Month: March 2025

Vegans Should Be Congratulated, Not Criticised

~ Graeme M ~ Leave a comment

(Four minute read)

I’m sure you are familiar with the outrage vegan advocacy so often draws on social media. One of the most curious complaints (which is everywhere these days) is the suggestion that vegans are really the biggest culprits when it comes to causing harm to other animals. Say what? This is quite the odd claim when you think about it. As a philosophy, veganism is committed to doing what we can to be fair to other animals, so by its very nature you’d imagine the ethics guide us to avoid harming other animals whenever we can.

The criticism seems pretty wide of the mark but OK, what if vegans really are doing a worse job than most? How would we know? Well, it depends a little on exactly what critics are getting at and usually they are restricting their criticism to just one thing – that more animals are killed to eat a vegan-friendly plants-only diet than an everyday diet. If – so the story goes – if you want to cause the most harm to animals, be a vegan and expect crops to be grown to feed you and see just how many wild animals are killed for your food. We’ve all seen the rant from John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) in Yellowstone and repeated on the Joe Rogan show. What we should be doing is eating grass-fed beef, where just one animal is killed for our food each year.

Seems legit. Except… it’s wrong. In reality, nearly everyone is not doing that at all. They are actually eating plenty of plants (eg fruit, vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts, sugar and derived foods such as bread, cakes, beer, wine and so on). Plus, they are eating quite a few animals, most of which are raised in “factory farm” conditions and also require crops grown to feed them.

Yes, it might be possible to adopt a super restrictive diet and eat nothing but beef from range-grazed cattle that are not supplementally fed. But who is going to do that and why should they? People like dietary diversity and nutritionists recommend we eat a mix of plants and animals. What might be more illuminating is whether or not on average a vegan-friendly diet is way worse than an everyday diet in the number of animals killed.

Now, I’ve tackled that question a few times before so I’m not going to go back over it. You can read one of those articles here. However, the bottom line is that more animals are killed to produce food for an everyday diet than for a vegan-friendly diet, so if you care about that fact you should be congratulating vegans for trying to make a difference. Yes, that’s right – if you do care enough about other animals that you think we should source food in ways that reduce harm to other animals, a vegan-friendly diet is a very good way to do that.

But it gets better. Veganism and animal rights are a far broader ethics than just what people eat. In fact, veganism asks us to be fair to animals whenever our actions affect them and the aim is to prevent using and exploiting them and being cruel to them when we can choose to do that. Vegans try not to support activities that use, abuse or otherwise harm animals. For example, vegans (and indeed, anyone that adopts the ethics and is guided by those principles) will typically not buy products from animal farming nor from companies that routinely test on animals, they don’t support animal circuses and often-times zoos, they don’t support commercial animal entertainments such as horse racing and so on.

If anyone is making an effort to make life better for other animals, it’s vegans. Sure, plenty of people try to be kind to animals and that’s great. We all want that. However, veganism is an ethical framework specifically aimed at delivering fairness and justice for other animals, so when people criticise veganism and vegans you can tell they aren’t genuine in wanting us to do better for other animals. If they were, they’d adopt the ethics themselves and help encourage vegans (and everyone else) to make the best choices they can. Of course, vegans might get things wrong here and there, but it would be hard to prove that they actually are doing worse than the everyday consumer.

In the end, it seems very difficult to sustain the argument that vegans are somehow doing worse than most. John Dutton is simply wrong.

Really, vegans are the people trying to make a difference. They ought to be congratulated, not criticised.

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One further thought before we leave this discussion. Critics often don’t realise just how little land is needed to grow enough food for a person to eat a vegan-friendly, plant-based diet. As mentioned above research suggests such a diet needs as little as around 0.13-0.17 hectares of cropland per year. Let’s use 0.15 hectares as an average requirement. But what does this really mean?

Critics usually want to say that some vast number of animals are killed to grow crops and of course that’s true, but that is because we use crops to feed people, the animals they eat, to produce vegetable oils, biofuels, other industrial applications and clothing. And we do that for 8 billion people in a capitalist market economy. Of course the scale is vast.

