Acknowledging the integrity of nonhuman interests obliges animal advocates to recognize that husbandry reforms cannot make a meaningful difference. Beyond that, they are a farce. Cage-free eggs? See http://www.humanemyth.org

Does Peter Singer, who is not a vegan and accepts so-called improvements in animal farming, know that?

1. Does Lee Hall herself maintain a vegan organic garden?

2. I’ve heard and read many vegans attribute their conversion to veganism to Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation,” so Hall’s argument that Singer interrupted vegan activism is not terribly convincing.

3. Hall ridicules the locavore trend, yet purposely fails to mention how purchasing eggs from a local farm that raises chickens that are free to roam is a far better choice than buying eggs from a factory farm. Eggs should be more expensive — get rid of the cheap factory farmed eggs and people will have no choice but to buy fewer eggs. Hey, it worked for cigarettes.

4. Now this is where it gets weird. Hall claims, “Activists who prefer to pursue humane animal agribusiness say we must do something for animals suffering in factory farms right now. ” (these activists really are crazy!)

Hall argues that true activists shouldn’t do anything right now except go vegan. Yes, animals are being tortured in factory farms, but that’s OK according to Hall. The shift is coming! Oh ye of little faith!

She further says, “Some think vegan education is just too slow, or that a vegan humanity isn’t possible anyway.”

What exactly have abolitionists accomplished? Some write books and make a name for themselves, many write articles and blogs online, but what do they actually “do” within the greater community? How are the abolitionists reaching and influencing the average non-vegan?

5. Hall: “They sound like realists, so they’re pretty effective at making vegans sound marginal. But are they right?”

Sadly, this seems to be the most important point for abolitionists, that they be proven right.
Let’s get this straight: Hall is arguing abolitionist vegans are *not* marginal? Does Hall really believe the goal of activists who campaign to end factory farming is to discredit/marginalize abolitionists? If anything, it’s the other way around. Honestly, all one has to do beyond reading Hall’s article here is google abolitionist vegan and you’ll find page after page of articles/blogs written by abolitionists targeting so called “welfarists” and “vegetarians.” Where are all the articles and books written for the average non-vegan? Shouldn’t abolitionists focus more on vegan education?

6. Hall: “When the idea of human supremacy — and its corollary, the treatment of the world as our warehouse — is understood as a destructive myth, it will be replaced by a new paradigm.”

And the lion will lay down with the lamb. When does Hall envisage this shift happening? 5 years? 10 years? 100 years?

In the meantime, Hall argues activists should stop campaigning to end factory farming, go vegan, and pray for the Second Coming, I mean paradigm shift. Sounds like a plan.

If humans and other animals truly lack a viable choice, I think meat eating is neither moral or immoral — but in the 21st century, this is not true for most humans in developed countries. We do indeed have a choice, and we’re responsible for how our choice affects others.

Because humans, like many animals, are capable of empathy, there is, I think, a universal moral code that prohibits gratuitous harm and violence. It’s inherent in human society, just as surely as our physical evolution, which is more similar to herbivores than to either omnivores or carnivores. One could say meat eating is natural for humans because we need B12 ( though that assumes we couldn’t obtain it from other sources), and it’s certainly part of our history, but what’s natural or historical may not be moral.

Looking back, we can see that in order to believe we were *entitled* to domesticate, exploit, and kill nonhumans, we needed to believe they were inferior to us, and that they couldn’t think, feeling, or experience emotions. Now we know better.

No wonder this myth is losing believers. and that so many of us include other animals in our universal moral code, applying it what we eat, wear, use, and beyond that to how we live. Focusing on the evils of factory farming is, I think, a way of side-stepping our responsibility — for even small family farms violate their most basic personal interests. And as Lee explained, such farms still use resources that could feed hungry humans, destroy the habitat of free living animals, and harm the environment we all depend on.

Basically, there are three ways that the planet’s biota receive energy and nutrients – thru sun and soil as most plants do, by consumption of these plants as do herbivores, or by carnivorism – the last to evolve in the line of energy sequestration tactics. Still, such meat-eating goes back a long way, whether it is one single-celled creature enveloping another with its plasma, or T-Rex removing chunks from a brontosaurus. Or for that matter, an early hominid coming upon beetles, bird’s eggs, or a small rodent. So while I would agree with Sussman and Hart that there was no ‘man the hunter’ and that hominids were indeed far more likely to be prey – they (nor anyone else) can make a strong case for strict vegetarianism – whether we look at our fellow primates or our fellow human in tropical rainforests today.

