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

by Ed Winters

Even so, the levels of animosity directed at vegans can be startling. In fact, research has shown that only drug addicts face the same degree of stigma as vegans, with male vegans who have gone vegan for ethical reasons being viewed the most negatively.5 This seems strange considering almost everyone is against animal cruelty; it doesn’t therefore make sense that one of the most reviled groups of people in society is the one that is actively trying to reduce the amount of cruelty caused to animals.

2010, a study was conducted with college students in which they were randomly given either beef jerky or cashews to eat.8 They were then asked to judge the intellectual and cognitive capabilities of certain animals and their moral importance. The results found that those who had been given the beef jerky deemed cows to have a lower intellectual ability and a diminished mental capacity to experience things such as suffering and pain, and they expressed less moral concern for animals when compared to those who had eaten the cashews. When it comes to the meat paradox, our brains are constantly working to rationalise our behaviours, even to the point that our subconscious view of animals fluctuates based on whether or not we have just eaten animal products.

Consequently, vegans make the status quo feel that bit more uncomfortable, eroding the sense of safety provided by the bandwagon effect. The comedian David Mitchell summarised this when he said, ‘The thing that’s annoying about there suddenly being a lot of them [vegans] is the nagging suspicion that they might be right. When there were hardly any vegans, I hardly ever had to think about that.’9

strongly believe that what we do to animals is something that future generations will look back at in horror. At the risk of sounding too idealistic, I hope that those future generations will be ones that come about in my lifetime. Although if they do, we should probably start to think about our answers to the questions, ‘Why did you allow this to happen? Why did you ever allow an industry that caused so much suffering, pain and death? That destroyed the natural world and the wildlife that existed within it, that caused infectious diseases, pandemics and antibiotic resistance, not to mention the chronic diseases and illnesses that affected hundreds of millions of people. What were you thinking?’ The truth is that we don’t see the damage caused when we take a bite out of an animal product, but that doesn’t make the damage any less real. Our ignorance about what is happening doesn’t lessen the reality of what others are forced to endure as a consequence of our choices.

That said, because we don’t want to turn all animal farms into arable farms, and many animal farms are on land that wouldn’t be suitable anyway, we could also use the money to pay farmers to restore, reforest and rewild their farmland. In essence, they would be publicly funded land managers, subsidised by the state, but the commodity they would be providing wouldn’t be food but instead wildflower meadows, forests, woodlands and peatlands. Rather than making a living from killing animals, they would be paid to provide habitats for wildlife and biodiversity – paid to create life, not to take it. There is a precedent for this exact model of land stewardship. In the 1940s, around 75 per cent of Costa Rica was covered in rainforests. However, by the 1970s and 1980s, it had one of the highest rates of deforestation in Latin America, with as much as half of the forest cover being destroyed, primarily for cattle grazing and the production of animal feed. In response to this, the Costa Rican government made deforestation illegal, except for specifically approved reasons. They then introduced the Payments for Environmental Services Program, a subsidy system that paid farmers to protect biodiversity, sequester carbon-dioxide emissions and regrow the lost forests on the grazing lands. Essentially, the government eliminated harmful payments such as cattle subsidies and replaced them with support payments for improving nature. As a result, Costa Rica has become the first tropical countr...

As it stands, an astonishing amount of money is squandered just keeping animal agriculture profitable. In the EU, 20 per cent (more than £24 billion) of the entire annual budget is spent subsidising animal farming.3 In the UK, grazing animal farmers rely on subsidies for more than 90 per cent of their profits while only 10 per cent of the annual profits for fruit farmers comes from subsidy payments.4 However, post-Brexit, there are changes being implemented to the UK’s agriculture subsidies with the new Environmental Land Management Scheme awarding payments for environmental efforts such as improving soil health and restoring woodlands. But, with the transition to the new subsidy scheme lasting seven years, and many of the initiatives simply consisting of reversing some of the damage caused by a decade of deregulation by the same political party that is now attempting to incentivise the very measures it had previously been rallying against, it remains to be seen how impactful it will be. In the USA, direct government aid to farmers rose to a record $46.5 billion in 2020, equalling about 40 per cent of net farm income. While we were being told that the pandemic was having a huge effect on farmers, these direct payments meant that US agriculture had its third most profitable year in half a century.5 They were being increased at the same time that President Trump was trying to cut funding for food stamps, which would have seen 700,000 people lose access to them during the pan...

Through our taxes, we are in essence funding the animal cruelty, human exploitation, environmental degradation and disease creation that we should all want to bring to an end. Then, to add insult to injury, we are paying for the healthcare costs, the environmental clean-up costs and the pandemic costs that come about as a result of what we do to animals. It is a truly absurd, scandalous and immoral use of public funds – tax revenues are meant to be spent on improving society, not degrading and destroying it. We have the money; it just needs to be distributed in a fair and logical manner. We should also tax animal products to reflect their true cost to society. Research has shown that there would need to be a 20 per cent tax on unprocessed meat and a 110 per cent tax on processed meat in high-income nations just to cover the healthcare costs incurred by the consumption of animal flesh.6 Doing so would also cut annual deaths by 220,000 and save £130 billion a year. Another piece of research calculated that in the EU meat prices would have to rise by 40 per cent, organic meat prices would have to rise by 25 per cent and milk prices would have to rise by around 30 per cent to cover the environmental costs associated with their production.7 In the same way that we have taxes on harmful products such as sugar, alcohol and tobacco, it makes logical and financial sense that the same be done for animal products. Why are we spending billions on these industries when doing so is caus...