There’s a lot of confusion about veganism yet it’s a really simple idea – let’s be as fair as we can to other animals. We put it like this:
“Veganism recognises the inherent value and dignity of other species and aims to treat them fairly by our choices whenever we can. It has just two aims – to keep animals free, and to protect them from our unfair use and cruel actions when we can do that.”
You can learn more about veganism and why it’s so important today in the free booklet linked below. We also tackle some typical criticisms about veganism and point out that if animals matter to you, veganism really is the most effective, rational ethical stance you can adopt to guide your choices and actions when they affect other animals. Honestly, vegan ethics just make sense.
Feel free to offer any comments, feedback or criticism in the Comments section below.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen people having a go at vegans and veganism by referring to other animals’ behaviours and natural states.
For example, they point out that eating animals is the “circle of life”, often referring to lions as though that’s the coup de grace right there. Or they rail against the idea of animal rights, wondering just how on earth (and why) we’d want to adjudicate on cases of intraspecies violations. Funnily enough, lions get a guernsey here too, with critics using lions as the archetypal predator we want to bring to trial for killing others.
The curious thing about this sort of criticism is that it entirely misses the point. In fact, most of the people saying this stuff don’t even realise that lions are pretty much vegan.
OK, I can hear people spraying coffee out their noses already. Lions??? Vegan??? Are you nuts? Well, no, but I should be a little clearer about what I mean. I’m not saying lions are vegans, because only people can be vegans. However, for much the same reasons that I’ve claimed our hunter-gatherer ancestors were vegan so too are lions and other predators.
Here’s why.
Veganism (and animal rights) have just two goals: for other animals to be free and protected from our cruelty, whenever we can do that. It should be pretty obvious that the animals lions kill are free – lions do not treat other animals as chattel property. So right there the main aim of veganism has been met.
Wait you say, those lions ARE pretty cruel. Sure they are, but let’s be clear. First, lions have no alternatives – they are obligate carnivores. Second, they have no better tools available than claws and teeth, so of course the way they kill their prey will seem cruel to us (and their victims, I’m guessing). And third, lions aren’t moral agents the way we humans are, which suggests that their cruelty is simply natural behaviour they aren’t enabled to evaluate, much less change.
So, wild animal prey are free and lions are only so cruel as their nature demands, nor do they have any alternatives. That right there is the very definition of veganism.
Modern human beings on the other hand treat other animals as chattel property, are cruel to them when we know that’s not fair, and have alternatives in most cases. Most modern humans are not living consistently with the aims of veganism, so in a very real way we can say that even lions are more vegan than the average consumer.
OK, that’s all a bit far-fetched, I know. I use this little story to illustrate something about veganism – that as modern people, we have the capacity to make much fairer choices for other animals. Lions do what they must and they fit into their world. We often just do what we want and bend the rest of the world to our whims. All veganism is saying is be more like the lions – keep other animals free and don’t be any more cruel to them than we have to be.
I have suggested that Ethical Omnivorism (EO) is a practical application of vegan principles but I have been criticised for this claim. Nonetheless I stand by it. Let me explain.
I propose that veganism is our moral baseline when it comes to our relationship with other, sentient animals. Whenever we seek to do what’s best for animals in recognition of their inherent value and dignity, we are within the moral scope of veganism. Veganism comprises the complete ethics needed to ensure fairness and justice for other sentient animals.
Consequently, the goal of veganism is for us to keep animals free and protected from our cruelty to the extent we can do that in the circumstances. This effectively translates to the formal definition of veganism (which claims to exclude the exploitation and cruelty to other animals from our actions as much as we can).
Thinking of veganism in this way doesn’t change the definition or meaning of veganism in practical terms, but it does somewhat extend its meaning. What I’m getting at here is that the scope of veganism extends far beyond simply diet or non-participation in animal-using industries: when we do anything at all that’s best for another animal just for their own benefit, we are behaving at least in part consistently with veganism. This doesn’t mean that behaving consistently with veganism in some ways means we are vegan, but rather that when we care about animals for themselves we are enacting vegan ethical principles. Someone cannot do things that help to make another animal’s life go well for its own benefit without applying vegan ethics in practice.
This brings us to the Ethical Omnivore Movement (EOM). EOM is an ethical approach to sourcing food within which is the fundamental belief that humans must eat meat for optimal health and that animal farming of a particular kind is critical to ensuring optimal soil health in agricultural lands. The core values of the EOM, as explained on their website, are:
Our mission is to support more consumers worldwide to use and to support the production of, the most ethically-produced food, drink, and other goods.
