7 Reasons Why I Am Vegan: 1. For The Animals

Vittoria
Jan 1, 2018
7 min read

Welcome to my series 7 Reasons Why I Am Vegan (and so could you)! In honour of Veganuary I will publish everyday on the first week of January 2018 from Monday 1st to Friday 7th, and by the end of the week I will explore all the motives that compelled me to choose this lifestyle. As I mentioned before, I believe in the power of information and even if you feel like this is not for you, you might end up discovering something you didn’t know and make a more informed choice going forward.

Without further ado, the first thing that compelled me to switch to a vegan lifestyle was to stop killing animals for food. And there are lots of different facades to this first reason:

Ethics

I have always been an animal lover and I would have never harmed my pets, which I considered family. So by that logic I always believed animals to have rights as I wouldn’t have abused a cat or a dog. However, if you accept that animals have rights, raising and killing animals for food is morally wrong. “An animal raised for food is being used by others rather than being respected for itself. In philosopher's terms it is being treated as a means to human ends and not as an end in itself. This is a clear violation of the animal's rights.”

No matter how humanely an animal is treated in the process, raising and killing it for food remains morally wrong.

Raise Above Tradition

It has been demonstrated that humans can survive on a completely plant based diet, unlike many other animals who kill for their food (I will go into greater detail in episode "5. For Our Health"). Some people have a hard time believing this because we have been eating meat for thousands of years and it has been ingrained in our brain that there is nothing wrong with our diets, and it’s perfectly normal as everybody does it.

Food and cuisine is also linked to traditions and social gatherings: we connect to our roots by eating typical local dishes, and we feel at home when we eat something from our childhood. So you can see how it becomes very difficult to break this complex emotional bond. In fact, one of the arguments against veganism is that cave men lived on meat and so have we for generations.

This is true, however they also went out and hunted for it and sometimes died in the process making it a circle of life, they didn’t have it packaged in plastic conveniently placed on the way home. They also lived covered in fur without light-bulbs and toilets in caves and reproduced with their siblings. Just because something has been done a certain way for ages it doesn’t make it automatically right! We can use racism, women’s rights, homosexuality or even the holocaust as examples! Our understanding has evolved and in the process we have raised above our mistakes and learnt to live in a better way.

Also, our bodies have changed and evolved since then, as well as our way of life and “we have come to learn that eating animals is no longer the necessity we once believed it to be. Research has proven that plants contain all the vitamins and nutrients that the human body needs to thrive.”

The Reality Of Animal Farming

“The animals we slaughter for food are extremely intelligent and sensitive creatures, and the way in which we treat them, regardless of whether the meat is factory farmed, free range or organic, is abhorrently cruel. From stealing their babies from them at birth to keeping them locked in confinement and denying them their natural behaviors, our actions cause animals immense emotional pain and suffering.”

If we look at the statistics over 56 billion farmed animals are killed every year by humans. “These shocking figures do not even include fish and other sea creatures whose deaths are so great they are only measured in tonnes.” To give you the full figure we kill 150 billion animals each year!

Just to put that into perspective, it is estimated that a total of 1,6 billion people killed in all of the wars (including deaths from famine and disease caused by war) throughout the history and pre-history of mankind.

We kill 93 times more animals that every man that ever died from wars, EVERY YEAR! In fact, 1.6 billion is just the number of animals killed in the UK in the space of a year!

We don’t kill animals just for food. “Each year, more than 100 million animals - including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds - are killed in U.S. laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity-driven experimentation, and chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing."

We treat animals like objects, forgetting that they are sentient intelligent beings capable of feelings and pain! Not only we abuse them, enslave them and brutally kill them, but we completely disregard their sacrifice by throwing them away. In fact 570,000 tonnes of fresh meat is thrown away each year and as many as 40% (63 billion pounds) of fish caught globally every year are discarded!

Here is more information about animal testing.

Animal Entertainment

“Circuses, zoos, aquariums, dog fighting, hunting, fishing, horse racing, bullfighting… all of these practices keep animals in captivity and use them against their will for human entertainment. People take part, considering them fun, entertaining, artistic or cultural, but none justify the forcing of animals into confinement, to suffer and die, for our benefit .”

Circuses and water parks animals are intimidated with pain and tortures to be taught tricks for our entertainment. “Whips, tight collars, muzzles, electric prods, bull hooks, and more tools of torture are employed to “train” the animals.” The fish and sea creatures in aquariums would swim thousands of kilometers a day in the wild and they would develop senses to guide them through their aquatic habitat, but are frustrated in tanks where they are condemned to spend their entire lives.

Zoos are prisons for thousands of animals whom have done nothing to deserve a life in a cage. “Zoos do not teach children about the natural attributes of animals, on the contrary zoos provide a distorted image and teach them how animals should not be living.” They are stolen from their natural habitat, or bred in captivity, kept confined on hard surfaces, resulting in infections and arthritis, and they are not able to exercise as they would in the wild.

“The severe confinement results in deleterious psychological effects. Repeated swaying and pacing are evidence that the animals are suffering emotionally.”

Don’t take your children to zoos and circuses with animals, take them to sanctuaries where animals are free and happy! You can go to animal rescues’ organised days and volunteer while spending a day among them, teaching the next generation to have compassion for all creatures and not treating animals like objects or toys.

If you want to find out more about the consequences of animal entertainment and how you can help please check the below sites:

Empty All Cages

Animal Abuse In The Circus

Aquariums & Marine Parks

Choice

All carnivores are compelled by their survival instincts to kill for food, and nature provides more prays than predators so that everything remains in balance. Once upon a time we were part of that food chain until we evolved to sit at the top and realized we possessed the intellect to raise above our instincts and start living by choosing.

Quoting Spider-man: “With great power comes great responsibilities”, and we are certainly exercising our power, but hiding the effects it has on our reality by disregarding the consequences and not taking our responsibilities. How many of us would have the guts to kill an animal? How many would shoot a chicken or skin a rabbit? Would you take away a baby from its mother while she screams in pain?

Would you pay someone else to do that for you

so you can satisfy your appetite?

We were taught not to do to others what we don’t want to be done to us, and not to act when it impacts others freedom; but we are not living by those principles. By exercising our power of choice we are taking away the life of innocent beings that cannot protect themselves against us, and don’t have a voice to express their suffering. We are actively ignoring their pain because it bothers us to see it and then having to do something about it, in other words we are being very selfish!

We have so many alternative choices to eating animal products nowadays that it’s unjustifiable not doing so! You are not in a desert, you are not stranded on an island, and even so I doubt you will use a knife to slaughter an animal (which will probably kill you first) and just end up eating the bananas or coconuts laying around.

Curious about product alternatives you can add today to your diet? Check here.

You Can Help!

You might think your contribution won’t change the world but vegans save 198 animals a year! That is 200 lives that get spared and won’t sit on your conscience. If that were children, soldiers, mothers, fathers, humans, would you not save them just because it’s not millions? Isn’t every life precious enough to be saved?

And just to prove how much of a difference we can make: veganism in the UK has grown over 261% in last decade which will result in 67.5 million FEWER animals being killed every year. That is thanks to 542,000 people in Britain are now following a vegan diet!