I hear stuff like this so often as a vegan. I get asked why I don’t wear leather, since the animal was already killed for its meat, so I might as well make use of its skin. Just yesterday I got asked why I won’t consume dairy because “the cows like being milked. It hurts the cow if they’re not milked.”
God forbid I try my best to reduce animal suffering. I know it’s not going to amount to a lot if I’m just an individual making consumer decisions, which is why I don’t treat veganism like that. It’s not a diet or a clothing style, it’s a demand for the end of animal suffering. And to that end I’ll try my best even if it makes my life personally difficult or annoying.
The only way I’ve been able to explain veganism to carnists is to ask them if they’d eat a dead baby, or wear their dead mother’s skin. But even that’s not very effective. I don’t know how to explain that animals are living beings who deserve life and dignity, same as humans. Because part of the problem I run into is needing to explain that humans deserve life and dignity. It’s hard explaining to a typical American carnist that cows shouldn’t be forcefully bred or used as a milk production factory when the same person believes homeless people all deserve to die.
I explain it roughly as “Veganism is when you believe that the combined values of non-human animals’ freedom, rights, freedom from pain and suffering, ecological impact of factory farming of animals, social impact of slaughterhouses, societal impact of allowing a class of “lesser” commodified sentient beings propping up and holding space for other axes of oppression, public health impact, and personal feelings of guilt at very least might be any amount greater than their value when made into a burger, or shoes, or glue. Everything you associate with vegans (diet) is a logical consequence thereof”
It doesn’t seem to help anyway because they still keep asking a bunch of seemingly obvious questions that verge on sealioning, but it at least seems to keep the conversation on track.
In their mind, the cow simply must die by nature, so why not eat its meat? They fail to see that by not buying the meat, that’s that much less meat that is sold by the store, and that much less they need to restock. It’s almost like these people didn’t graduate from high school or something, because it’s really basic math.
furthermore it’s a moot question to ask this of a vegan because vegans often see animals as deserving rights on the level of humans, or at least I believe this based on my personal morals. So it’s like asking why I simply don’t eat human corpses. Or to make the analogy even more horrible, why I don’t eat the corpses of executed prisoners.
Your last line is the clincher.
Being vegan (like arguing in defense of any minority) is a crash course in what suspender-slapping, exclusively crowd playing, bad faith, debate nerd, and fake arguments look like. Once you genuinely pick up one cause on even one axis of oppression, you quickly learn to see through a lot of bullshit. I believe veganism to be the most effective of all for exposing this.
level argument.What’s worse are the chuds that say they’ll eat 2 steaks to offset my meal. Like, what? Why do this?
