Choosing Kindness
“The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” —Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Letter Writer“ (1968)
Everything changes when you understand that every animal you’ve ever eaten was an individual—a sentient, self-aware individual, a unique and irreplaceable individual, with fears and desires and joys and sorrows no less meaningful to them than yours are to you…
…that every one of the creatures exploited for your benefit experienced love and loss and pain and grief no less real than that which you experience…
…that every one of the trillions of sentient beings unnecessarily slaughtered each year to satisfy our appetites is an autonomous being—a feeling, sensing, suffering being who cares about their family, mourns their friends, seeks well-being, and, like you, doesn’t want to suffer.
The ground shifts beneath your feet when you come face-to-face with the horrors in which you and everyone you know and everyone you don’t know and all of us everywhere are at all times complicit…
…when you look at the science, and accept the evidence, and the immensity of the crime comes into focus…
…when you can no longer ignore the never-ending holocaust for which we are responsible.
Trillions a year. Every year. Year after year. Decade after decade.
It’s heart-stopping. Soul-shattering.1
One of the best descriptions of this epiphany that I’ve read is from Alex Melonas, on Louise Jorgensen’s magnificent Animal Sentience Project website:
I can’t pinpoint the time or moment when I thought there was something to the argument, so it was a kind of accumulative process. But once there was a tipping point... When you come out the other side intellectually, I’d almost say it’s crippling. You’re immediately confronted with a holocaust, that is occurring everywhere at all times and everybody you know; your loved ones and people you hate, everywhere, they’re all participating in it.
And here I am, I’m just talking about it, I’m kind of somewhat impassionately just talking about it because I’m trying to relay my feelings about it. When really the only reasonable response to that realization… to waking up to this world we live in, is a fucking explosion. That’s the only reasonable response. Because this is something that’s never happened before and it’s so bad. How do you possibly talk about a holocaust that’s happening everywhere, all the time, every day and everybody’s included? How do you talk about that when it’s just a laughable subject when you bring it up? When your friends and your family think it’s cute when you’ve decided that you’ve taken an interest in the ‘animal issue’. But you know, ‘I’m glad you’ve made your choice, please respect my choice’ - How in the hell do you possibly go on in that world? How do you not see the world and everybody in it as dark and dangerous and irrational? How in the world do you not see your life, that you’ve lived up until that point when you’ve woken up as inexcusable?
How indeed? How do you go on knowing the crimes of which we are guilty? Knowing the scale of the suffering we’re causing? Knowing the countless unique and beautiful individuals who live their entire lives in unspeakable pain and despair? How do you go on in a world like that?
How are you supposed to just continue living your regular life—going to your regular job, having your regular conversations, watching your regular shows, eating your regular dinners—when every time you look into the eyes of the unique and beautiful cat or dog sitting on the couch beside you, you’re reminded of the countless other equally unique, equally beautiful beings—beings no less worthy of love and kindness and dignity and well-being—living their whole lives in unimaginable agony?
How do you go on?
How the fuck do you go on?
And no, it’s not just mammals: reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians, even insects—all consistently show signs not only of sentience and self-awareness, but of consciousness:2 of intention and play and connectedness, of altruism and compassion and theory of mind.3 In other words, just because humans have only recently learned to recognize the myriad forms of intelligence and consciousness that have arisen on earth over the past 800 million years doesn’t mean those intelligences and consciousnesses weren’t there. Because they were there. They are there. As Carl Safina has written: “Love and caring is not new with us and it’s not the thing that makes us human. We’re not the only ones that care about our mates. We’re not the only ones that care about our children.” Indeed, many of the psychological and emotional states and cognitive abilities previously thought to be uniquely human—states such as love and joy, compassion and altruism, loss and grief; abilities such as complex language and tool use and number sense—are now known to be present across the animal kingdom. The more we study our nonhuman relatives, in short, the more sentience, consciousness, individuality, community, and culture we find. We just had to open our eyes. We just had to be willing to see.4
Consider the octopus: an invertebrate with a body and brain structure completely different from our own, whose nervous system possesses fewer than 1% as many neurons as ours (roughly 500 million as compared to humans’ 86 billion). Although we last shared a common ancestor with these wondrous beings some 750 million years ago, octopuses have, through a process known as convergent evolution, developed highly complex minds—minds with fundamentally different ways of operating than our own, but which have nonetheless evolved the capacity to experience many of the same psychological and emotional states humans do.
