How To Argue With Vegans: An Analysis of Anti-vegan Arguments (Vegan Philosophy Book 1)

by Benny Malone

The initial problem with talking to people about veganism is that people do not want to talk about veganism.

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

they want to make it clear they are fine with you being vegan as long as you leave them alone and it’s an attempt at getting reciprocation from the vegan to be ‘fine’ with their ‘personal choice’. It can also be an attempt to make the vegan seem unreasonable, interfering and moralising. You aren’t fine with people living their lives and making their choices? How unreasonable of you!

Of course, vegans want people to make personal choices, just not those that promote animal use and slaughter. They want people to use the power of choice for a better alternative.

By identifying a superhuman effort or character trait that they say is needed to be vegan people create a comfortable distance between themselves and the change that would be required to be vegan.

Placing vegans or veganism as an unreachable goal is done so you have an excuse to not even try. Maybe this is where the myth of the ‘perfect vegan’ or ‘being 100% vegan’ comes from. Make veganism more difficult than it is and no one can blame you for not being able to run a marathon.

A future solution such as a technological fix or invention is often proposed when veganism is mentioned. This deferment of taking any action until an undefined future date is another way of creating distance. Rather than take the present day best available option of veganism they say they will take advantage of animal flesh alternatives in the future to avoid acting in the present.

They may also say ‘we will look back in horror’ on how animals are used in the present day. If you can realise this now why not look upon things as they are now?

Modern animal agriculture kills tens of billions of animals every year, making it the quantitatively largest form of violence in human history.

One tip with discussing anything where you want people to change their minds is giving them the space they need to do so. A person backed into a corner by logic may be utterly defeated in your internet debate. But have they got any room to manoeuvre? Or would a climb down be almost impossible? We may win the argument but lose the person.

People are not scared vegans are wrong. They are scared they may be right.

People will say ‘’so you think I’m a bad person?’’ No, I think you are a good person, which is why I respect you enough to think you might want to avoid animal use and slaughter.

these are the ‘good vegans’ that don’t disturb the peace of the non-vegan and so are more liked by them. Anyone seeking to advocate for change is going to have to argue against the positions of those who support the exploitation and slaughter of other animals.

A good Socratic question to respond to ‘What will happen to all the animals if everyone goes vegan?’ here is ‘where do all the animals come from at the moment?’

If animals cannot live free on their own terms then they should not be bred just to be exploited and killed at the earliest possible convenience for humans.

They want to kill and eat animals then pretend that giving animals life through breeding them to be slaughtered at the youngest possible age is their real philanthropic concern.

One way I define veganism simply is to say that it is a position against the commodity status and exploitation of other animals.

What part of avoiding animal use and slaughter do you disagree with exactly? What part of using oat milk instead of subjecting cows, goats and sheep to exploitation and slaughtering their offspring to take the milk do you disagree with? What part of minimising animal use do you disagree with? Veganism is simply using a non-animal alternative where available.

what evidence for animal sentience would change your mind? What evidence for the environmental impact of animal use do you require? What standard of evidence for the health of plant based diets would you accept?

“Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.” - Tom Regan

We all make moral judgements and there is no avoiding making a moral evaluation of animal use and slaughter when advocating veganism.

What we see is animal slaughter supporters fitting their moral criterion for concern for other animals into the Procrustean bed of their desire for animal products. It just doesn’t fit without chopping some limbs off.

Agvocates will try to say that vegans are against farmers or people having freedom to choose and other such general principles, none of which is true.

‘The Sexual Politics of Meat explains the concept of “the absent referent.” Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. This is the "absent referent." The absent referent functions to cloak the violence inherent to meat eating, to protect the conscience of the meat eater and render the idea of individual animals as immaterial to anyone’s selfish desires.

It is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep something from being seen as having been someone, to allow for the moral abandonment of another being.’

The animal flesh and secretions themselves are called names that are distant from the once living, breathing, sentient being. Individual animals of species are not referred to as individuals but as one homogeneous entity. ‘Fish’, Sheep’ etc – they lose the plural and become one.

Suicide Food documented how animals are depicted wanting to willingly sacrifice themselves to be consumed by humans in some sort of perverse Stockholm Syndrome where Douglas Adam’s thought experiment becomes a reality. (10)

It’s been speculated that so many arguments against veganism are at this sort of inchoate infantile level because people haven’t thought through these arguments since the time they were taught it was acceptable to exploit and slaughter animals. A curious child may ask why we eat animals and their questions will be brushed off and dismissed with the fallacious arguments and bucolic myths of how that’s just the way things are and that it is normal and necessary and that’s what those animal’s purpose is.

Being indoctrinated in the myths of animal use at such a young age, most people don’t give a second thought to the issues until they encounter a vegan arguing against them. It’s then that they reach back in time to bring forth the only arguments they have at their disposal, those myths they were taught in youth and have never challenged since.

This is seen in people saying they aren’t personally responsible for slicing animal’s throats or grinding up day old chicks alive in macerators. The responsibility is placed on slaughterhouse workers and the companies that exploit and slaughter animals. While these corporations that profit from animal use are reprehensible it does not mean individuals are not responsible for their actions.

