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Why Vegan?

I'm genuinely confused here how does becoming a vegan help in ending the suffering of the animals? Becoz the animals that are gonna be killed are still gonna be killed no matter what.There is not gonna be any reduction in animals getting killed each year nor their suffering is gonna go away.How is it gonna help them ?

I would advise looking at the ‘Why Vegan’ section of my pinned post; particularly on the the impact of veganism and the moral imperative.

#ask #vegan #why vegan

Moral consistency? My moral code re: food: don’t eat conspecifics. That’s it. I don’t care about other animals. Other animals don’t care about us. This is consistent with other species that eat animals; hell, some of them STILL eat conspecifics. The moral argument for veganism only works with vegans, no one else cares.

I’m assuming you put this in my inbox because you care what I think about what you think about killing and eating animals. I don’t really care about your thoughts but I do care about the impact of your thoughts on the world. In this vein, the moral argument for veganism works not only for people who care about animals, but for anyone who cares about climate change and the wellbeing of the planet, anyone who cares about their own personal health, and anyone who cares about human suffering in general. Even if you don’t care at all about animals themselves and you only care about humans, it’s worth considering how carnism hurts humans, too. Because it really does.

You rationalize carnism by concluding that if animals don’t care about you then you shouldn’t care about them, but that’s a very ecologically naive way to think about things. Animal agriculture is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions because 70 billion land animals produce tons and tons of burps, farts, and shit every year. Animals raised for their flesh and secretions also require food and water for the duration of their lives, and the calories required to raise an animal is much greater than the amount of calories in the meat, dairy, or eggs produced. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison also found that “plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland.” By only growing crops to feed humans we could reduce the amount of redundant agriculture in the current food system and therefore reduce the total amount of land, pollution, and exploitation that goes into the agricultural system. Sure, animals don’t care that we’re polluting the earth because they can’t understand these things. But you can, and you should. If you care about the impacts of climate change, go vegan.

The recent outbreak of Covid19 likely began in a wet market, when the virus spilled over from an exotic animal host into one or more common livestock animal intermediates, which was then came into contact with a human who became ill. This is far from the first case of zoonotic infections in human history. SARS, Ebola, influenza, vCJD (Mad Cow disease), Nipah virus, HIV, and many others all came into human history from exposure through animal agriculture and/or hunting, trapping, and scavenging of animals. By reducing contact between humans and potentially infectious animals, we can reduce the likelihood of outbreaks of new diseases. Even beyond the relatively infrequent cases of spillover events, animal agriculture is a huge driver is antimicrobial resistance with the presence of resistant bacteria in farm animals tripling in the last two decades. Animals are kept in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions that are prime breeding grounds for microbial life, and overseers use massive amounts of antibiotics to try to prevent and manage disease with 80% of all antibiotics in the US being sold to treat farmed animals. When bacteria are exposed to these antibiotics, the ones that don’t have genes or plasmids that help them survive the antibiotic will die. Not only will those surviving bacteria “pass down” their genes to their daughter clones, bacteria (and some archaea and eukaryotic microbes) are also capable of horizontal gene transfer where they can share genes with unrelated organisms. Bacterial generation times are extremely quick, which means that antimicrobial resistance can appear and disperse throughout a population much more rapidly than humans can produce new antibiotics. These resistant bacteria can then cause untreatable infections in humans, essentially bringing our health system back to the pre-penicillin days. If you care about human health and safety, go vegan.

Slaughterhouses are some of the worst workplace environments imaginable. They have some of the highest rates of physical injury, and psychological trauma. 1/3 of slaughterhouse workers in the US are immigrants without citizenship, largely because they are the least likely to push back against unsafe and unsanitary working conditions. Violence against animals has long been observed as a predictor of physically and sexually violent behavior against other humans, and humans working in slaughterhouses are at high risk of a specific kind of PTSD called Perpetrator Induced Post-Traumatic Stress (PITS). If you care about the physical and emotional wellbeing of the people who are traumatized every day to put meat on your table, go vegan.

So no, I don’t believe that “the moral argument for veganism only works for vegans”. I don’t think anyone has to already be vegan to be disturbed by the issues I’ve outlined, and you don’t really have to feel much concern for animals at all to understand the ways that animal agriculture hurts us, too. For the sake of virtually the entire world, go vegan.

#ask #vegan #climate change #climate crisis #antibiotic resistance #violence #human suffering #why vegan

These are my 3 ethical reasons for being vegan: the animals, the environment and the people. What are yours?

[On my channel I’ll be making more videos about veganism, ethical fashion, sustainability and overall conscious living. If you’re into that, please consider subscribing! Your support means the world to me 🖤]

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For us, going and staying vegan and (re-)asserting our stance of veganism, is an act of liberation, it’s a process of cutting through the cognitive dissonance that is inherent in the unnecessary exploitation and killing of animals. It is an* assertion of our deepest held values: That all life is valuable and that any harm should be minimised as much as possible. That instead, we should improve and enrich each other’s lives as much as we can!

We live in a world that, by its very structure, makes it impossible to fully live these values. This is why practising veganism is sometimes difficult (and can not be done “perfectly” by anyone!), often more difficult the less privileges someone has. Every fight against structural and societal injustice and violence is hard for the same reason. The powers-that-be don’t want to give up their power. Life today is built on foundations of exploitation and violence so that the path of least resistance is to just participate in the violence. Trying to even just extract oneself from that violence to the best of one’s abilities (to say nothing of actively fighting it!) is not only difficult, but already seen as an attack on the status quo, and met with some amount of social stigma. A society built on structures of violence and exploitation can not allow better alternatives to exist alongside it, it wouldn’t survive the competition! So the alternatives are gobbled up, faught, slandered, forbidden, invisibilised or co-opted. Veganism especially suffers from cooptation – it’s now mostly presented as a wellness diet (something really harmful! Diets kill.) instead of a political struggle for liberation, one that attacks the very foundations of capitalism and hierarchichal and extractive societies. We oppose the commodification of living beings.

The fact that it’s not exactly easy doesn’t mean fighting and advocating for justice is somehow an expression of privilege! On the contrary, the fight to revolutionize society so that it is less violent and exploitative is a fight against unfair privileges. This is what the societal liberation of animals is about, just like other social liberation struggles. Yes, we are against cages. But more importantly, we are against structural violence and systems of “morality” and law and “common sense” that make those cages possible in the first place.

We especially oppose the myth that it it somehow necessary to structurally exploit and violate (breed, cage, slaughter - for profit! not to meet anyone’s needs! It’s capitalism after all!) anyone! It’s not necessary to exploit animals this way. It’s not necessary to find the one group of beings that’s even lower than us (exploited and marginalised humans) on the social ladder and to kick down to hold ourselves up. On the contrary – we can never have a truly free and liveable society if the idea and practice of exploitation and subjugation survives. Even if it were “only” animals.

We have to rip all exploitation out by the roots! All of it!

And no we’re not shaming anyone for not being able to live 100% animal-products free this very second. I’m also not making any statements about indigenous peoples (or any culture but my own western industrialised one).

We’re just stating how important and necessary veganism as movements and as a liberation struggle is for this western industrialised society!

*not the only one!