But what about at the personal level where the vegan rubber hits the road, so to speak. Well, when it comes to animals killed to produce plant-based foods, we don’t really know. There have been many estimates, and one of the highest I have ever seen came from Professor Mike Archer who claimed that in Australia, about 100 mice are killed on every hectare of wheat production. Archer based this estimate on the numbers of mice killed during mouse plagues in wheat fields. While we can’t extrapolate from this what the cost is to produce other crops, we might assume that averaged overall, the 100 wild animals killed per hectare of crops is not far from the truth. We should note that this means some 2.5 billion wild animals are killed on Australian croplands (excluding invertebrates) each year, which does seem unlikely (see example number 3 below).

That claim has since been discredited, but let’s assume he’s right and use his numbers of 100 to look at some estimates about what that means for a vegan-friendly diet. First up, we can see that if a vegan-friendly diet uses 0.15 hectares of land, just 15 animals are killed in a year for that diet. This is rather less than the 50-100 animals killed for an everyday diet.

What about some specific food-related cases? Let’s look at three, using Professor Archer’s 100 animals killed on a hectare of cropland.

Plant milks. Oat and soy milk production requires growing oats and soy. It turns out that about one hectare of these crops can return about 20-30,000 liters of “milk”. If that’s so, and the average person consumes about 100 liters of milk in a year, then their share of any wild animal deaths is about 0.004 of the hectare’s production. That could mean that about one-half of a wild animal is killed for a year’s oat milk. By the way, it’s worth noting that a hectare of land used to produce dairy milk delivers around 6,500 litres of milk.

Update: It’s been pointed out that while in some places (eg New Zealand, the US) a hectare of oats can produce maybe 30,000 litres of “milk”, in Australia the quantity is closer to 6,500 litres. Also, while the average per capita milk consumption is about 100 litres in a year, many people consume as much as 300 litres. So to be fair, we can ask what that changes in the the Australian context. The answer is that a typical oat milk drinker might need about .05 hectares of oats grown. At 100 wild animals killed per hectare, that means the death toll will be about five.

Sugar cane. Much is made by some critics of vegans eating sugar and causing animals to be killed for a taste sensation and this is true. Vegans should be mindful that wild animals are killed to produce sugar (and other foods), so reducing consumption of such foods is more consistent with the goal of preventing cruelty. But does that make much of a difference? I don’t think so, to be honest. Consider, typical sugar yields in Australia are about 12,000 kg/hectare/year. The average person eats about 25kg of added sugar in a year. That suggests that just 0.002 of a hectare is needed for one person’s sugar consumption, which at 100 wild animal deaths per hectare translates to about one-fifth of an animal killed for my added sugar intake. It’s hard to think that not eating sugar can have much of an effect on my personal toll.

Wild native animals. This is an interesting claim – millions of native animals are killed to grow crops, with critics referring to all sorts of animals. But do we have any genuine empirical estimates? I’m not aware of many. In Tasmania, estimates suggest about one million wild natives are killed each year on croplands (see here). It’s likely other animals are killed too, but how many? Let’s assume the same number. So, two million wild animals killed on Tasmania’s croplands each year. There are approximately 60,000 hectares of crops harvested each year in Tasmania, which could mean that as many as 35 wild animals are killed per hectare per year in Tasmania. If a vegan diet needs about 0.15 hectares, then the death toll of wild animals is around five. Again, this is easily dwarfed by the 50-100 animals killed to feed someone a typical everyday non-vegan diet.

Veganism and the modern Left

~ Graeme M ~ Leave a comment

A question: why do left-leaning Australians (in particular modern progressives) overwhelmingly appear to reject veganism and animal rights?

You might retort, how do you know that leftists reject veganism? I think it’s obvious. The voting landscape is typically somewhat stable. About 30% of voters always vote for left-wing parties such as Labor and the Greens, 30% for the right (the LNP) and the rest seem to swing around a bit but seem mostly moved by what’s best for them personally (but often exhibit a wish to benefit from fairer conditions). As well, we might note that in line with overseas trends, Australians (particularly young Australians) are shifting left in their political outlooks. In 2022, for example, just 25% of voting age Millennials voted for the conservative LNP coalition.

From that, I think we can say that at least 30% and perhaps as much as 50% of the voting public are directly interested in, and concerned about, matters of fairness and justice as seen through a “progressive” lens. Perhaps we could say that social justice is a significant motivation for between one-third and half of the Australian voting public.

