The last two essays discussed 1) sentience as the morally relevant characteristic justifying the basic right to physical security and 2) the economic commodity and property status of nonhuman beings as an impenetrable barrier to recognizing the basic right to physical security.
This essay will discuss veganism as 1) the only way to destroy the property status barrier to the basic right to physical security and 2) the morally principled relationship to nonhuman beings.
Destroying the Property Status Barrier
We slaughter 10 billion land animals annually in the United States for food consumption (about 50 billion worldwide). To give an idea of the magnitude of that number, it is helpful to imagine what one million looks like. Imagine 20 average-sized stadiums next to each other with 50,000 people in each stadium; that’s one million. To think of 100 million people, imagine 2,000 stadiums filled with 50,000 people. Now think of that 100 million people as only 1% of 10 billion people. We would need 200,000 stadiums filled with 50,000 people to have 10 billion people. Even when we analyze 10 billion in this way, it is still so large as to be virtually impossible to imagine, yet this is the number of nonhuman beings – each with a life that is very important to that being – that we slaughter for our food preferences annually.
We treat nonhuman beings – conscious, sentient beings like our beloved dogs – similar to a tank of gas for the car. From the perspective of animals, that is what it means to be an economic commodity, a “thing” no different from about 12 gallons of petroleum pumped into a car’s tank. The average American non-vegan intentionally, merely by food choice, causes the death of around 34 land animals annually (10 billion land animals divided by the approximate population of American non-vegans, estimated at 290 million). If we, on average, fill our gas tanks about 3 times per month, we consume a tank of petroleum product at about the same rate that we individually kill land animals. Of course, like fuel consumption, there are many individuals who probably consume around 90 land animals annually, while others are almost vegan and consume perhaps only 1 to 10 beings annually. If you are a non-vegan, you can probably roughly estimate your own contribution to land animal death based on your eating habits compared to the national average.
Given 1) the magnitude and pervasiveness of land animals as economic commodities (i.e. “things”) 2) the economic demand pressure for dead land animals, and 3) the wealth, political and marketing power of Big Food, it should be clear that discussing the elimination of the property status of nonhuman beings as long as there are so many non-vegans demanding so many dead nonhumans is absurd. The deepest and most fundamental problem – as a practical and empirical matter – is our habit of consuming animal products. And our habit of consuming animal products is a direct result of our willingness to ignore what we don’t see. We don’t see how these nonhumans are raised, how cruel it is, and how cruel slaughter is. Out of sight; out of mind. The industry (including the “free range” and “cage-free” industry) depends on enticing us with better-than-life pictures of “happy animals” and grilled steaks and other expert marketing ploys while hiding the bloody, excruciating horror show. They surely don’t give public tours of feeding facilities and abattoirs! And it is not because nobody would be interested; it is because the industry companies won’t permit it on their property. We ought to be outraged at this deception; but since everyone else turns a blind eye to it, and since we are in the habit, we all too willingly play this absurd game of “don’t ask; don’t tell”. We implicitly request industry to keep on lying to us so we can live in denial and outside of the reality of the eternal atrocity, utterly disconnected to the living, breathing conscious beings who endure a life of hell we cannot imagine enduring even for a small fraction of the time they endure it.
The first step – personally and as a society – in resolving the economic commodity problem; therefore the property status problem; therefore, the lack of basic rights problem; and therefore the unimaginably large and extreme animal cruelty problem; is to go vegan.
The Morally Principled Relationship to Nonhuman Beings
Aside from the practical considerations of veganism as the only way to eliminate 99% or more of unnecessary animal cruelty in our society, there are even more principled reasons for veganism. As established in the essay on sentience, animals have a basic moral right to physical security and the right not to be property; therefore, we have a corresponding duty – and it is a stringent duty – not to violate that right, and therefore not to intentionally kill them or cause them to be intentionally killed through our consumption of animal milk, eggs, and flesh (which do all directly and significantly contribute to the 10 billion slaughtered annually). This stringent duty to be a vegan, based on moral principle alone, exists regardless of how little effect it has on the multi-billion dollar per year industry and regardless of who refuses or how many people refuse to acknowledge the duty.
Veganism: Easier Than You Think
Fortunately, going and staying vegan is very easy as long as we are relatively independent of anyone who would stop us from going vegan. If we are not independent as adults, we may seriously want to consider seeking ways to obtain our independence, because anyone who would coerce us – physically, financially, or emotionally – to consume animal products is probably not worthy of us as a person with which to have a relationship. For kids under 18 or 21 whose parents are tyrannical enough to prevent them from avoiding animal products, it should only be a matter of time until independence is achieved.
Blogs and forums promoting recipes and brands of vegan food are plentiful these days (I have a couple of links on this blog), as are all of the vegan options. It is easy now to be vegan, but it has become easier every year as more and more vegan products are introduced to the market.
A Final Note
Critics of animal rights sometimes object that animals (rodents, etc) are displaced or killed in the process of harvesting crops with large machines; therefore, so they maintain, vegans violate the rights of animals by eating vegetable food. If our unreflective intuitions tell us there is something seriously wrong, and even ridiculous, with this objection to animal rights, it is because our unreflective intuitions happen to be correct in this case.
Coming up in the next essay or two, I will analyze this objection to animal rights with as much current empirical factual detail as I can find, along with further discussion on the nature of basic rights. Questions about assessing harms to be addressed are: What percentage of current crop production is dedicated to feeding the 10 billion animals we slaughter annually? By what percentage could crop production be reduced (or redirected toward feeding the world’s hungry humans) if all Americans were vegan? If every American was vegan, how many inadvertent animal deaths would occur from harvesting crops? How does the number of those deaths compare as a percentage to the 10 billion land animals we intentionally slaughter directly for the purpose of consuming their flesh and bodily fluids? How could we go about reducing inadvertent harvesting deaths via birth control and harmless deterrents (e.g. from smells and sounds) and similar ideas?
Questions about clarifying the nature of rights to be addressed are: Are rights ever absolute? As people who generally accept the basic right of humans to physical security and not to be property, do we ever knowingly, but inadvertently kill large numbers of innocent human right-holders, say, in a just war (perhaps like WWII), or in a policy on highway speed limits, or in health care economics? What about the large number of human deaths caused by harmful products such as tobacco and alcohol? Are these companies violating human rights, per se, by manufacturing and marketing these products, causing thousands of deaths annually? Are rights not absolute, but overridden in cases where they conflict, or in particular cases where the observance of rights cause severely negative consequences? When are rights actually violated? How much sacrifice do we endure to protect an individual’s right?
Some of these questions will be answered, while some of the more difficult ones will merely be discussed. In the end, we will have a much better understanding of the proposed objection and why it utterly fails to weaken animal rights and veganism. We will find – through empirical evidence and reasoning – that it is nothing but a diversion attempt that self-interested animal exploiters use to avoid addressing the elimination of greater than 99% of the legalized, unnecessary, direct and intentional cruelty we inflict on tens of billions of conscious, sentient beings annually.
