Vegan Practically

I have blogged a lot about reasons for being vegan. As regular readers are aware, I think “vegan for the animals” is decisive. Given the vast animal suffering and exploitation in factory farming, from which 99% of all animals products originate, and given that the moral balance in causing suffering and death to trillions (yes, trillions) of non-human animals each year because they’re tasty is wildly off, it is wrong to consume animal products. I don’t see that as negotiable or even controversial.

And yet so many people — indeed, the vast majority — are completely unmoved. Oh yes, they might say, it’s terrible. Or they may even say they’re aware but they don’t want to know more because it will make them feel bad.

So it was in a weird way encouraging or at least reassuring (even if tragically so) when climate threat of the animal product industry became part of mainstream news, as it has in the past decade or so. If people, even self-proclaimed animal lovers, aren’t moved by animal suffering, maybe (I thought) they would be moved by the impending un-inhabitability of our planet.

A friend brought an article to my attention that made me think on this again (thanks, Shelley!). The article, which raises many many issues, not just this dual set of reasons (animals and the climate), is “Peter Singer Is Not Animal Liberation Now” by Karen Dawn of Dawnwatch, an organization dedicated to encouraging mainstream media to cover animal issues. It’s hard to come away from this article thinking well of philosopher Peter Singer, frequently identified as the founder of the modern animal rights movement because of his book Animal Liberation, updated and revised last year as Animal Liberation Now.

But let me focus on Dawn’s commentary of the paragraph in Singer’s recent New York Times op-ed where he says, “Boycotting this monstrous abuse of billions of animals each year is a powerful reason for not eating meat, but the outsize contribution of meat and dairy products to climate change is for me now an equally urgent part of shifting to a plant-based diet.” Dawn takes issue with Singer’s claim that these are “equally urgent” and for the subsequent endorsement in his op-ed of a softer approach: “But we need not be hard-line about avoiding all animal products. If everyone chose plant-based foods for just half their meals, we would have fewer animals suffering, and a tremendously better shot at avoiding the most dire consequences of climate change.”

She is not denying that the climate is an urgent issue and that the animal product industry is a major contributor to it. Nor is she even denying that reducing the consumption of animal products for climate reasons rather than animal suffering will in fact reduce animal suffering. Her concern, rather, is what it means for the founder of the modern animal rights movement to be voicing this view.

She says, “As for saving animals with that recommendation: yes, such a change would save many animals, and in general campaigns that encourage meat reduction are helpful because studies have shown that those who go vegan gradually are far more likely to do so permanently. But I hope activists can appreciate the nuanced difference between encouraging people to cut down, in order to get them to take the first step on the right path, and actually instructing, ‘But we need not be hard-line about avoiding all animal products.’”

It would be great, she says, if more people would be unapologetically vegan for the animals instead of cloaking their politics (or consciously de-politicizing their choices) in the language of “plant-based.”

A large part of my project here at veganpractically.com is to attract would-be vegans instead of scaring them away. Seeing food choice as a continuum, I encourage people who aren’t there (yet!) to be “more vegan” than they have been and I outline reasons why that’s a good idea.

Dawnwatch also aims to draw people in rather than send them running in the other direction. She says, “we need to up the frequency and volume of our sharing, while we significantly soften the tone.” What type of guidance — if any — do we give people who are in the curiosity phase of their reflections on their food choices? I say, “if any,” because I try to stick to information about the material realities of animal suffering and exploitation as routine components of factory farming and philosophical arguments about the ethics of everyday life as it applies in our approach to food choices. It’s frustrating when people don’t follow through on what seem like pretty obvious moral conclusions, but the whole thing about the moral life is that its principles require self-governance and are not typically enforceable by others.

Another goal, exemplified in my Friday posts, is to make veganism more accessible and less daunting. I endorse things like Meatless Monday and Veganuary even if I think that a “sometimes” approach or a reductivist approach doesn’t go far enough. I endorse them as steps along the way. And as I said to a friend this morning who was horrified by what she saw on episode one of the new Netflix series “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” (which I haven’t seen yet but is now on my Watch List), “once it starts to feel more do-able and less difficult, it will no longer be daunting.” And also that with respect to cheese, I would recommend first being more discerning (surely there is some, or even most, cheese that you can live without and only a very small range that feels impossible to give up). I assured her that “over time you will not be tempted because you will be too aware of how horrific the dairy industry is. It would feel like wearing a mink coat.”

Singer endorses “Conscientious Omnivorism.” Dawn doesn’t think it goes far enough and neither do I. Is it a completely unreasonable position? Perhaps not — though it is much harder to be conscientious than one might think. Nevertheless, as Dawn notes, “coming from somebody currently speaking on behalf of our movement it is dispiriting. We should not have to argue about the worth of animal life against somebody promoting Animal Liberation Now.”

The main takeaway in my view is that there is mass atrocity on the most unfathomable scale happening daily. There may be a spectrum of positions people can take on a number of issues related to food ethics. And it surely is unrealistic to think that suddenly the entire world will become vegan for the sake of the animals. And the climate crisis is a terrifying and urgent additional reason to change the status quo. But, in light of the trillions of animals suffering annually, the most visible and representative figure associated with the animal rights arguments against factory farming, namely Singer, ought not to soft-pedal the fact of animal suffering and exploitation by urging moderate or conscientious consumption of animal products as an end-point even if it’s a legitimate stop along the way.