Standard Arguments Against Veganism, Pt. 7

Jun 25, 2020

To know, and not to do, is not to know.
Proverb

1. Vegans are too strict

Here's a standard rule of thumb: Never allow your opinions of others to justify your own wrongdoings or prevent yourself from doing good. You don't have to like other vegans to be vegan yourself. You don't have to be friends with them or do any of the things they do (aside from actually being vegan). However, what does it really mean to be strict? Would you say that abstention from murder is too strict? Or not beating your dog on occasion is too strict? In my opinion, insisting that the products of cow rape are the only foods that can be classified as milk or cheese or butter or ice cream is too strict. Refusing to take a chance on the health, environmental, societal, and ethical benefits of just trying a plant-based diet because you just love cheese too much is too strict. Obstinately rejecting anything a vegan says because you don't want your idealism shattered is too strict.

When people make these claims about veganism, they're failing to realize that veganism isn't about restricting yourself, about not allowing yourself to partake in products and activities you once enjoyed. Veganism is choosing not to unnecessarily harm other beings, and the way that is enacted is by not participating in the consumption of products that cause others harm. It is not being strict, it is being kind.

2. The animals will overpopulate

The first time I ever chose to publicly speak about veganism was in a college class, and I had a classmate ask me this very question: Where do all the animals go if we stop eating them? I thought about it for a moment and came to a conclusion: They won't go anywhere because they simply won't exist. Unfortunately, veganism won't happen overnight. In fact, it's been nearly 80 years since the term was first created, but it's only in the past 5-10 years that the lifestyle has become popular. And certainly with the monetary investments in and economic power of animal agriculture and the government supporting them, making changes in the food system will continue to move at a snail's pace. (No offense intended to snails.) With time, as more and more consumers reject animal products and favor vegan alternatives, companies will shift their business models to slowly eliminate animal-based productions. This means that fewer and fewer animals will be bred and killed, so there is an incredibly low possibility of farmed animals overpopulating any ecosystem.

However, if we were to sincerely entertain this idea of overpopulation, there's also an answer. In business, there is a term called "planned obsolescence," in which suppliers create products with the sole intent of those products becoming obsolete quickly. While this is most obvious with advancing technology, like the new smartphone models released every year, it also applies to animal agriculture...but in a far more sinister fashion.

The animals used in agricultural practices were bred over many years to develop certain traits to make them more efficient to farm: broiler (meat) chickens gain weight so quickly that they generally lose the ability to walk more than a few steps within a few weeks of birth and are then killed just a few weeks later; wool-producing sheep have been bred to have wrinkly skin so they can grow as much wool as possible, making them look like dogs you see rescued from hoarders, and completely dependent on humans to shear them for the rest of their short lives; and all male animals, aside from a select few used for breeding, are castrated to prevent aggressive behavior and injuries, meaning that even if they did filter into native populations, they would be unable to procreate. These animals are bred, raised, and killed in captivity and, just like the companion animals in our homes, would not survive long outside of those conditions. (Not that they survive long in those conditions, either.) Whatever way you look at it, the probability and possibility of farmed animal overpopulation is virtually zero.

3. Humane farming & slaughter is fine

If your father was forced to rape your mother, then you were born and taken away from them and raised for a few years eating fat-heavy foods to get you nice and blubbery, all with the sole intent of killing you as a child so some alien race could eat you, would you be ok with it as long as it was done humanely? So long as your mother was humanely raped? So long as you were humanely enslaved? So long as you were humanely stabbed to death? I didn't think so. To treat someone humanely is to show compassion and benevolence, but there is nothing humane, compassionate, or benevolent that occurs in any business practice using animals.

If you were born impoverished in the "bad part of town," and your only job opportunity was the local slaughterhouse you walked by to school every day as a kid, where you could smell the urine and feces and blood, where you could hear the screams of animals being murdered, would you want people to keep supporting that business as long as they thought it was "high welfare"? Humane, animal welfare, all-natural, grass-fed, organic, free-range, cage-free -- these are all words we use to make ourselves feel better for participating in an unjust system. But if we were the ones being exploited and murdered or if we were the ones forced to kill innocent baby animals every day, we would want someone to speak up for us, to take action to save us. Like I mentioned in Part 3, only villains use these kinds of excuses to continue harming others; we must choose to be the heroes.

4. The animals are already dead

Would you use that as an excuse to eat roadkill? Or after euthanizing your old, sick cat? If you would...I'll admit I'm a tiny bit impressed (but mostly disgusted). This is actually an argument I faced when I was much younger and stopped eating "red meat." Sometimes my friends asked me why I wouldn't eat it because the animals had already been killed, so technically I wasn't doing anything wrong. But I don't want to base my morals on shaky, subjective technicalities. (Though I didn't know it at the time.)

The truth of the matter is that the animals aren't already dead. Buying an animal product is like paying a credit card bill: you pay for everything purchased on the card the month before. When you purchase a leather purse or a salmon fillet, you're paying for everything that happened to the animal from which those products came before they were killed. If everyone in the world were to stop buying animal products, soon they would cease to exist. As consumers, we hold the power to choose what products and services we want, and companies have to respect our wishes if they want to stay in business. Every time we purchase a Beyond Burger instead of a beef burger, we're not paying for an 18-month old cow to be slaughtered; we're not paying for his horns to be burned off, to have tags stabbed through his ears, or to be castrated without anesthetic; we're not paying for him to be ripped away from his mother as an infant never to see her again; we're not paying for the death of the calf beside him as she suffered for days before finally succumbing to her infection; we're not paying for violence. We're paying for a more compassionate future with every dollar we spend.

5. Vegans are anti-capitalist

First things first: veganism has nothing to do with your political or economic views. Second, while it's true that many vegans do tend to lean more progressive on the political spectrum, there are millions of us in the world, and the singular commonality between us is veganism. We all hold a strong belief in animal rights and a goal in animal liberation. To be vegan, that's all you need, and then we can debate other issues separately. So, if you want to be a pro-capitalist vegan, then go for it.

An interesting aspect of this particular argument is that it's used both by vegans and nonvegans. On the vegan side, those arguing against capitalism often say that vegans should never buy plant-based products from nonvegan companies, such as the Impossible Whopper or Ben & Jerry's non-dairy ice cream, because by doing so we are supporting companies that profit from animal exploitation. And while I agree with this point to an extent, and I agree that our current system protects the rich and powerful -- the rich and powerful including multinational multi-billion-dollar animal agriculture corporations -- and condemns the innocent and unempowered, as I said in "Is Cross-Contamination Anti-Vegan?," where do we draw the line? Because nearly all vegan businesses are owned by larger nonvegan businesses.

Additionally, if we don't support new vegan-friendly products from these companies, they will simply revert to selling animal products instead. By purchasing a pint of non-dairy Ben & Jerry's, we're telling them that we support their investment in animal-cruelty-free ice cream. I remember how excited I was to try their first vegan flavors when they were launched, and now, within just a few short years, they have more non-dairy flavors than I can count. You may not believe in the system or want to support it, and I completely understand and respect any vegan's decision to patronize exclusively vegan brands as much as possible, but if we can't fix the system right now, at least we can try to make it a little better.

be conscious, be kind, be vegan