The evidence suggesting “that octopuses experience complex emotional states,” Esther Evangeline explains, “may indicate a deeper form of consciousness than previously acknowledged. They demonstrate what appears to be curiosity, frustration, playfulness, and even what some researchers interpret as a sense of humor.” The fact that octopuses seem to be conscious beings, she continues, “raises profound questions,” requiring us to rethink our human-centered conception of ethics:
As we develop a better understanding of octopus consciousness we face the challenge of creating ethical frameworks that acknowledge the moral significance of non-human, non-mammalian awareness. This may require expanding our moral circle to include beings whose consciousness, while alien to our own, deserves recognition and protection.
And though we will probably never know (to paraphrase Thomas Nagel’s famous formulation) what it’s like to be an octopus—or any other being, for that matter5—given the growing scientific consensus that octopuses are sentient beings, we can be reasonably confident that at least part of what it’s like to be an octopus is that it matters: it matters to the octopus that it is that octopus; just as it matters to each and every sentient being to be the particular being it is. “Each animal’s life matters,” Christine M. Korsgaard points out,
because it matters to the animal himself or herself. The reason why what happens to them matters is not that they are moral beings, but simply because they are the kinds of beings to whom good and bad things can happen – sentient beings…. Each creature’s life matters, and matters uniquely and irreplaceably, because it matters to that creature himself or herself.
Just as we care about our lives and the lives of our fellows, so also do the beings with whom we share the planet care about their lives and, oftentimes, the lives of their fellows. This is no less true of your beloved childhood pet than it is of you yourself; no less true of the octopus frolicking in her garden … or the wolf howling his joys or and sorrows at the moon … or the hummingbird swooping happily around the feeder outside your window.
And it is also no less true of the nearly 200 hundred million mice, fish, rats, birds, dogs, cats, rabbits, and primates tortured every year in labs around the world; or of the tens of billions of chickens, cows, pigs, goats, turkeys, and other land animals living at this very moment in indescribably brutal captivity; or of the estimated two trillion fishes and sea creatures pitilessly slaughtered every year. Continuous unremitting suffering. Every second of every day of every year. And it never stops. The suffering never stops.
To put it bluntly: It is no longer possible to deny that humans are responsible for the enslavement, exploitation, torture, and slaughter of trillions of sentient beings every year … no longer possible to disclaim that we are at every moment causing unthinkable suffering to an inconceivable number of beings … no longer possible to ignore that it is a fundamentally depraved system that puts the butter on our croissants and the foam on our lattes, the eggs in our omelettes and the chicken in our nuggets, the salmon in our sushi, the bacon on our BLTs, and the beef in our burgers.
We know this. We know this because of the many brave activists and reporters who have—at great personal, legal, and financial risk, at the cost of profound trauma and moral injury—filmed hundreds of hours of documentary video revealing remarkably consistent and widespread brutality across the entirety of the animal agriculture industry: an obscene amount of savage and gratuitous day-to-day violence that far surpasses the barbarity inherent in unnecessarily killing sentient beings merely to satisfy humans’ appetite for flesh; a sickening degree of depraved, even psychopathic cruelty towards these beautiful, helpless, suffering beings.6
And though approximately 99% of the animal products sold and consumed in the United States come from factory farms, the cruelty isn’t limited to large, industrial-scale animal agriculture; even small, so-called sustainable, organic, certified humane “family farms” (where “only” hundreds or thousands of animals are tortured and slaughtered each year, rather than hundreds of thousands or millions) are equally guilty of treating nonhuman animals as commodities—as things rather than beings; as something rather than someone. Because even those animals who are supposedly well-treated—the “grass-fed” cow you see in the milk commercial “living its best life” in a beautiful bucolic setting; the “cage-free” chicken in the egg advertisement pecking gleefully in the farmyard—are in the end slaves, stripped of all autonomy and agency, utterly at the mercy of their human captors in a cruel and barbaric system that inevitably leads to extortionary behavior and violence. Just as human slavery did … and does.7
Think about it for a minute: sentient, self-aware beings—beings whose experience of pain is no less real and intense than yours, whose suffering matters to them no less than yours does to you—being bred, exploited, and ultimately discarded based solely on what is most profitable for their “owner.” In the 21st century! If this doesn’t shock the conscience, it’s hard to imagine what would.8
Consider, for example, the moral cost of producing cow’s milk for human consumption on what we euphemistically refer to as a dairy “farm,” but which would more accurately be called a dairy factory. It’s estimated that there are approximately 270 million dairy cows worldwide, the vast majority of whom live their entire lives in massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where they are routinely subjected to brutal mutilations, including branding, dehorning, and tail docking, and where they are forcefully impregnated over and over and over again, year after year, in what can only be honestly described as industrialized serial rape.
