This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You)

by Ed Winters

Every time we eat, we have the power to radically transform the world we live in and simultaneously contribute to addressing many of the most pressing issues that our species currently faces: climate change, infectious disease, chronic disease, human exploitation and, of course, non-human exploitation. Every single day, our choices can help alleviate all of these problems or they can perpetuate them.

Good people can do bad things.

it is estimated that globally around 220 million land animals are killed for food every day,1 and when you factor in marine animals that number increases to somewhere between 2.4 and 6.3 billion.2 Every. Single. Day. That means that somewhere between 28,000 and 73,000 animals are killed every second, a completely incomprehensible number.

For all of our intelligence, we have still failed to grasp the simple reality that we need the planet more than the planet needs us.

Humanity is at a crossroads: we can either continue as we currently are or set off in a new direction, learning from our previous mistakes and working for the benefit of all life.

‘The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.’

nobody can force anyone to be vegan. When you put this book down, what you choose to buy in a supermarket is entirely up to you.

‘How do you know when someone is vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you!’

More broadly than that, most of us don’t stop to reflect on what we do to animals; we simply carry on doing what we have always done.

how do we morally justify our exploitation of animals?

it is sufficient to think about morality in terms of what most people would consider to be the values that we should live by and that we can all broadly agree on: respect, kindness, generosity and so on.

Veganism is instead a social justice issue that recognises that non-human animals deserve autonomy, moral consideration and the recognition that their lives are far more valuable than the reasons we use to justify exploiting them.

So why are we selective in our compassion towards animals? And why are we only outraged by some forms of animal cruelty?

If cruelty is defined as causing unnecessary and intentional physical or mental harm, what we do to animals must constitute acts of cruelty.

is it ‘benevolent’ to mutilate piglets or to separate newborn babies from their mothers? Is it ‘kind’ to selectively breed chickens so that they cannot stand and their organs fail? And, most importantly, is it ‘compassionate’ to exploit and ultimately take the life of an animal who does not need or want to die?

humane slaughter is an oxymoron,

People often call vegans extremists, and yet veganism is merely living by the principle that if I am against cruelty then I will do what I can to avoid perpetuating systems that cause physical and mental harm to animals.

Is it not strange that we call those who kill dogs animal abusers, those who kill pigs normal and those who kill neither extremists? Is it not odd that someone who smashes a car window to rescue a dog on a hot day is viewed as a hero but someone who rescues a piglet suffering on a farm is a criminal?

‘You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.’

where a rat was placed in water and another rat had the option to either pull a lever that saved the one in the water or pull a lever that released a chocolate treat. The rats pulled the lever to save the rat in distress, even though it meant forgoing the treat. When there was no other rat to save, they would just go for the lever that gave them the treat. Interestingly, if the rat with the choice of levers had been placed in the water previously and had gone through that experience, they were quicker to help the rat they had the chance to save.1

It is ironic that we often believe that empathy and complex emotions only really exist in humans but we then fail to empathise with the animals who suffer at our hands.

‘Anyone who wants to make the case that a tickled ape, who almost chokes on his hoarse giggles, must be in a different state of mind from a tickled child has his work cut out for him.’4

Consumption is only a symptom. The real problem is our mentality, a mentality that judges some lives to be less important because of the pleasure we get from consuming their flesh or wearing their skin.

So while animals respond to situations, plants instead react.

It’s unconscionable that billions of sentient beings have their lives filled with suffering and forcibly taken from them just for fleeting moments of pleasure.

Singer defines speciesism as being ‘a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species’.

However, it is not the differences that are relevant when deciding whether non-humans matter morally but instead the similarities – most fundamentally sentience, meaning the capacity to feel and experience subjectively. If it is sentience that makes human animals worthy of moral consideration then it is sentience that makes non-human animals worthy of moral consideration too.

Some people believe that to be vegan means you have to be an animal lover or be someone who goes out of their way to be kind to animals. But it’s not an act of kindness to not needlessly hurt someone. If we walk down the street and don’t kick a dog, that’s not an act of kindness. In the same way, avoiding forcing animals into gas chambers and macerators and onto kill lines isn’t an act of benevolence – it’s an act of justice and respect for the basic moral consideration that all animals deserve.

Overton window, which is sometimes referred to as ‘the window of discourse’. It is defined as the range of ideas that the general public is willing to consider and may accept at any given time. So, from a politician’s perspective, it contains the policies that the majority of voters see as reasonable and legitimate.

As a result, for most of our existence, humans were very much in the middle of the food chain, able to hunt smaller animals but still at the mercy of predators.

Other farmers would kill the offspring, eat them and then stuff the skin, smearing it with the mother’s urine to trick her into producing more milk that humans could then consume. Disturbingly, this practice can still be seen today, with some farmers stuffing dead calves with hay to try to trick mother cows into producing more milk.

While the industrialisation of animal agriculture has brought about disastrous consequences, there has never been a point in our farming history when animals were treated well.

There’s No Such Thing as a Happy Farm Animal

And there is no such thing as a happy farm animal, as abuse and exploitation is an inherent and fundamental part of what we do to animals, regardless of how they are farmed.

In essence, the animals are involved in a non-consensual compromise where any consideration for their lives must be weighed against the financial burden such a consideration will incur on the farmers.

abuse of animals is simply systemic and legally condoned, and, from the perspective of the animals, the legal practices also cause them suffering, pain and fear. So how do we farm animals and what exactly do

It is estimated that only 3 per cent of pigs will spend their entire lives with access to outdoor space.26

There is something profoundly moving about looking into the eyes of an animal.

You recognise that behind those eyes is someone who is having an experience and through that recognition you can empathise with that experience.

The truth is, the dairy industry is very much the meat industry, just with the added years of cruelty before the cows reach the slaughterhouse.

To put it into perspective, we kill approximately 80 billion land animals every year;71 however, it is estimated that we kill somewhere in the region of 0.8 to 2.3 trillion wild fish and 51 to 167 billion farmed fish in the same period.

animal rights and human rights aren’t mutually exclusive, and we can instead work towards improving them both at the same time, but it also fails to address the cases of human exploitation within the animal exploitation industries.

Ultimately, there is no right way to do the wrong thing and exploiting and killing animals, and causing them pain and suffering when we don’t have to, is absolutely wrong.

the United Nations released a report that stated, ‘The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.’1

Four years later, the UN then warned that a global shift towards a vegan diet was vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change.2

The study showed that even though meat and dairy take up 83 per cent of global agricultural land, they only provide 18

per cent of global calories and 37 per cent of global protein consumption.10

On a positive note, the University of Oxford researchers discovered that if the world shifted to a plant-based diet, we could feed every mouth on the planet and reduce global farmland by more than 75 per cent. This is the equivalent of land the size of China, Australia, the USA and the entire European Union combined no longer being needed for agriculture.13

It is currently estimated that animal farming accounts for somewhere between 14.5 per cent and 18 per cent of total emissions.16 This means that animal farming is responsible for more emissions than the combined exhaust fumes produced by all global transportation, which is estimated to be around 14 per cent of the total.17

that transportation was only responsible for 6 per cent of the total emissions related to diet, and when the results were broken down by food items, animal products were shown to be responsible for 83 per cent of overall emissions in the average EU diet, compared to only 17 per cent coming from plant-based foods.26