There should be no shame in the use of animal-based products – just in the cruel, wasteful, careless, irreverent methods of production.
Our shared commitment to ethics extends to all relationships in every area of our lives, especially the one with our gracious Mother Earth.
The EOM opposes:
the consumption of any seafood from unsustainable or farmed sources.
industrial farming because of the cruelty and environmental impacts.
industrial dairy due to pasteurization and the cruelty dairy cows endure, inluding its by-product, crated veal.
The EOM supports and advocates for:
local small-scale farmers who get their hands dirty by growing and harvesting produce ethically, authentically and naturally.
environmentally sustainable agriculture that increases the biodiversity of the land, favouring organic farming over industrial mono-cropping/monocultures. Increased biodiversity must be an essential outcome for a healthy ecosystem and vital for long-term productivity of the land.
ethical ranching methods such as holistic management where pastured animals are fed and raised according to Nature and without cruelty, hormones, or routinely-administered antibiotics.
Clearly, the EOM is a welfarist movement so cannot be considered vegan – anyone subscribing to EOM principles is not a vegan. However, it’s also clear that the EOM philosophy includes clear elements of reducing/eliminating cruelty for farmed animals while also advocating for livestock to have freedom to pursue natural behaviours.
Assuming that the reasons for this are not merely instrumental (ie not meant purely to maximise economic benefit) but are intended to promote higher quality life experiences for these farmed animals for their own benefit, as seems to be the case from the statements shown above, and further assuming that having such concern for other animals can only be possible within a veganistic ethical framework, Ethical Omnivorism can be regarded as a practical application of vegan ethical principles within a welfarist philosophy.
The only barrier to the EOM becoming entirely consistent with vegan ethics is the belief that other animals must be used for both human health and soil health. If a subscriber to the EOM came to believe otherwise, then given their wish to be fair to other animals it seems likely they would adopt the complete vegan ethics.
Let me emphasise though that as it stands, the EOM is NOT a vegan movement. What I am highlighting is that because a significant portion of the EO philosophy’s moral foundation emerges from the moral baseline reflected within veganism, it remains a practical implementation of vegan ethics within a welfarist belief system.
Put simply, the EOM can only be possible because of the fundamental moral beliefs that drive veganism.
Unlike other animals, humans have moral agency – we care about what’s right and wrong. We’ve been developing this quality for thousands of years with the goal of making life go well not just for ourselves, but other people too.
We can also extend this moral concern to other animals. To some degree or another, that’s been a hallmark of human attitudes to other animals for much of our existence, but in recent times moral thinkers have refined just how we might go about this (and how far our concern should extend).
One notable step forward in this regard was the formation of the UK Vegan Society in 1945 from which came both the concept of veganism and one’s personal identity as vegan. Cutting a long story short, the founders of veganism were hoping to free animals from their harmful and unfair use by people and by so doing help advance the human condition. This sense of veganism was somewhat driven by emotional and moral reactions to World War II.
Veganism is a secular ideology – it doesn’t depend on a faith-based outlook – so anyone at all can be guided by its principles. Those principles have been refined and expanded in meaning since 1945 by later ideas such as animal rights and animal protection. But at the heart of all of this remains the core belief that human beings can care about how life goes for other animals.
“Veganism recognises the inherent value and dignity of other species and aims to treat them fairly by our choices whenever we can.”
Boiled down into everyday terms, I am proposing that veganism is the moral baseline for human treatment of other animals. At its simplest, veganism gives rise to just two core principles – that whenever we can, we should keep animals free and and protected from our cruel treatment so that life goes well for them.
This is not to redefine veganism as it was originally thought of by the founders of the UK Vegan Society. Rather, it makes much more explicit just what they intended in their own ethical and moral attitudes to animals, and by extension, the improvement of the human condition.
I offer one caveat to this. Veganism, so regarded, remains for now a personal and voluntary ethical program (no-one has to be a vegan). Everyone is free to adopt vegan ethics as they see fit, according to their own motivations and circumstances. This means that there is no action someone can take that seeks to make the lives of sentient animals go well for them, just by virtue of their own existence, that is not at least in part consistent with veganism.