And it gets worse: within hours of giving birth, their babies are stolen away—causing emotional pain and trauma to both the mothers and their young—in order that the mothers will continue to produce milk for humans … who have no physiological need for it. Rape. Birth. Separation. Again and again. Rape. Birth. Separation. Year after year. Rape. Birth. Separation. Their whole life long … until they “age out” after four to six years, at which point they are slaughtered for meat.
And the babies? Well, if the babies resulting from the pregnancies are female, they are condemned to the same nightmarish life of brutal mutilation, servitude, and serial rape that their mothers lived before them so we can enjoy our ice cream sundaes and grilled cheese sandwiches. If they are male, they typically spend less time suffering—usually living just 2-3 years before being slaughtered to produce our ground round and veal steaks.9
Or consider the chicken and egg industries. It’s estimated that more than 75 billion chickens are slaughtered for meat around the world every year, with another 6.6 billion egg-laying hens living in indescribably inhumane captivity. Add to that an additional six billion male chicks gruesomely killed within hours of hatching each year due to their lack of profitability, and we’re looking at almost 90 billion conscious individuals—each of them no less capable of suffering than you or me—living their whole lives in constant, unmitigated pain and misery. Their whole lives. Ninety billion individuals—each with their own personality, their own intentions and desires and emotions, their own memories and fears and cares and worries—condemned to lives of unceasing agony.
As the Humane League notes, “Chicks begin their lives in massive hatcheries, where they … are never allowed to meet their parents,” and then spend their entire lives in “intensely crowded, often unsanitary conditions,” confined in battery cages (wire cages so small that they “can’t even spread their wings without hitting the cage or another chicken”) where they are “prevented from resting properly or engaging in normal social activities.” And while chickens raised in so-called cage-free facilities may be spared some of this suffering, most of them live their entire lives inside massive, filthy, horribly over-crowded sheds, never seeing the sun or feeling fresh air, where they are (like their caged counterparts) routinely subjected to a range of barbaric practices, including:
● forced molting—i.e., starving them for anywhere from a week to a month to force their bodies to lay as many eggs as possible before they are killed;
● debeaking—removing a portion of hours-old chicks’ beaks, without anesthesia, to prevent the pecking that results from their unnatural confinement, thereby causing pain throughout their lives; and
● genetic manipulation designed to increase their egg production and/or to drastically increase their rate of growth, causing them to develop osteoporosis, tumors, uterine prolapse, muscle disease, deformities, and foot problems.
All to ensure that we can eat our chicken fingers and scrambled eggs.
And then there’s what we do to pigs, emotionally complex beings capable of experiencing joy, fear, excitement, sadness, stress, and empathy, among other emotions. Despite the overwhelming evidence of pigs’ capacity to experience a wide range of emotional states, despite the fact that every single one of them is no less capable of suffering than you or me, we casually kill a billion and a half of them around the world every year. These are “social creatures,” as one recent article notes, “who form strong bonds with one another,” who “communicate through grunts, squeals, and body language,” and who “mourn the loss of a companion, celebrate reunions, and even comfort one another during times of stress.”
And, as if this needless slaughter isn’t enough, before we kill them we subject them to years (years!) of near-constant cruelty, pain, and suffering. According to the ASPCA, “the vast majority … are raised in barren crates or pens at industrial-scale facilities without fresh air or sunlight” where “Ammonia fumes rise to dangerous, uncomfortable levels due to high concentrations of waste.” Sentient, conscious beings—beings no less conscious or emotionally complex than the cat or dog you share your home with—living in unremitting agony their entire lives. And while it’s possible that conditions in some countries are better than those in the U.S., it’s certain that conditions in many countries are as bad as—if not worse than—conditions in the U.S.. All so we can have our spare ribs and pork chops.
