Sure, I’ll lean into the stereotype – I'm a coastal liberal, and my network is pretty much the same. I'm seeing a lot of outrage on the killing of Palestinians civilians: just over 20,000 as of late December, according to CBS News. People on the other side of the argument point to the Hamas atrocities of October 27th: 1,200 killed and 240 kidnapped, then kept hostage.
I’m not here to get into that centuries-old conflict. I'll just say that I'm as horrified by the loss of life and suffering as anyone else with a functional moral compass. That said, I'll lean into the aforementioned stereotype even more: I'm also a vegan (going on eight years now). At one point it hit me: are these same people as appalled about the amount of animal suffering happening on factory farms, every single day?
According to Vox, “10 times the [human] global population” are raised for slaughter each year. That's 80 billion. The slaughter, while gruesome, isn't the real kicker for me personally – it's how these animals live. Their living conditions are bad enough that there are laws in some US states against getting photo and videographic evidence of what it's like (so-called “ag-gag” laws).
As a short list, these animals most often have to sleep in their own excrement, have little to no freedom of movement nor access to the outdoors, and grow in ways that are painful and unnatural. It's not how their instinct nor biology call them to live – not anything like it. Why these conditions? For economies of scale and efficiency…and, I’ll say, executive/shareholder profit.
Okay, I'm not here to police how anyone speaks about what matters (or doesn't matter) to them…we all only have so much bandwidth, and we can't be angry about everything all the time. My larger point is that there's an incredible force of suffering in this world, humming along day by day. Many, if not most, of us are acculturated to become numb to it. It's nothing at all, just the proverbial water that we swim in.
Your outrage may actually be that I've actually dared to put human suffering on par with animal suffering. Fair enough. That, however, would have to be under the premise that human life – and human quality of life – is more meaningful than the same of animals. You are free to believe what you will believe. Yet that’s a premise that I wholeheartedly reject. “(X) makes humans more important than animals” – you may have something to fill in for “x” there. I personally don't.
Spend ten minutes with a cow, and you will see as much emotion as a human could ever muster. Pigs are remarkably intelligent, and actually quite clean (seriously). If you watch a chicken survey its world – searching for food and looking out for threats – it’s using abilities and a kind of intelligence which we humans could never fully understand. Humans aren’t more capable or more important than any other species. We’re just different.
Okay, so maybe it is humans that you care about…understood. The factory farming system wouldn't score great on a social justice scorecard. Workers are often undocumented, and therefore easily exploited. The working conditions often aren't exactly what OSHA loves to see (but again, “ag-gag” laws).
Additionally, waste from these farms is a serious detriment to the wellbeing of those who live around it – often communities of color and/or low-income….Environmental Racism Exhibit A. For example, waste from North Carolina industrial hog farms has been empirically linked with serious health issues in local residents.
Social justice aside, factory farming presents a serious public health threat – even apart from what anyone does or doesn’t consume. These operations use antibiotics, at a massive scale, in order to stem the spread of disease in these animals’ incredibly cramped, unsanitary living spaces.
The more often antibiotics are used, and the larger the scale at which they’re used, the more potentially resistant bacteria become to them. Ergo, massive factory farms use of antibiotics has an appreciable potential to reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics to address bacterially-based human disease. That could be a serious problem.
Vegan pancakes, made by yours truly!
I’m often fairly quiet about these matters – both in my online and real-life presence. Food is very personal and subject to individual lives. I never want to sound moralistic, judgy, or like I'm telling anyone else how to live. In part, that’s because I don’t think that those ways of being are even constructive.
I’d argue that positive example-setting and educating do a lot more good – to lead people to make their own changes, if it's right for them and if they are so inclined. That said, I've thrown a lot that I've kept quiet on down here – and in a subsequent piece (coming soon!). Take it or leave it. It's your life.
I want to also note that I don't speak for all vegans. Within the lifestyle choice of not consuming animal products (as a general rule), vegans are just as diverse as any other group of people. There might be vegans who have significant disagreements within what I say in this piece, and the next one. That's fully fine by me; uniformity is boring and stifling!
In that next piece: I think that there's a lot of misinformation and many faulty beliefs about plant-based eating out there, so I'll take the “myth-busting” approach. Stay tuned for that, as well as a larger take-home message on this subject – if it happens to pique your interest! Until then!
Myself, my mom, and my brother celebrating her birthday. More on eating with family in that second piece!
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