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.

Realising the scale of mass suffering and death that is relentlessly occurring every second of the day is by far the hardest aspect to face. To put it into perspective, 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.

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.

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

And regardless of the farming methods used, humane slaughter is an oxymoron, as it is impossible to take an animal’s life needlessly and against their will in a compassionate, benevolent or kind way

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.

It is a clear indictment of how ingrained our state of cognitive dissonance is that we see attempts at moral consistency as signs of extremism.

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...

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

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.

have heard it said before that to the animals we are the devils of this planet and this world is their hell, a place of subjugation and pain. I can’t see any rational reason why this isn’t the case.

Even if many of us don’t realise it, by placing taste at the heart of our justification for eating animal products, we are essentially saying that our pleasure is more important than any moral consideration.

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.

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.

Deforestation is one of the most concerning environmental problems we face, and as a society we look on in horror at what is happening to rainforests all around the world without realising that the countries where we live have already been deforested and much of the damage has already been done.

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.