For example, animal welfare regulation (particularly when it reflects current thinking such as the Five Freedoms or A life Worth Living) seeks to ensure that we are not cruel to animals when we can do that, so it is partially enacting at law one of the core principles of veganism. Likewise, philosophies such as Ethical Omnivorism are deeply anchored to those very same core principles. In that way, the Ethical Omnivore Movement remains a practical application of veganism (though to be clear, the Ethical Omnivore philosophy denies the core aim of veganism for animals to be completely free, thus Ethical Omnivores are NOT vegans).
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.
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.
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.
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)
Something I often see on social media is farmers objecting to vegan advocacy on the grounds that vegans know nothing about animal husbandry. Because vegans aren’t engaged in the business, the story goes, they don’t understand just how well farmers really do look after their livestock. Unfortunately, this criticism rather misses the point.
I think this happens because farmers don’t understand what veganism is really about and the fact that pretty much all vegan/animal rights activism focuses almost exclusively on how much animals are harmed in animal farming with graphic imagery and stories about grossly negligent behaviour by producers. Farmers therefore think that vegans are simply complaining about animal welfare.
The reason that this criticism misses the point is that veganism and animal rights are not focused solely on animal welfare but rather on the question of whether or not we should use animals in these ways. The objection from veganism is that animals are being farmed in the first place, not just that they may suffer and be harmed.
To put it simply, “Veganism recognises the inherent value and dignity of other species and aims to treat them fairly by our choices whenever we can.”
In this context, “fairly” means that animals should be free to live their own lives without human interference, whenever it’s possible for that to happen. An easy way to think about this is that veganism proposes that when we can we should want to protect animals’ interests to:
be free and able to live their own lives
be able to make their own choices about their own bodies
not be treated cruelly by humans
A farmed animal is not free and is regarded as property, they are not able to make their own choices about what they do and when, and they can often be treated cruelly. That’s really why people adopting vegan ethics might choose not to buy products from animal farming (eg meat, dairy, etc). They are rejecting the unfair use of other animals when we have alternatives, so how animal farming is done is not relevant when making that choice.
That said, how animals are treated is important so while people continue to use animals in farming and other industries, we should want the best possible welfare for them. While it’s absolutely reasonable for farmers to defend their practices (and we should encourage their best practice), remember that the best welfare in the world doesn’t address the overall objections of veganism. Only the abolition of animal farming would achieve that.
Is that possible? That’s not for me to say, but really it’s a little irrelevant to what people can do right now. Veganism is primarily a personal stance so it’s much more likely that someone can make choices that minimise their support for animal farming.
Summarising all this:
Veganism objects to the unfair use of other animals and regarding them as property when we can do otherwise
People who adopt vegan ethics typically don’t buy products from animal farming for that reason
They also don’t need to know how animal husbandry systems work to take that stance
Farmers can (and should) promote best practice welfare and that’s important, but it’s not addressing the real moral objection
Here at JustUs Too we advocate for fairness and justice for animals. Importantly, we endorse veganism because it’s the only general term and overall conceptualisation of the wish to be fair to other animals we know of. We believe that “veganism” – regarded as the idea we can and should strive to be fair to other animals – is a rational, effective and workable ethical framework. No-one has to be a vegan but everyone can be guided by these principles.
What is Veganism?
The UK Vegan Society defines veganism as both a philosophy and a lifestyle. You may be most familiar with it as a super strict diet. However, veganism really asks that we do what we can, when we can, to be fair to other animals and prevent injustices to them from our choices. We could sum this up as:
“Veganism recognises the inherent value and dignity of other species and aims to treat them fairly by our choices whenever we can.”
Why veganism?
Veganism is important today because of the outsized and often unfair effects we have on other species. Veganism is about minimizing these negative effects as much as we can and hopefully making a fairer world for them.
If we think other animals are worth respecting for themselves and not only for what they can do for us, then vegan ethical principles can guide us in how to do that, especially when it comes to our everyday choices.
What can I do?
The answer is deceptively simple. Whatever you can or are willing to do that aligns with vegan ethical principles. These principles are pretty much exactly the same as those we adopt when wanting to be fair to other people, where “fairness” means taking into account the interests of others to live a good life.
That’s why people who identify as vegans don’t buy animal products. They believe that modern animal farming is inherently unfair to the animals and when we have alternatives – such as plant-based foods – we can make fairer choices.