‘Many people like eating meat, but most are reluctant to harm things that have minds. The current three studies show that this dissonance motivates people to deny minds to animals. Study 1 demonstrates that animals considered appropriate for human consumption are ascribed diminished mental capacities. Study 2 shows that meat eaters are motivated to deny minds to food animals when they are reminded of the link between meat and animal suffering. Finally, Study 3 provides direct support for our dissonance hypothesis, showing that expectations regarding the immediate consumption of meat increase mind denial. Moreover, this mind denial in turn reduces negative affect associated with dissonance. The findings highlight the role of dissonance reduction in facilitating the practice of meat eating and protecting cultural commitments.’ (12)

It’s been shown that merely labelling animals as destined for a certain purpose means they are viewed to have less moral status. This is disastrous for many millions of individuals of certain species. Rather than see animals as they are, we assign them lesser value as a way to make ourselves feel less guilty about exploiting and slaughtering them.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

If one rabbit is labelled as a ‘food animal’ and another as a ‘wild animal’ or ‘pet’ why would doing the same things to one but not the other land you with a criminal record and probably an FBI file as a potential serial killer? The case of a man who was charged with cruelty for running a lawnmower over some ducklings while people can grind chicks alive in egg production highlights this disparity and Gerrymandering. (17)

Weber and Matthews found that although "food miles" contribute to the carbon footprint, an average of 83% of a food product's carbon footprint is caused during production. Transportation accounts for only 11% of the product's greenhouse gas emissions.

‘Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%. Whether you buy it from the farmer next door or from far away, it is not the location that makes the carbon footprint of your dinner large, but the fact that it is beef.’ (19)

If dogs are bred solely for the purpose of fighting does that make it justified?

Many scientists and engineers will naturally seek technological solutions to humanity’s problems and in the case of feeding large populations it is no different. Tyson proposes that technology may be able to ‘scrub’ CO2 from the air and provide a technological fix to climate change. This is an example of the ‘distancing’ we discussed – deferring solutions to an unknown future date rather than taking advantage of the already available best options.

Without addressing the impact of meat of dairy on the environment scientists are warning that meeting climate targets as set out in the Paris Climate Agreement will be unachievable. Even if all other areas of greenhouse gas emissions were addressed in a best case scenario a failure to address animal agriculture always pushes us over planetary boundaries and the limits set. (21)

However for those clinging on to an ideology of animal use who can’t see beyond that paradigm they think of using the technology or innovations to try and improve how animals are fed to try and make feed conversion ratios a little more ecologically efficient. So farms are used for animal feed, masks are worn by cows to capture their methane emissions and cows wear virtual reality helmets to keep them calm. These absurdities can only arise from trying to find loopholes in a flawed system.

There is no impersonal reason for regarding the interests of human beings as more important than those of animals. We can destroy animals more easily than they can destroy us; that is the only solid basis of our claim to superiority."

Veganism is seen as extreme in proportion to how normalised violence against other animals is. If we contrast the supposed extremism of avoiding all forms of animal use and slaughter with the myriad ways in which animals are exploited and slaughtered which do you honestly think is the more extreme action? You have just been conditioned to see abstaining from violence to animals as extreme because the violence is socially acceptable and ubiquitous.

“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.” - Carl Sagan

It is debateable that there are larger and more pressing issues that the greatest systemic exploitation and slaughter of trillions of animals a year. The climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution and antibiotic resistance as well as potential for zoonotic pandemics, cost to public health are large issues of a magnitude it is hard to match.

“Instead of wild animals, a small number of farmed animal species (mainly cows and pigs) now dominate global biomass. Together, they account for 60 per cent of all mammal species by mass, compared to 4 per cent for wild mammals and 36 per cent for humans. Farmed chickens now account for 57 per cent of all bird species by mass, whereas wild birds make up 29 per cent of the total. Animal farming now occupies 78 per cent of agricultural land globally” “A global shift to a plant-based diet would substantially reduce the requirement for pasture and cropland (taking into account human nutritional needs and population growth to 2050); such land could thus be spared for nature.’’ (notes 14)

‘If you were alone on a deserted island with a pig, would you eat the pig or starve to death? Hmm. If you were not alone, living on a planet with 7 billion people, had access to unlimited fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and other healthy foods, and knew animals suffer and die horrible deaths so you could eat them when you don’t need to eat them to survive, would you continue to eat them? The difference between our questions is that your scenario will never happen and mine is the choice you face right now. Which do you believe is worth answering?’

Vegans are targeted over consumption of soy, avocados, quinoa and other plant foods. The issues from plant agriculture should not be dismissed. But targeting vegans when most soy is used for animal feed is out of proportion to reality. Around SIX PERCENT of all soy grown worldwide is used for direct human consumption. Obviously vegans are not responsible for consuming all of that 6% either as that feeds the entire world including Asia where it is consumed more widely and has been for 3,000 years. The other 94% is split between industrial uses and animal feed, with 70% going to feed animals. The proportions of soy grown in the Amazon for animal feed are even higher. (20)

The natural climate solution with the largest potential to sequester carbon globally is reforestation, with zero new deforestation only achievable though veganism.

'A new study published by researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology has found that it is possible to feed the world without further deforestation. Published in Nature Communications, the study assesses the likelihood of 500 various options for feeding the global population in 2050 in a hypothetical world of zero-deforestation, depending on combination of key factors including agriculture technology, livestock systems, and human diet. Every combination in which the human population follows a plant-based diet would be feasible for a deforestation-free future, the study found. "According to our analysis, human nutritional behavior is the most important component,” study author Karlheinz Erb said. “If the world's population followed a vegan diet, all combinations of parameters, even those with lowest yield levels and low cropland expansion, would be feasible.’’