There are three reasons a non-vegan becomes vegan. Health, environment and ethics. About one and half months ago, I made the decision to do what I knew was the right thing to do for over a year prior. I decided to go vegan.
My Story
It was only a few years ago that I was talking to a vegan at a party. I asked “why are you vegan?”. I asked this because if they responded “for health reasons” I would say consider it respectable. But if they said “moral” or “ethical” I’d say “Haha but humans are better and I love the taste of nuggetsssss”. Safe to say it was not my best intellectual performance. I slowly became more open to the idea I read articles here and there, speaking to more vegans, who are surprisingly kind (very sarcastic, it’s not surprising at all, these people literally don’t want any sentient being harmed unnecessarily). I began to realise that there was no justification for eating (or using) animal products.
For a year or so I became a vegan apologist. Upon encountering vegetarians (aka. cheese breathers or cheese gobblers) and vegans I offered my respect. I began to defend them whenever the conversation came up around a dinner table, though of course, not as vehemently as I would now. I didn’t become vegan for that whole year because it was “inconvenient”. That became my justification. I knew veganism was morally right. However, I considered animal product consumption morally neutral. My primary was that we give life to these animals and give them “happy” lives. Which is, of course, not true.
I live in a household of meat eaters and dairy consumers. There was never a meal (apart from breakfast) that meat was not a part of. Pasta with bolognese sauce was my favourite. Admittedly, I was the biggest dairy consumer of the family, by quite a long way. I drank upwards of 600ml of milk a day on average, usually as part of my daily iced coffee. If not an iced coffee it was a large cappuccino.
So, that year of being a vegan apologist (aka. bitch) ended when I picked up Dr Michael Greger’s book How Not To Die. I read to chapter 5 before I realised what I was eating was killing me. With all the momentum of the last year, and a general acceptance of the vegan point of view, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I became vegan that night.
What are the Reasons?
I could break down each category of Health, Environment and Ethics into each constituent argument and give the counter argument. This has been done time and time again, and you can find each argument covered elsewhere in detail online with respective inks to academic articles or maybe some Earthling Ed street debates if you prefer video. I shall write what I deem to be the most direct route to acknowledging that being vegan is one step towards living the most ethical and benevolent life you can.
First, are you against animal cruelty? Obviously. Did I even need to ask this question?
Second, do we need to consume animal products to live and thrive? The answer to this question is no. Though, you may not know this. There are common misconceptions about diet. One of these is protein intake on a vegan diet. Legumes are full of protein, as are nuts and grains. There are no essential amino acids that we cannot get from plants. There are some non-essential amino acids that can be consumed in the form of animal products, but our bodies can make these anyway.
If we’re not eating fish, how do we get our Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids? Nuts and seeds (particularly hemp, chia and flax) is the simple answer to that question.
Iron deficiency can occur if you don’t eat enough leafy iron containing greens. First a distinction: Non-heme iron is the iron found in plants, it’s absorption into the blood can be regulated meaning you can never have too much iron in your blood if you only consume non-heme iron. Heme iron is found in animal products. While it is more readily absorbed, its absorption cannot be regulated and thus leaves one open to excess levels of iron in the blood. You can increase the absorption of non-heme iron by eating Vitamin C rich plants with plants high in iron.
Oh and B12? Yeah, best to supplement that on a vegan diet. If you consume animal products you’re likely secondary supplementing anyway, most animals are supplemented B12 so we don’t need to supplement directly. This is due to modern sanitation. For our own good, we no longer have to drink from dirty streams, where we historically got our B12.
I could go on about every macro and micro nutrient, but there are many more credible sources e.g. nutritionfacts.org that do a much better job than I could.
So, if you’re against animal cruelty and we don’t need to consume animal products to live, why do you then consume them?
Meat
I read this question, similarly phrased, during my time as a vegan apologist. I thought it was a bit unfair. Just because I eat animal products doesn’t mean I’m condoning animal cruelty… right? Unfortunately eating animal products goes hand in hand with exploitation and cruelty.
“Humane slaughter” is oxymoronic. “Humane” means “having or showing compassion or benevolence”. Giving a cow a good life aside, can you kill it, humanely? No. If you think so, you should have no problem with a murder sentence being shorter than an assault sentence, so long as the murder was quick and painless. “Oh but we gave them life” you say? So it’s morally okay for a mother to slit her son’s throat (humanely, of course)? You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to justify it, and even then you’ll end up landing flat on your face.
The second fact is, these animals do not have good lives anyway. It takes a few minutes of watching a documentary like Earthlings or Dominion (link) to recognise this. These farms are not committing illegal practices. The RSPCA formally approves many of the practices seen in Dominion.
Milk
Why does a cow produce milk? The answer is the same to the question of why humans, or any other mammal produces milk. For their babies. In order for the cow to produce milk, a farmer forcibly inseminates the cow so that it will give birth . You might find a similar description under the definition of rape in the dictionary. After the dairy farmers have raped the cows, they then must take the baby calves away.
Take them away. Just imagine that for a second. Imagine you’re a mother, you’ve just given birth to a child who you hope to care for and nurture… and someone snatches them from your arms. Cows pine for weeks. They show all mammalian signs of mourning and emotional trauma after being separated from their calves. Also, most burger meat is slaughtered dairy cow.
Are Eggs Vegan?
Well for starters, eggs are terrible for you. If you want to improve arterial function start by removing eggs from your diet.
As for the ethics, mass production egg farms routinely grind up live male chicks because they cannot lay eggs. Throwing male chicks into a grinder alive is an RSPCA approved practice. Alive.
Backyard eggs also have ethical problems. Buying the chickens creates demand for breeders where these chickens are often kept in bad living conditions. Supporting the industry itself is unethical, no matter how you do it.
If they’re rescued chickens, there is still the biology to consider. Egg chickens lay over 300 eggs a year because they have been selectively bred. In the wild the “base species” for these chickens lay only 10-12 eggs per year. Laying 30x the eggs per year than they would naturally, much of which is calcium, is the cause of the high levels of osteoporosis in egg laying chickens. Letting the chicken eat its own egg or even scrambling the egg and feeding it back to them is a good way to replenish the nutrients it loses in the egg-laying process.
Furthermore, eggs are a topic on which to build a clear example of what a vegan worldview looks like. If an egg is laying there, the chicken doesn’t want to eat it, is it now okay for you to take it? The vegan worldview would still be no. This is because a vegan views animals as beings who ought to live out their own lives in their own right. We don’t see the animal as something only valuable for what it produces, but we see the value in life itself.
Environment
Long story short, animal product consumption destroys the environment. Animal agriculture is the leading cause of rainforest destruction in the world. The animal agricultural industry contributes the leading amount of green houses gases by sector, larger than the entire transport industry. An average non-vegan requires about 18 times the amount of land to produce their food than a vegan that of a vegan.
Our oceans are massively overfished, there is no such thing as consuming fish from “sustainable fishing practices” because at this stage any fishing is not sustainable. We’ve passed the threshold for “sustainable” fishing. Also, fish do feel pain.
That’s why I’m vegan.
I’ve provided some documentaries below for the curious.
For the record vegans don’t think they’re morally superior to non-vegans. We do think non-vegans take immoral actions. But we also understand. We were once in your position.
Documentaries To Check Out:
Health:
What the Health (Netflix)
Forks Over Knives (Netflix)
Environment:
Cowspiracy (Netflix)
