Animals eat other animals, so why can’t we?
A common fallacy I often hear is that “animals eat other animals”, using that as a justification for humans to eat animals. Or they’ll say “good luck making a lion go vegan” or “I bet you wouldn’t tell a bear not to eat an animal”. This sort of comment always confuses me, because they’re absolutely right, we would never try to make lions or bears (or other animals) go vegan. Why not? Well, that’s easy, because veganism is a moral philosophy, not a diet. We wouldn't expect lions or bears to go vegan for the same reason we wouldn't expect them to conform to other moral and ethical standards; they're not human. For example, we wouldn't expect lions and bears to adhere to human moral and ethical codes, such as abstaining from:
murder
rape
racism
misogyny
homophobia
transphobia
xenophobia
genocide
infanticide
etc.
And that's for this simple (and what I thought was obvious) reason - morals and ethics are constructs that relate to humans, not to other animals. Why would we expect animals to adhere to any human moral code of conduct, let alone veganism? For example, we don’t arrest lions and bears for killing other lions and bears. We don’t prosecute lions and bears for murder and rape, and then put them in prison. That's because lions and bears are not human, they are not part of our society, and they are not bound by our morals, ethics, or laws.
So why on earth would we expect them to follow a moral view such as veganism?
Then there’s the flawed logic of saying that it’s ok for us to do something just because an animal does it. It’s important to remember that even though we are biologically animals, we no longer live in the wild. We live in a civilized society with ethics and laws. Additionally, we have moral agency which sets us apart from other animals. Animals in the wild kill and rape each other within their own species, eat their babies, and eat their own feces (the last one not being immoral, but hopefully we can all agree it’s disgusting). If we base our morality on what other animals do, does that mean we should do these things as well? Most people would agree that murdering and raping other humans is wrong, and that eating babies is also wrong. So if we aren’t adopting those parts of animal behavior, why are we choosing to adopt the part about eating animals?
Another thing to remember is that many animals, such as lions, are obligate carnivores. That means biologically they are required to eat meat. Additionally, animals eat other animals out of necessity and for survival, whereas humans eat animals out of desire and want. It may have been true that at one point in human history (and maybe even today in remote parts of the world, and of course for those in survival situations) humans needed to eat animals for survival, but for the majority of human society nowadays that is no longer the case. Our grocery stores are filled with non-animal foods that provide the same or better nutrition, and often cost considerably less money. So if we don’t need to eat animals to survive or even thrive, is it moral to do so?
But Adam, it’s the “circle of life” right? It’s perfectly natural? Nothing about the way we raise and kill animals is natural nor does it resemble the circle of life that we see in nature. As Gary Yourofsky says, “Did you ever notice when an animal kills a human, no one uses the circle of life excuse anymore?” In the wild, an animal hunts down and kills another wild animal and eats it on the spot. But with humans (for the most part) we don’t hunt and eat animals in the wild, we factory farm and mass breed them. We breed 90 billion land animals into existence every year, confine them to cages or other small places where they stand in their feces, torture and mutilate them (castration, tail removal, teeth clipping, horns burned off, toes amputated, debeaked - all without any sort of anesthesia), pump them full of chemicals and antibiotics, forcefully impregnate them with a device that the industry calls the “rape rack”, then kill them in brutal ways such as gas chambers, a bolt to the head, electrocution, and slitting their throats. We then package their decomposing flesh to sit out on shelves, then take their rotting flesh home and cook it. This is nothing like what an animal in nature does, and there is nothing natural about this process. If we saw an animal in nature doing these things to another species, we would be absolutely horrified.
What we do to animals is not the circle of life, it is a literal hell on earth. Don’t believe me? Watch Dominion.