Sadly, if not surprisingly, the treatment of the almost 300 million bulls raised and slaughtered for beef every year is no better than that of the chickens, pigs, and dairy cows. They spend their entire lives confined in factory farms—again, the word “farm” is misleading, as these massive operations bear little resemblance to actual farms—where many of them literally never see the sun, where they are forced to live in unbearably crowded and unhygienic conditions, and where they are daily subjected to many of the same cruel and painful mutilations their counterparts at dairy operations experience.
Then, once they have grown large enough for their slaughter to be profitable, they are crammed into trucks for transport to the slaughterhouse, sometimes traveling for several days in conditions so brutal that hundreds of thousands die painful deaths en route. As Sentient Media explains:
These animals tend to die of heatstroke, respiratory disease, starvation or thirst (livestock are given no food or water during transport) and physical trauma. They’re often crammed so tightly that they can’t move, and during the winter, animals in ventilated trucks will sometimes freeze to death en route.
Finally, upon arrival arrival at the slaughterhouse, those that are still alive typically wait one or two days to be slaughtered, during which time, according to Animal Equality, “Workers often beat the confused animals with heavy metal objects” and many “watch their peers die in front of them, increasing their anxiety as their own times near.” Then, according to the Humane League, when their time does at last come, they are, “per slaughterhouse guidelines … killed slowly by loss of blood, or exsanguination“:
Because the cruelty of this is self-evident, regulations also require animals be “stunned” before having their throats slit. However, no method of stunning is guaranteed to avoid causing distress or pain. Two of the three methods of stunning were originally conceived to be lethal and are now widely regarded as inhumane. All three methods of stunning are prone to failure, frequently resulting in animals being fully conscious as they bleed to death.
To be clear: these are sentient beings—self-aware beings whose experience of pain and distress is no less significant to them than ours is to us—subjected to a life (and a death) of pain and terror so we can eat steaks and meatloaf.
And finally, there are the more than two trillion fish and sea creatures we needlessly kill every year, most of whom, according to a recent article in Vox, “are not caught wild from the ocean but raised on fish farms, which are so cruel they have been widely dubbed by animal welfare advocates as ‘underwater factory farms.’” Fish possess the same pain receptors as humans, and “exhibit complex pain-avoidance behaviors that go far beyond simple reflexes,” yet they are, according to Animal Equality, “usually removed from the water and left to suffocate and die … desperately attempt[ing] to escape as their gills collapse, preventing them from being able to breathe.” Or if they are of a larger species, such as tuna and swordfish, they are typically bludgeoned to death, which often results in their being injured and then regaining consciousness, requiring that they be repeatedly beaten until they are dead. All so we can have our grilled salmon and fish sticks.
This is the true cost of the animal products so many of us consume on a daily basis: suffering and death that dwarfs all of the holocausts in humanity’s sad and bloody history put together: a bottomless moral cesspool in which trillions of individual sentient beings are subjected every year, year after year, decade after decade, to torture as bad as anything even the most degraded, debased, abused human has ever endured. As Herman Gombiner laments in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1968 short story “The Letter Writer“:
What do they know—all those scholars, all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you. They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.
But it could stop. It can stop. We can stop this holocaust.
And the stopping begins by looking our fellow nonhuman beings in the eye, because when we do—when we open our hearts as well as our eyes—it’s impossible, as John Berger has written, not to see the individual “looking back at us“ from behind their eyes; impossible, as Stephen Batchelor has said, not to see the beautiful, vulnerable being begging us, “Please don’t kill me”; impossible, as Martin Luther King, Jr., noted in a different context, not to see that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny”; impossible, finally, not to see that every individual, every sentient being, is equally worthy of dignity and respect and care and kindness.
The stopping begins when we discard the pernicious myth of human exceptionalism—a thoroughly discredited belief with no good evidence to support it and substantial evidence refuting it; when we recognize our fundamental interconnectedness with the other inhabitants of the natural world; when we acknowledge not only that humans are neither more nor less significant than our nonhuman relatives, but that we are, in the end, just one of the crowd, a relative newcomer on the scene.10
The stopping begins, finally, when we look in the mirror and see ourselves as we truly are and confront the true consequences of our actions; when we acknowledge the unbearable moral cost of our gustatory preferences; when we ask ourselves if the satisfaction of our appetites is worth the untold suffering we cause to achieve it.
