idk if you still answer vegan stuff.
my understanding of why many vegans say that eating animals is ethically wrong is due to thinking animals have a right to live and that humans can go beyond the need for meat so it’s wrong to eat meat if you don’t have too.
There this term called speciesism that is discrimination against species and many vegans treat it as a form of oppression. So eating animals for some vegans, a bigoted action.
I’m not sure if this is like problematic way to think bc I see the point. It’s just that meat eating only became a problem when mass factory farms were developed, so it implies the issue is with how people raise/eat animals rather than eating animals in itself.
I mean yeah, I’m very familiar with everything you’ve said here. I’ve met a lot of vegans. I knew all of this before making the post, but even if I didn’t, I absolutely would by now. Basically every single argument that could possibly made for, about, and against veganism has been made on that post in some form or another.
I just, like, flat out do not agree with that line of thinking. For one, while yes we have developed foods and technologies that allow for some people to live on fully meat-free diets, there still absolutely are people who will die without meat proteins. That wasn’t the point I was trying to make with my initial post, but it’s been pointed out like hundreds times in the comments, tags, and reblogs so I figure I might as well highlight it here. And I don’t think those people deserve to just die, frankly, and I think any argument against that goes counter to the notion that all animals have a right to life.
To speak on that further, the key point I was trying to make is that humans are animals. We are not separate from or above the animal kingdom, we’re part of it. Animals are our relatives, we are all sharing this earth together. A human eating a deer is no more cruel than a bear who eats a fish, even if our hunting methodologies might be different. If you are taking only what you need and treating the creatures who sustain you with respect, all of this is part of the natural cycle of life. Animals eat, kill, and die. I think it’s extremely divorced from reality to suggest otherwise, and I do think that thinking is an offshoot of Christian white supremacy that seeks to position humanity, particularly white humanity, as unique on this earth in a way that is paternalistic and ultimately oppressive. Whether it’s that we can take whatever we want with no regard for the repercussions or that our impact is uniquely harmful in a way that is seen as inherent to our very nature and applied to no other animal, both schools of thought are based in the same misguided principles. And as I mentioned in my post, Indigenous people have tended to be particularly targeted by this for our traditional hunting practices, despite the fact that we have sustainably been living alongside our animal relatives for generations and are frequently at the forefront of ecological restoration. I think it’s incredibly crass to coin a new form of bigotry and attempt to apply to uniformly to both factory farms and sustenance hunters.
Ultimately, the issue is indeed with the meat and dairy industries. The scale and capacity at which these run allows for immense cruelty towards both non-human and human animals, as well as massive environmental destruction. But it’s equally worth noting that the exact same can be said for the modern agricultural industry. Anyone striving to be truly ethical in their diet needs to be willing to account for both truths. And I know people who are very much living this way—anecdotally, in my life, primarily Black and Indigenous people. And some of them have an easier time maintaining this than others, depending on circumstances. All of them acknowledge that this is not really an option that is that accessible to a vast majority of people. Ultimately, the problems posed by these industries cannot really be solved by individual dietary choices, no matter how widespread. We need to be taking on not only the industries, but the very systems that enable and perpetuate them. And that’s not easy to do, it’s something that requires collective action. It’s much much easier to direct your anger at an arctic hunter killing to survive than it is to take on these destructive and colonial food systems. But that misdirected anger saves no humans nor animals, in the long run.
