animals for food uses more land, costs more resources, and emits more pollutants as we see from greenhouse gas emissions.
I already hear the rebuttals…
What about cars?
What about airplanes?
What about x, y, or z?
We need to reframe this argument to focus on what really matters, which are two main points.
Does diet contribute to climate emissions and by how much?
Which foods within a diet contribute most?
The answer to the first question is a resounding yes. Feeding billions of humans will lead to climate emissions and food production accounts for about 26% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
However, some studies suggest total emissions to be a bit higher at a third of global emissions.
So, it is not a matter of comparing apples to apples to see what causes the most emissions. It is about accepting the fact food production does indeed have an environmental impact.
Now, what foods within food production cause more emissions? The answer is pretty obvious, non-human animal-based products.
To recap, food production does have an environmental impact via greenhouse gas emissions, and the foods with the highest carbon footprint are non-human animal-based products compared to any plant-based product.
Killing cows, chickens, sheep, pigs, fish, etc. have a detrimental environmental toll because it takes up a lot of land, uses a lot of resources, and emits more greenhouse gases.
Conclusion
It was tough for me as a near-religious meat eater to accept the fact eating meat has clear downsides and moral implications.
The three most convincing considerations that lead to my transition to a vegan diet were:
Sentience
Our Current Treatment of Animals
The Environment
Sentience describes the ability to have subjective experiences such as pain and enjoyment. Non-human animals have sentience, which means they have moral worth and consideration.
Our current treatment of animals can be best summed up as speciesism. This describes human discrimination against non-human animals merely on the grounds that they’re a different species.
Animal agriculture emits more greenhouse gases, uses more land, uses a good chunk of cereal production, and uses a lot of water. Animal agriculture is worse for the environment than plant-based products.
I hope this article gets you to consider your own choices related to diet and animals.