Just perhaps our distant ancestors could somehow absorb B-12 from plant matter – and this capability was lost along the way. Nonetheless, meat-eating is apparently the way all primates presently (and for a long time back) get B-12. So too humans. So it begs the question – how is meat not needed for our health, inasmuch as B-12 is absolutely essential for survival? If we argue that B-12 can be gotten by supplements, we are just conceding to a modern convenience (and one surely not available worldwide). Taking B-12 supplements certainly obviates the need for doing violence to animals, but it does not mean, in and of itself, that meat-eating is immoral. We are animals, and that is common behavior among animals. That is, unless you want to posit that we are superior to other animals and should thus place ourselves apart from them. Now, we can choose not to do such violence to animals – but we have to understand that animal eating long predates primates, and in and of itself is neither moral nor immoral – but merely a method of nutrient and energy concentration.

That we would choose not to eat meat is an evolved human trait, one that sets us apart from other sentient beings (as is the ‘choice’ of factory farming an evolved human trait – a rather malignant one).

I think we’ll likely have to disagree on the morality of meat-eating, though I would likely NOT disagree with you on the grotesquerie is has become.

I think it’s clear by now that vegans of any age can be perfectly healthy, so unless sufficient plant nutrition is not available, there isn’t moral justification for eating animal products.

That said, I think we could probably continue to debate human evolution, since there are anthropologists who think ‘man the hunter’ is a myth, and I think they’re correct. See a review of “Man the Hunted by Robert Sussman and Dona Hart”: http://www.physorg.com/news138462747.html Still, however humans evolved doesn’t change the moral reasons for being vegan.

All or most primates will eat meat (especially those most related to humans) – not as the main course, but opportunistically. Chimpanzees actually hunt monkeys (as I see you’ve noted) and other small creatures. Bonobos will snatch small animals and invertebrates – and a small forest antelope – the duiker. Orangs will eat invertebrates, bird’s eggs, etc. Similar for gorillas. Monkeys will catch rodents for consumption, though not as an organized endeavor. Baboons will eat meat as well when the situation presents itself. As often as not, the prey is a bug of sorts – nonetheless, insectivorism is still carnivorism. (Regarding chimps, it may be that organized hunting forays evolved only recently in response to disturbed habitats – nonetheless, it is a behavior humans have in common with that close relative.)

I think it is safe to say the humans were very likely unexceptional in this regard. They almost assuredly evolved out of a hunting tradition. Hunting provides a large dose of protein in one setting. Certainly humans were afraid of being eaten, so are leopards when a lion is in the vicinity. That does not preclude leopards from hunting. It would not be a stretch for humans to understand both prey and predator concepts.

As soon as a group of proto-humans realized that they could scare off (as chimps and baboons do) large predators using numbers and weapons (branches, probably) they also then realized that they could corner and kill animals as well. Basically, I think able-bodied people hunted together to bring down old or sick or injured animals – or the young in an unguarded nest. Scavenging is surely an old habit, carnivores will engage in that too. For hominids, it’s unlikely a cognitive stretch to imagine creating a carcass rather than merely finding one.

It seems the best way to get B-12 from vegetation is if it has fecal matter in it – or perhaps if it is sufficiently bug-infested. That may be how leaf-eating monkeys obtain B-12. But as for humans, I don’t think we want to go back to unwashed food – it carries more dangerous and immediate threats. I would think most vegetarians and vegans get their B-12 from supplements. But that’s not a moral argument against meat eating, merely a dietary argument.

Similarly, I don’t think humans have a “hunting instinct”. We might never have hunted if we had a steady abundance of plant foods. (I write more about B12 below.) The socialization that spurred our evolution was more likely built around protecting ourselves from being eaten by other animals — not the acquisition of meat, as anthropologists had once claimed.

Early humans may have been a lot more like the bonobo than the larger chimpanzee that occassionally hunts. And can we really be sure that larger chimpanzees hunted at the time hominds split? After all, chimpanzees evolved just like we did. A new fossil find may be cause for modifying our therory:
http://www.b12partners.net/wp/2009/10/01/fossils-shed-new-light-on-human-origins/

In any case, early humans scavenged for eons from the remains of animals killed by carnivores. I’m not sure what you mean about humans not being “of the animals”?

