Research Before You Speak

“Wait, you’re vegan? Why?” Simple. Because I don’t want to be a part of the hurt and distress that animals have to endure for the human population’s selfish wants. “Don’t you miss bacon?” No I do not. I haven’t had meat of any kind in four years and I’ve survived so… “I bet you cheat sometimes.” Are you undermining my willpower because you’re incapable of standing against something so strongly? “Lions eat meat!” True, this has been observed first-hand on the plains of Africa. Lions and other wild animals are natural carnivores whereas humans are not and therefore the wild animals have no option but to eat meat since they would die without it. Humans, however, can survive without it and we would actually be healthier. Arranging the claim that lions and other non-human animals eat meat as a defense of meat-eating among human beings is a classic example of the assumption that anything that occurs in nature is therefore morally justifiable.

“How come you don’t feel bad about killing plants. They have feelings too.” I have heard about a scientific study of researching whether plants actually have feeling, but somehow no particular scientist, university, or institution is ever mentioned in association with it. Were the results of this study peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal? When you can tell me this, please get back to me. Oh, and did you know that 70 percent of all agriculture is used for the production of the meat you eat? So actually you’re killing more plants than me. “The Bible says we should eat meat.” If you’re going to use holy writ to justify killing and eating animals, then you place yourself in the highly unenviable position of having to accept such justification from others who use the same text to excuse and rationalize slavery, murder, rape, genocide, animal and human sacrifice, and a host of other divinely sanctioned obscenities.

Now let us overlook the common responses to otherwise foolish comments and let’s talk about the facts. Vegan living often reduces the intake of saturated fat, animal hormones, and cholesterol while increasing the intake of fresh fruits and veggies. That has the potential to reduce the risk of cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. A study done by Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn found that a vegan diet caused more than 500 genes to change in three months, turning on genes that prevent disease and turning off genes that cause cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. Going back to the fact that majority of agriculture is used for the meat industry, the amount of grain fed to livestock in the U.S. alone could feed about 840 million people, roughly eleven times the number of people who die of starvation every year according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Producing a single pound of beef, for instance, requires sixteen pounds of grain. One pound of pork requires six pounds of grain and for every sixteen ounces of edible chicken flesh that is produced, at least five pounds of innocent plants must lose their lives. We’ll leave aside for the moment that these figures represent an egregious, immoral, and unsustainable misappropriation of the world’s dwindling natural resources and we’ll concentrate instead on the issue of suffering, which is of such great concern to the many meat-eaters who are convinced that vegans bear the responsibility for inflicting pain and misery upon innocent fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and tubers.

The misery and suffering of the tens of billions of animals raised and slaughtered for food every year are multiplied by hundreds of orders of magnitude if one accepts the claim that plants, as well as animals, possess consciousness and therefore suffer when they are harvested.

Eating plants causing them to suffer is a proposition that has never been demonstrated in a controlled scientific experiment, despite the numerous efforts of scientists to determine the legitimacy of so-called “primary perception”. It’s time we recognize that the “Plants have feelings, too!” argument is a feckless attempt to undermine the ethical basis of veganism with pseudo-science and bad logic. That being said, while a lot of people have so much to say about a topic they know nothing about, we vegans are not only watching out for animals but we’re also looking out for ourselves and most importantly the world we live in.

Your argument is invalid but by all means go ahead and say something else.