A common meme seen on social media these days shows some wild animal killing/eating another. It invariably comes with a punchline that suggests vegans are avoiding reality. In fact, people posting these memes completely miss the point.

Nature IS cruel, but surprisingly far more vegan than most people realise. Of course, wild animals cannot be actual “vegans” because only people can – veganism is a purely human idea. But how can nature itself be vegan? Let’s find out.

Veganism is just the name for a particular idea – that other animals matter enough that we should want to be fair to them by adopting vegan ethics to guide our behaviours when our actions affect them. Vegan ethics are sound principles for doing this and they are aimed at achieving two goals: to keep other animals free, and to protect them from our cruelty and unfair use.

Let’s now turn to nature. Wild animals are almost always free – that is, no wild animal is owned by another, though there can be cases of parasitism and similar close relationships. These however are naturally evolved behaviours that do not reflect any held concept of property ownership. Wild animals are free.

When predators kill and eat other animals, they do so because that is what they’ve evolved to do and they have no alternatives. Obligate carnivores must eat other animals, while other animals that eat meat have no concept of choosing their food – they eat what they can find. Wild animal predation upon others is “fair”.

Of course wild animal predation is an awful thing. The ways in which other animals can be killed (including being eaten alive) certainly is cruel as we see it, but we must agree that again, the animals don’t have the concept of cruelty and they are usually just doing what they can and must. The cruelty involved is awful but it’s simply how things are. It’s hard to say that this is intentional, avoidable cruelty.

When we think about modern human use of other animals, we can see that usually the animals are not free – they are regarded as property. Very often, we can find alternatives that don’t need animals to be used and killed, or we simply don’t need those products at all. And as moral agents, we can choose not to be cruel – cruelty is not demanded of us in most of the ways we interact with other animals (and we know cruelty is wrong which is why we have animal welfare/anti-cruelty regulation).

No, wild nature is far more vegan – consistent with vegan ethical goals – than many of us today. The outlier by a very large margin is humanity, animals who own other animals and treat them as property, who treat them unfairly when we have alternatives or can go without, and who so often act cruelly towards them when we can choose not to.

The critics are wrong – vegan ethics represent what is inherently good about our human capacity to be moral agents. We know that nature is harsh, cruel and uncompromising yet even so, far more consistent with vegan goals than we modern people often choose to be. Shouldn’t we want to do better?