Veganism: A way forward
View(s):If you have social media,
I am sure you have seen half the people you follow attacking the Yulin Dog Meat Festival in China.
This seems like an obvious thing to do: why on earth would anyone want to eat the flesh of an innocent animal? This is the reason you see people speaking out against animal testing, captivity and poaching. But do you ever wonder who the person behind the screen is and their potential hypocrisy?
I can assure you that a large proportion of the people you see doing this on social media will then go back to eating their bacon and eggs or their chicken curry as soon as they have finished reposting something for the hundredth time.
Why is it that people are so outraged when animals they consider to be beautiful such as elephants or that they consider to be pets like dogs face abuse, but they turn a blind eye to the hundreds of millions of farm animals murdered every day for their consumption? This is called speciesism.
Social media can be an amazing platform to advocate for or against an issue or educate people about something, but it also allows people to be completely and utterly fake.
When people see everyone posting the same Chinese Dog Festival post they immediately follow the trend but when people see educational posts about veganism or graphic images showing the atrocity of the meat and dairy industries, they suddenly accuse vegans of just being trendy or being too aggressive.
I find it ironic that people who contribute to the mass murder of animals call people who do not do this “aggressive”. If you do not want to see what happens in farms or are disgusted by the images you see, then you should not be consuming the products of this industry and supporting it.
I completely understand why people are so averse to the idea of veganism, because I used to be as well. I’ve always been against the meat industry, but I simply did not understand the problem with the rest of it until quite recently and I simply believed what everyone told me about vegans just trying to be trendy.
Then one night I accidently came across a video about veganism and stayed up the entire night watching video after video and reading article after article: by the time morning came, I was simply horrified. It is completely understandable that people are not vegan because people don’t understand it. However, once you are educated on it there is no excuse for you to be against veganism.
Veganism is not a diet like vegetarianism. It’s more of a lifestyle where you don’t contribute to the abuse of animals in any way.
This means that not only do you not consume food derived from animals, but you also don’t buy leather shoes
or bags or use products tested on animals.
There are, of course, many grey areas and it is down to each individual vegan to decide whether certain things are vegan or not. Another misconception about veganism is that it means you must be perfect in every walk of life. People have asked me why I advocate veganism, but I don’t eat healthy salads all the time or why I use air conditioning or fast fashion.
While it is true that veganism is healthier and better for the environment vegans are simply people who don’t contribute to animal abuse not insanely healthy environmentalists.
It is self-explanatory why the meat industry is deadly because obviously the forced captivity of animals in terrible conditions just for them to meet their inevitable death is immoral. But why should keeping cows in nice green fields to milk them be wrong? Unfortunately, this is not exactly how it works.
Cows obviously do not produce milk unless they have babies, so they are sexually assaulted and impregnated over and over and over again by farmers so that they are constantly producing milk and once they are no longer producing milk they are murdered. When the calf is born it is immediately taken away from its mother.
Males are murdered immediately, and female are kept in a pen until it is time for them to also become a dairy cow. The dairy industry is actually worse than the meat industry because animals raised for meat are only kept in bad conditions for a small amount of time before being murdered whereas in the dairy industry cows are tortured for years before eventually being murdered anyway.
The egg industry is unfortunately no better. Hens are genetically modified and impregnated to become so heavy that their legs break under them. When chicks are born, if they are female they also are used for eggs and killed when they no longer produce them but if they are male, they are thrown into a mass blender and macerated.
People have this conception that because animals are not as intelligent as us, they do not mind dying. Once you have stood outside a gas chamber and listened to pigs screaming for their lives as they are lowered to their deaths or even watched fish squirming to cling onto life as you pull them out of the water you can no longer say this.
Additionally, intelligence level does not equate to how much right to life one has (and in fact, pigs have the intelligence of a three-year-old child) and just because animals speak a different language to us does not mean they deserve to die (especially because they were here first, and this is actually their planet that we have destroyed).
People say they are not vegan because it is unhealthy but being vegan is actually healthier which is the reason many athletes have converted. Meat is seen as very healthy, but in fact it has so many negative health effects.
People also think that they need meat and dairy for calcium and protein, but this is entirely untrue. The animals people eat are herbivores, so they clearly get their protein from plants. This means we could just eat the protein-rich plants rather than the middleman.
The idea that you need milk for calcium is also completely untrue. In fact, it all started due to government advertisements for milk after there was a huge surplus of milk after World War Two. Humans can survive perfectly well on a healthy vegan balanced diet as well as vegan alternatives and vitamin supplements (which is actually what farmers feed to animals to make them so vitamin rich).
Going vegan does not disrupt the food chain because the meat and dairy industry is not part of the food chain since animals are genetically modified to be mass produced by farmers: if everyone went vegan there would not be a sudden surplus of animals.
It is also not a fair argument to say that animals eat other animals anyway because carnivores must eat animals to survive. We are omnivores in a civilized society who do not need to consume animals to live. And of course, the most common reason that people are not vegan is obviously that they like meat which is not fair because pleasure does not equate to morality.
The one argument that does stand is that vegan alternatives are more expensive and difficult to find particularly in developing countries. Additionally, it is difficult for younger people to be vegan because their parents are averse to it.
This is why we need to spread awareness and education because as more people become vegan it will be more commonly accepted and, as demand increases for vegan products, prices will decrease.
Session XIV of SLMUN will be held on the 22nd and 23rd of January 2022 at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (BMICH), Colombo, Sri Lanka. Registrations for delegates, admins and IPC delegates are now open until the 20th December 2021.
For further details, head on over to our website on www.slmun.org , or please contact us via:
Email – cda@slmun.org
/ pr@slmun.org
Telephone – +94 71 801 3722 / +94 71 444 9694
/ +94 76 898 9763
- Anna Shearer (News and
Media Team 2021)
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