Vitamin B12 is synthesized by bacteria, not by plants or animals. If domesticated mammals don’t obtain enough cobalt from the soil, or from adding it to their feed, they become anemic. Until humans devel0ped a penchant for cleanliness, we obtained B12 from the bacteria in our environment, including but not limited to unwashed vegetables. That some nonhuman primates eat no meat, and others eat very little meat, suggests they may well have obtained B12 from the bacteria in their environment, as humans did.

I don’t refer to eating meat as murder either, but for most humans it causes unnecessary harm and thrives on violence that isn’t justified.

But to note that other animals ‘simply interact in the struggle to survive’ – and we don’t – is also to acknowledge that humans have long operated at a different level. If there was a time when humans *behaved like animals’* it may have been 6 million years ago – at the time of the chimpanzee/hominid split. It was back then that this small, slow creature of little strength, no claws, and small teeth figured out how to harvest a sufficient number of animals through its collective brain power. That this ability has morphed over the eons into something grotesque does not mean we can yet again be *of the animals.*

Because human behavior may be ‘useless in other environments’ the human effort has long been to control the environment – to bend it to human needs (or more specifically, the band’s needs or the village’s needs). Thus humans – at least in settled areas – went from hunting and gathering to farming and animal husbandry. Virtually everywhere on earth humans set about domesticating both plants and animals. It is neither a scarce nor haphazard human custom.

I say this knowing the present mode of food production is a dead end. It is a product of capitalist economics. It is the root cause of the death and near-starvation of billions – to say nothing of its inherent cruelty to its animal victims. It must be overhauled. But for families that get to eat a home-grown chicken once in a while I’m not about to tell them that meat is murder.

Carnivores and omnivores are not entitled to eat other animals, anymore than herbivores exist to be their food. They simply interact in the struggle to survive, in a world that most humans no longer belong to. When we rethink the idea of humans eating other animals, I think it’s important to acknowledge that.

That does not mean meat should be a large part of our diet, nor does it mean we should be doing factory farming, nor should we treat animals as inanimate chattel. But we have been eating meat since before we were human. It’s just that the whole idea of animals as products for humans has to be rethought.

As Lee explained, we need to let go of the destructive myth of human supremacy. Both humans and nonhumans are personal beings, each with an interest in living on our own terms, each worthy of respect.

Focusing on the price, quality, or “sustainability” of animal products perpetuates the system that makes conscious living beings into things. Prices especially will fluctuate. If consumers don’t buy meat beause it’s too expensive, what will happen when the price goes down? Chances are good they’ll buy meat again, The change in price won’t change the notion that humans are entitled to kill other animals because they happen to like the taste of their flesh.

What we can do is whittle away at their resistance. If we can get them to simply think about where the pork chop came from, that is planting a seed. And every step you do to improve meat quality, sustainability, and ethical standards raises the average price of meat. People do buy on price. If we could just get the US government to stop spending tax dollars on meat & livestock food, prices would rise. If we stopped shipping in cheap meat from mexico or asia, prices would rise. This hits those with no conscience where it does matter: in the wallet. And as even they cut back on meat consumption, the American diet must surely change. Eventually meat could become something just eaten occasionally, and it wouldn’t take much at that point to stamp out that last little bit of cruelty/murder.

Re: sustainability of hunting – This is incorrect. For something to be sustainable, it means the animal population would have to continue in healthy numbers and the ecosystem not be unduly stressed by the removal of those animals. Imagine 300 million americans turning to wild venision to make up their big greasy 1/4lb burgers they eat at every meal. There is simply not enough open ground to sustain those herds, even if we took cattle off the public lands. In my semi-rural area (Maryland) deer hunting is popular to the point where herds are down to only 3-4 deer and some places you don’t see deer at all for years. It’s also ignoring the ethics of killing (deer aren’t guarenteed to die instantly or with a single shot) and the pollution/mess of butchering enough deer to satisfy millions of meat-hungry people.

Re: “natural is moral” is a false argument. In nature, animals commit infanticide, rape, and murder. Some species survive by the males repeatedly raping the female until enough of their sperm overwhelm the other rapists’ sperm — yes, let’s go back to doing things the way animals do! We can throw poo at each other and run around naked, too. And the other thing we should keep in mind is that we’re better than animals; we have morals. We don’t have to kill animals to survive. We’ve got a flexible digestive system and a smart brain, allowing us to get more than enough nutrition from plant sources.