Anyone can be guided by these principles – you don’t have to be a vegan to do that. In everyday terms, think about whether or not the products and services you buy and support contribute to treating other animals unfairly. If so, look for alternatives that minimize or eliminate this unfairness. What you do is up to you. If you are genuine in your wish to treat other animals fairly and compassionately, you’ll do what seems best.
JD Garland is a Youtuber who criticises vegans and veganism, largely on the grounds that veganism is a toxic religion rather than a genuine moral philosophy. His favoured tactic is to claim that a wholly plant-based diet is far more harmful to animals than any other diet. Unfortunately he rather misrepresents veganism – it’s a moral philosophy together with supporting ethical principles which is constrained by both real world conditions and personal willingness – so his criticisms frequently address strawman arguments.
In his latest two videos, “New! Crop Deaths Proof Veganism is a Lie” parts 1 and 2 he hopes to provide yet more evidence for his claim that veganism is really BAD. The following short critique responds to his basic argument.
Garland claims that because a vegan-friendly, plants-only diet requires crops to be grown AND many animals are killed to grow these crops, such a diet is maximally harmful and worse for animals than any other diet. In particular he argues that a vegan diet requires far more crops to be grown than is the case now.
While this is the overall flavour of these videos, Garland’s main contentions here are that most crops are NOT grown for animal feed and that a vegan diet is not cruelty free, ie that vegans are also responsible for a great many animals being harmed and killed. I agree. However, this is not a knock-down argument that completely defuses the value of veganism. In fact, IF one is worried by the degree of harm to animals from cropping, vegans are doing better than most (we should bear in mind that veganism addresses all the ways we humans interact with other animals, so there is ample scope for vegan ethics to offer significant positive benefits for other species beyond the food system).
The reasoning for this conclusion – that a vegan diet is significantly less harmful to animals than a typical Western diet – is straight-forward.
First, a typical western consumer will eat between 50 and 100, possibly as many as 200 animals in a year, plus however many animals are killed as a by-product of production systems (eg chicks and hens killed in egg production, seafood by-catch, etc). On average, none of this happens for a vegan diet.
Second, as well as food derived from animals, most people also eat foods derived from plants – fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, oils, bread, french fries, cakes, pasta, breakfast cereals, juices, jams and other spreads, beer, wine, sugar, etc. Plus, the animals they eat also eat plants. This means that while a vegan-friendly diet has a cropland footprint, so too does that of the typical consumer.
For a vegan-friendly diet to be more harmful than a typical Western diet, it must have a greater cropland footprint. Most research suggests it does not. The crops grown to feed a typical consumer include that used directly for their food and that used to feed the animals they eat. On average, it seems a typical Western diet requires about 0.20-0.25 hectares per year (a more meat heavy than average diet may use even more), while a plant-based diet requires about 0.12-0.15 hectares. This means that a vegan-friendly diet requires approximately 30% less cropland.
Now we can take a look at the arguments put forward in these two new videos. I suggest that overall, the videos are inaccurate and misrepresent the research presented as evidence. They fail to demonstrate that either more cropland is required for a global plant-based diet or that a vegan diet is more harmful on average.
At 0:15. The claim being made is that the majority of crops are grown for human food and not to feed animals. This is true. BUT, a significant proportion is grown for feed – up to 20% – while some other proportion ends up as animal feed. Overall, as much as 40% of global arable land is used to feed livestock (Mottet et al 2018). This is an important point.
At 1:38. Here the speaker argues that in a vegan world, there would be more crops grown than is the case now. Assuming he means by this a world with zero animal agriculture and all food derived from plants, this is likely to be untrue. What research there is suggests that less arable land would be required (as mentioned above, up to 30% less – see Peters et al (2016) “Carrying capacity of U.S. agricultural land: Ten diet scenarios” – Figure 2).
At 3:30. Both speakers claim Our World in Data is a flawed source and somehow driven by evil interests. However, Our World In Data is generally regarded as a reputable source so we should feel confident their data is reasonably fair and accurate.
At 5:00. The speaker claims that the OWID graph showing that 77-80% of agricultural land is used for animal farming is misleading. No, it isn’t – this is correct. So it absolutely is true that IF we eliminated animal farming, we would free up for other uses as much as 70% of land currently used for agriculture. Note that the FAO observed in Mottet et al (2018) that some proportion of existing grazing land could be converted to crops (as much as 14% of global agricultural land).