While left-wing political ideology tends to focus on fairness and justice in human-centric terms (and thus is primarily engaged in bettering the human condition within dominant political and economic systems), the underlying concepts and ideological motivations seem admirably suited to engaging with veganism.

Yet, just 2% of the population self-identifies as ethically vegan.

If the core essence of veganism is exactly about fairness and justice for other sentient species and people with leftist, progressive attitudes are engaged in striving for those qualities in human society, why then are they not engaged in the struggle for animal justice? Why is the wish to deliver to animals freedom from violence, oppression, marginalisation, powerlessness and violence whenever we can achieve that not striking a chord with those whose avowed aims in human society are exactly those?

I don’t have an answer. Possible explanations are:

  • like most people, they aren’t really aware of veganism as a justice issue, believing it to be about diet/environment/health.
  • most are likely raised in left-leaning households, so from the beginning they identify with that kind of politics. This doesn’t require them to change their core beliefs/behaviours over time, whereas to transcend typical societal attitudes to other animals requires challenging oneself and doing things differently.
  • leftists (and conservatives!) care about people much more than they care about animals – their goal is a fair, just and equitable human society.
  • they fear that by assigning comparable moral worth to other animals we undermine our human exceptionalism (and thereby deflate the project for human rights that emerges from our shared humanity).

What do you think – can you offer a reason why the significant proportion of the Australian voting public who believe in fairness and justice are not engaging with a perfectly rational ethical framework that strives to achieve those conditions for sentient animals?

Postscript: Interested readers may like to check out this article pondering similar themes from Will Kymlicka, though his is a far more erudite analysis than I can manage!.

Will is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and is married to the author Sue Donaldson, with whom he has co-authored Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford UP, 2011)

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/04/human-supremacism-why-are-animal-rights-activists-still-the-orphans-of-the-left-2

Voltaire and Veganism

~ Graeme M ~ Leave a comment

Hang on, you exclaim, Voltaire was a French writer and philosopher who lived over two hundred years ago. What on earth does he have to do with veganism?

Well, he said something that has resonated down the ages and which has a particular relevance to veganism. So, what DID he say?

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”

Google AI tells us this quote is often attributed to Voltaire. The original French phrase is “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” which translates to “The best is the enemy of the good”.

Why is this quote important? Voltaire used this phrase to encourage people to take practical steps toward improvement, rather than getting stuck chasing perfection.

I think what he meant is that if our aim from the outset is perfection, we may hesitate to even start. Perhaps we’ll abandon our efforts because we can never be good enough. But if we let this happen, if we allow our resolve to be undermined by doubts or feeling that the project dwarfs our puny abilities, we can never progress.

So what if all we can do is our best? Or not even our very best, but something? Surely having a goal in mind and doing what we can do with who we are in our circumstances still takes us down the road towards our goal.

This is very good advice, to be sure. And it’s not the only form in which the idea of moving forward and not simply giving up or procrastinating has been stated. You may have heard of the “if you can’t do everything” fallacy. Google tells us this is a logical fallacy where someone argues that because a solution isn’t perfect or doesn’t address every aspect of a problem, it should be completely disregarded, essentially rejecting any action at all, even if it provides some positive impact; it’s a form of the “Nirvana fallacy.”

OK, so we have pretty good advice that encourages us to go forward rather than giving up or settling for the worst. How does this relate to veganism? Well, I think it sets the tone for how we can apply vegan ethics in our everyday lives, as well as defending against those detractors and bullies who try to undermine our resolve to do better.

Veganism at heart wants us to be fair to other animals when we can do that. Its goals are simple – other animals should be free whenever possible and we should choose not to be cruel to them by our actions.

How we go about this is up to each of us. What counts is believing other animals have an inherent value that demands a duty of fairness from us. If we are honest in that belief, we’ll do what we can to make the best choices we can. Even when they aren’t the most perfect choices. And we are all free to keep on refining the choices we make and finding even better ways to do what we can to make a fairer world for other animals.

Finally, don’t let the bullies get you down. When you hear someone telling you that you are a hypocrite or a failure because you still use a computer, or drive a motor vehicle, or rely on medicines tested on animals, ignore them. What they want is for you to give up, and THAT Voltaire would never have wanted us to do.

Doing something positive is always better than doing nothing.