The bigger picture humankind needs to face is that of its own survival. The whole planet cannot eat the way the average American eats; there aren’t enough resources to produce those number of livestock. The bigger the world population, the less we can afford to throw away food & farmland to feed pigs and cows. And as crowding increases, we really need to think long and hard about disease: most of our infectious diseases have their roots in humans killing animals for meat. Anthrax, smallpox, and TB are believed to be due to our domestication of animals for food. We’re currently dealing with a H1N1 strain of influenza, believed to be shared back and forth with the high density pig farms and humans. How many more diseases will we inadvertently cultivate with peoples’ ongoing love for cheap meat? Will we see a modern version of a plague, killing off half the population, if we keep incubating & mixing germs back and forth with livestock?

Also, bloggers often contend that what is “natural is moral” ( eg, (nonhuman) animals eat other animals in nature, so meat eating is moral) — this is recognized as a fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

All I have to say is that hospitals, medical centers, doctor’s offices and medical clinics are not full of vegans or vegetarians. They are full of people who eat dead animals and call it “meat.” That ought to tell thinking people something. But then again…

While there are indeed few vegan-organic farmers (so far!!), i believe part of Lee’s intent with this is that if any of us are doing any growing, we too should be vegan-organic – i’ve been helping a neighborhood friend in her garden! =)

@redcatbicycliste sure did post a lot of nonsense. One interesting fact is that people and regions have, indeed, been eating entirely plant-based (vegan) diets for thousands of years. (This isn’t ‘new’.)

One need look no further than the Jains of India. While i’m an anti-theist and no fan of religion, Jains deserve credit for demonstrating that humans can get along just fine without eating animal products. Period.

And as a vegan cyclist and racer, i’d love to challenge @redcatbicycliste to a bike race. Hopefully their riding ability is better than their fact-checking. ;)

It seems, however, that some postings, have little to do with Lee Hall’s underlying philosophy, which strikes, although gently, at the very heart of veganism.

Ethical veganism is more than avoiding the consumption of animal flesh and reproductive tissues; it is rejecting the notion proclaimed by many religious institutions and school officials, and entrenched in governmental policy (all spawned from a feeling of self-importance), that other species are here for our convenience, our enjoyment, and what we perceive to be our emotional and physical needs.

It will not happen in my lifetime, but I believe there will come a time when veganism will be a way of life for our human species. Our planet cannot sustain the breeding of vast numbers of animals to satisfy the appetites (not the needs) of 7 billion humans, most of them eating from both land and aquatic animals.

Aside from the crimes against the natural world that will inevitably occur, consider what human existence will be like when (unless we control our numbers, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon) we are 8 billion, and perhaps even 9 billion, surrounded by domesticated, enslaved animals, with free-lviing species wiped out, and the remaining free spaces destroyed to raise ever-increasing amounts of soy and grains to feed farm animals. And what will happen to our oceans and waterways and the creatures that inhabit them?

I believe our planet, which has withstood so many insults already, will become nothing more than a toxic wasteland under such an assault. It is difficult to imagine such a world. It would be more difficult, if not impossible, to live in it.

I hate to bring cliche arguments to the table: but the fact that other animals eat other animals means that it is a natural and therefore by my definition, ethical. Its over-consumption and habitat destruction (i.e. civilization) that are unethical.

Look, I really didn’t mean to start an argument against veganism. The guy sleeping 10 feet from me right now is a vegan. The idea makes a lot of sense to me. I was just trying to submit the fact that the cultures which have been historically more sustainable and generally happier than our own have not been vegan. I think I’ve made my point, and this is therefore my last post for real this time.

(I certainly did not intend to hijack the article. I had only meant that my conversation with lichen had become more about the possible futures available to us and how we may/may not get there than about veganism. Chill out.)

peace

The word “sentient” comes from the Latin “sentire”, which means “to feel”. It’s not always anthropocentric to describe other animals through our own experiences. Humans are able “to feel” and we understand nonhumans can too. Indeed, many nonhumans understand us through their own experiences as well.

Do you really not see the difference between carrots and conscious living beings who experience thought, physical sensation, and emotions? To claim plants and animals are the same would require us to dilute the meaning of these experiences until they define anything or nothing.

Re: meat eating, the essential ethic concerns whether it is necessary to kill nonhumans for our health — not whether they are farmed or hunted. With the exception of remote cultures (that may not have enough nutritious plant foods), it is clearly unecessary for most humans to eat other animals — to knowingly cause unnecessary harm to others is wrong, regardless of treadition and culture.

Also, while I don’t think (or understand how) indigenous Americans wiped out whole ecosystems, they hunted the horse to extinction, just as the earliest hunter-gatherers caused the extinction of many animals in Africa.

If your intention was to highjack this article (?), you haven’t succeeded.