At 8:00. Pretending that anyone says that rocky cliffs can be used for crops is mischievous. What people are saying, the FAO included, is that some land currently used for grazing could be used for cropping, and that’s true. Just because there is land that can’t be used to grow crops doesn’t mean we have to graze animals on it.
At 9:20. The claim that ruminant grazing for meat is a benefit is somewhat irrelevant to the main argument. While “regenerative grazing” might be a good strategy for restoring degraded grasslands, this could be achieved in other ways. The example given of bison in Romania is a case in point.
At 14:00. The chart from the paper “Crop harvests for direct food use insufficient to meet the UN’s food security goal” makes my point clearly, however Garland and his guest seem to misunderstand what they are looking at. As they themselves observe, the land area for feed is half that of the land area for food. In other words, as much as one-third of all arable land dedicated to food and feed is used for feed. This goes to the point I made earlier about respective cropland footprints.
At 15:30. Calories/protein are useful measures for working out the area of land needed to supply food. In particular, we can observe that a hectare of cropland can deliver substantial amounts of human edible protein. This is useful if we want to work out how much land is needed to replace animals with crops.
At 18:30. The FAO graph where we see that soy meal is just 5% of livestock feed intake is being used carelessly. The proportion of feed intake would be significantly greater – and more salient – if we were evaluating only arable land use for feed (which is the metric in which we are interested).
At 19:15 to 21:00. What’s being avoided here is that a significant proportion of soy is used to feed livestock, with about 93% of the soy harvest supplying the feed market. While oil is a co-product of crushing soy, it is likely not the main driver of soy production as a proportion of global oilcrop.
At 21:20. Here the speaker claims that soy oil consistently fetches a higher price than meal, so for comparable units of production, the oil is the better value proposition. However, if we go by commodity prices as suggested in the video, soy meal is the greater earner per hectare of harvest (80% by weight is meal and just 20% by weight is oil).
That means that for 100kg of soy, just 20kg will be oil and 80kg will be the meal. I’m not sure what current prices are, but let’s say they are somewhere around $0.45USD per kg for meal and $1.10USD per kg for oil. So, for my 100kg of soy crush, I would get back $36 for the meal and $22 for the oil.
I checked with an ag consultant about this a while back:
“My understanding is that the money is largely in the meal, but it is worth crushing to remove the oil. The meal is a protein source for feedlots; cows, pigs and chickens. The oil finds its way into many uses (food chain, industrial etc) but it is essentially a byproduct. That is what makes it hard for canola farmers because although canola oil is a superior and preferred oil in food manufacture it’s base price is determined by the soy oil price and soy oil production fluctuates with the need for soy meal. Canola is the reverse of soy in that oil is the valuable component, and a greater % (around 40 c.f. 20% for soybeans) and the meal is essentially a byproduct.”
It is most likely that the feed market drives soy’s presence in the oilseed market.
At 22:15. Absolute conspiracy theory nuttery. A truly vegan world would NOT be a benefit to the soy industry which depends on the inexorable growth of CAFO production for its own expansion. For example, the protein from all the meat and dairy produced in the US right now could be replaced by current levels of domestic soy consumption; instead it’s largely wasted being fed to CAFO raised animals (which is why the FAO find that we feed such animals about 2-3 times more human edible protein as we get back). A vegan world would not generate more soy.
At 1:20 The pie charts from the paper “Nutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from US agriculture” is NOT saying that a vegan food system requires three times more land for grains etc in total. It’s saying that for human FOOD, those are the relative proportions of sources. The graph does not include crops currently grown for industrial use, export use or animal feed, so it says nothing at all about the total arable land area needed in the current BAU. In fact, it quite clearly says that grains and soy that are currently used for feed are redirected to food: “human-edible feeds that were previously used by livestock are routed for human consumption”.