We can stop this holocaust.
But doing so requires that we recognize that the crime of which we are guilty is a choice. A choice we make every day. A choice we make as a society. A choice with dire consequences for trillions of sentient, suffering individuals.
And just as it’s important to acknowledge that our current system is a choice—humans have no physiological need to consume animal products11—it’s equally important to acknowledge that veganism is a choice of privilege, a choice many people don’t have. Because the fact is, many people have little or no choice about what they consume: tens of millions of parents raising their children in food deserts where the only affordable option is a Big Mac or a Whopper, hundreds of thousands of women and men and children (children!) sleeping rough on U.S. streets every night, hundreds of millions of war and climate refugees and incarcerated persons around the world, to name just a few examples.
And we must also acknowledge that the decision to limit one’s participation in the atrocity that is animal agriculture can come at a social cost. Becoming vegan can, for instance, make it difficult to fit in at holiday gatherings—requiring that we reimagine the traditional Thanksgiving turkey or Passover brisket or Easter ham or Eid haleem; it can complicate previously simple activities such as bar-b-queing with family, or sharing a croissant and cappuccino with a friend. And for many, it can mean challenging long and deeply held belief systems, changing ingrained habits, and letting go of (or reimagining) cherished traditions and practices that are integral to peoples’ identities—traditions and practices that nearly everyone accepts as “the way we’ve always done things.”
To be clear: I’m not suggesting that the social costs of being vegan outweigh the unfathomable suffering visited upon trillions of sentient beings every year. But if the goal is to help people move away from consuming animal products and towards a more compassionate, more ethical, more environmentally sustainable plant-based diet that doesn’t threaten the survival of humans and our fellow travellers on earth,12 we must acknowledge that these social costs are, for many people, real and significant, and that large-scale social change is therefore needed alongside personal change.
In other words, while it’s imperative that we do everything we can to mitigate the suffering we cause as individuals by avoiding animal products as much as possible, we must recognize that individual action is far from enough. We need to move beyond the political and economic systems and structures that perpetrate these horrors and perpetuate ignorance about them, systems and structures that make it almost impossible to make ethical choices in the first place.13 We need political action, social and political revolution, cultural transformation, and, ultimately, spiritual awakening.
In the end, of course, we each must make our own choices—to the extent we are able, with the information we have, in the circumstances we are in.
But knowing what we know about the sentience of our nonhuman relatives and what the science reveals about their inner lives…
…seeing the unspeakable suffering we cause every year, year after year, to trillions of sentient beings…
…hearing the screams of the countless millions living in terror and pain at this moment, as you read these words…
…and understanding that animal agriculture is completely unnecessary and is in fact driving humans and countless other species to the brink of extinction…
How could we not make different choices? Better choices. Kinder choices.
What other rational—what other moral—choice is there?
###
Notes
There has been much debate about whether it is appropriate to compare humans’ treatment of nonhuman animals to the Nazi Holocaust. The comparison has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League and others for trivializing the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. But such criticisms almost always rest on the false premise of anthropocentrism (the anachronistic and discredited belief that humans are separate from nature and superior to other animals), despite broad scientific consensus that, from an evolutionary perspective, humans are simply one species among many—neither more nor less evolved, neither more nor less significant, neither superior nor inferior. It is also notable that many such comparisons have been made by Holocaust survivors themselves. For instance, Edgar Kupfer, a Dachau survivor, has written, “I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale.” Even more directly, Alex Hershaft, a Warsaw Ghetto survivor, has written, “I noted with horror the striking similarities between what the Nazis did to my family and my people, and what we do to animals we raise for food…the arbitrary designation of who lives and who dies — the Christian lives, the Jew dies; the dog lives, the pig dies.”
In July 2012, The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness affirmed that
the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
Twelve years later, in April 2024, The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness went further, acknowledging that “the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects)” and that “when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal” (my emphases).
As Christopher Krupenye and Josep Call point out:
Research has already made huge strides in identifying theory of mind capacities in nonhuman animals from corvids to primates to dogs. Recent advances in studying cognitive mechanisms have further blurred the lines between humans and non-humans, raising the possibility that some of the richest theory of mind abilities, such as understanding of subjective desires and false beliefs, may not be the exclusive province of our species. Distant relatives of humans, Eurasian jays, show sensitivity to others’ desires, even when they conflict with the subject’s own. Our closest relatives, the great apes, show sensitivity to perspectives that differ from their own, responding appropriately to others’ false beliefs.
In many ways, it would be more surprising if we didn’t share these traits and abilities, for as Joni Mitchell reminds us, “we are stardust“ … all born in the same cosmic garden of space dust and exploding stars … the same thirteen-billion-year-old primordial soup … the same billion-year-old seas … the same hundred-million-year-old forests and deserts. Once we accept that we are all quite literally “made of starstuff,” it’s not surprising that we share a wide array of cognitive, psychological, social, and emotional traits with our nonhuman relatives.
In An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong reflects on the ultimate impossibility of any species ever being able to fully understand the experience of another:
A moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand what it is to be a bat. We [humans] will never fully do any of these things either….
Tragically, as Martha C. Nussbaum notes,
even minimal justice for animals seems a distant dream in our world of casual slaughter and ubiquitous habitat destruction. One might think that Utilitarianism presents a somewhat more manageable goal: Let’s just not torture them so much. But we humans are not satisfied with non-torture. We seek flourishing: free movement, free communication, rich interactions with others of our species (and other species too). Why should we suppose that whales, dolphins, apes, elephants, parrots, and so many other animals seek anything less? If we do suppose that, it is either culpable ignorance, given the knowledge now so readily available, or a self-serving refusal to take responsibility, in a world where we hold all the power. (My emphasis.)
The link between animal abuse and violence towards humans is well established. As David A. Nibert points out:
The harms that humans have done to other animals—especially that harm generated by pastoralist and ranching practices that have culminated in contemporary factory-farming practices—have been a precondition for and have engendered large-scale violence against and injury to devalued humans, particularly indigenous people around the world.” (Emphasis in original.)
As Jeremy Bentham recognized more than 200 years ago:
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? (Emphases in original.)
While vegetarianism is viewed by many as “more ethical” than eating meat because the cows that produce our milk aren’t killed in order to do so; sadly, this is little more than a comforting fiction designed to assuage the conscience: for the fact of the matter is that there is no significant moral difference between vegetarianism and carnism. Indeed, as the above makes clear, there may well be more suffering in a glass of milk than there is in a hamburger.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer explains in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants:
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as ‘the younger brothers of Creation.’ We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.
Although there was a time in human history when it was necessary for humans to kill and consume other animals in order to survive, that time is long past: we no longer need, in 2026, to eat animal products to survive, or even to thrive; we have the knowledge, as well as the economic and technological resources, to meet everyone’s needs with a fully plant-based global food system. Millions of people around the world live vibrant, active vegan lives, raising happy, healthy vegan kids who grow into happy, healthy vegan adults. (Some even raise happy, healthy vegan puppies who grow into happy, healthy vegan adult dogs.)
Replacing animal agriculture with a fully plant-based global food system would not only eliminate the massive and completely unnecessary suffering our current, torture-based systems cause; it would require less land, use fewer resources, and cause far less environmental degradation. And given the well-documented environmental costs of animal agriculture—greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, water consumption, water pollution, and biodiversity loss, to name but a few—it’s clear that the survival of many species, including humans, may ultimately depend on eliminating animal agriculture.
The systemic use, abuse, torture, and murder of our nonhuman relatives is such a sickeningly pervasive part of our culture and economy that it is impossible to fully escape it: no one is 100% pure; even those of us who try our best to avoid using or consuming animal products still participate in and benefit from the agriculture industry and the exploitation of nonhuman animals every time we take an aspirin or ride in a car. To completely eliminate animal products from one’s life one would need, for instance, to stop using medicine, since almost all medications were or are tested on (and many are still derived from) animals; to stop using vehicular transportation, since most tires contain animal-derived stearic acid; to stop using many electronics, due to the use of gelatin in the metal processing of certain components, etc.