At 4:42. The speaker refers to the paper “Plant-based diets add to the wastewater phosphorus burden” and suggests that a vegan diet would lead to an increased production of fertiliser and hence there must be an increase in cropland. This is a complete misrepresentation of the paper which notes that:
“Livestock density is a major driver of this P inefficiency and pollution due to the extra land and fertiliser P required to produce animal feed and the difficulties of recycling livestock excreta evenly back to croplands (Leip et al 2015, Withers et al 2020). Increasing global demand for animal food products has increased the demand for mined P by 28% since 1961, and 90% of the environmental P footprint for an individual UK resident is due to animal product consumption (Metson et al 2012). As such, transitioning towards a plant-based diet seems beneficial for P sustainability by reducing global P fertilizer demand and lowering eutrophication rates by reducing individual P footprints (Macdonald et al 2012, Metson et al 2012, Thaler et al 2015).”
and
“Although reducing animal products in diets is an effective way for UK consumers to reduce their P, and other environmental footprints (e.g. Leach et al 2016, González-García et al 2018, Vanham et al 2018), these footprints are not the only metric that must be taken into account when planning for a more sustainable food system.”
At 5:30. The graph from the paper, “Essential Amino Acids: Master Regulators of Nutrition and Environmental Footprint” is also being used mischievously. In fact, the graph tells us that the land needed to produce any of the main food types is largest for beef and pork, while the smallest area is needed for most vegetable foods and especially for soybeans.
At 12:50. Making up stories about governments/vegans forcing people to be vegan is a nonsense. While some fanatics might indeed advocate for this, at the end of the day any progress towards a “vegan” world would depend entirely on the willingness of the people to be moved in that direction. No government wanting to remain in power would risk losing the support of the vast majority by enforcing dietary limitations. This is just more nutty conspiracy theorising.
I believe passionately in the idea that we should want to be as fair as we can to the rest of the animals with whom we share our world and the best way to do that is to be guided by vegan ethical principles. Yet while it seems that many, maybe even most, people often agree that animals should be treated well, most reject veganism. Why is this?
I think it is because veganism is deeply misunderstood by almost everyone, and worse, it has a terrible public image. Perhaps vegan advocacy and messaging has taken too much of an adversarial and even judgemental stance – if there is anything that will put people offside, it’s being told they are bad and they should do better.
In practice, veganism is a purely voluntary and aspirational set of ethical principles that guide us in what’s best to do when our choices affect other animals. No-one has to be vegan nor do they have to conform to any particular standard.
Of course many people do strive to completely eliminate animal products and use from their diets and lifestyle. They might identify as vegans and follow the definition of veganism to the letter as much as possible. The formal definition for veganism can be found on the UK Vegan Society’s website. But in the end, it’s up to you. We all get to make our own choices.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere on my blog that I think vegan advocacy needs a reformation and in particular that advocacy should focus on community engagement, inclusion and encouragement, rather than measuring success by the somewhat dubious metric of people “converted” to veganism. Perhaps we might see more interest from consumers if they can be shown practical ways to make a difference without feeling pressured to become something other than just themselves.
In this post, I want to propose a different way to think about the ethical philsophy that veganism represents in such a way as makes the principles accessible to anyone.
Upfront, I should point out that I do not regard veganism as merely a diet. If veganism really were just a super-strict, animal free diet, it would carry no compelling force at all. We could all just laugh at the idea and get on with things. No, there has to be something more than that – the diet can only be a consequence of whatever it is veganism stands for.
So, what does veganism stand for?
Quite simply,I believe that veganism is the idea that whenever we can, we should want to be fair to other animals and aim to prevent injustices to them from our actions. That’s it.
We could phrase this as: “Veganism recognises the inherent value and dignity of other species and aims to treat them fairly by our choices whenever we can.”
But what exactly does it mean to be “fair” to other animals? Well, I think most of us can say what fairness means. At its simplest, it means to regard the interests of others equally and try to be consistent in our actions when they affect others. For example, a pig has just as much interest in being free to roam and do pig things as people like to be free to do people stuff.
Thought of like this, anyone at all can embrace veganism. All that ever comes into question is how far they are willing to go. Because vegan ethics are relevant in all the ways we treat other animals then as long as someone is being genuine in their efforts to be fair to other animals in their choices, that is veganism in action. And funnily enough, I would even be willing to agree that a carnivore dieter can be guided by veganism in this way. Unlikely, but possible.
Why should anyone want to be fair to other animals? I believe it is because of our modern context. In the distant past, our hunter/gatherer ancestors did not need to be vegan. In fact, I’d suggest they were largely vegan in practice. But things changed about 10,000 years ago and today we do not share the same fundamentally fair relationship with other animals. So, the reason we should want to be fair is that we have an enormous influence over, and effect on, the rest of nature. Just as our ancient ancestors sought to live in some balance with the rest of the animals, I believe we really should want to today.
Just Us Too 