How do you know if someone’s a vegan? Answer: don’t worry, they’ll tell you! Joking aside, I do feel that vegans and even vegetarians get more flack than they should in contemporary society. At least in the West. Unlike other parts of the world, such as India, we don’t exactly have a long tradition of vegetarianism, and it shows, particularly with how we use vegetables in our cooking. But I digress. My point is not to expound my half-baked theory on why modern vegetarian foods (e.g., Beyond Meat) taste so bad, but to give credit where it is due: I say again, vegans have a point!

After all, why do we assume that it is morally acceptable to eat meat? Almost immediately, I imagine those who say that we’ve always done it and it’s natural, so it must be okay. And were I to buy into a philosophy of “natural=morally permissible”, then perhaps I would agree. However, unlike many carnivorous animals that eat meat because they have to (and presumably because of a strong instinct), we omnivorous human beings seem to have a choice. There is the potentiality (barring certain health conditions, etc.) that one could forgo meat in their diet and they could live a healthy life! Many people do, after all. So, in the abstract, with that choice in front of us, why do we assume that eating meat, or even using animal products, is acceptable?

I must confess to being a hypocrite here. I’m not sure I have the willpower to give up meat completely. Nevertheless, my conscience does tell me that not eating meat is almost certainly the more moral thing to do.

For one example, consider this: imagine if a race of beings, far more advanced and intelligent than ourselves—hyper-rational creatures, let’s say, as we often suppose ourselves to be when compared with our animalistic kin—were to come to earth and farm humans for consumption. They eat us, and in their mind, it’s perfectly acceptable. They might say things like, “We kill them humanely” (ironic), “They don’t really feel pain or fear like we do, so it’s okay,” or even “It’s the natural order of things”. You see, if we say these things about other creatures that we count as “lower” than ourselves on a “natural hierarchy”, then why would it be any less valid for creatures “higher” than us to argue the same thing?

I expect that will strike some readers as maybe being ridiculous and undignified, but why? Why do we have dignity and not other creatures? In fact, let’s take this example even further: what if those hyper-rational feeders just fed on human corpses instead of killing live humans? What if they made shoes and bags and clothing out of human skin, like we do out of the various leathers? Is that not disturbing? It should be. And I think, when it comes down to it, we find our practices towards animals disturbing as well, if only on the unconscious level.

How many meat eaters would find themselves capable of killing the creature they eat? I expect (almost certainly) that it would be fewer than the number of people who eat meat. Why do we market shoes and bags as “leather” rather than calling it by what it is: a product made of treated cow-skin? When we actually consider the origins of some of these things, they begin to appear far more disturbing—more primal, naturally horrid—than the alienated civilisation in which we produce and purchase it. All of which is to say, we distance ourselves from the reality of these practices because there is almost certainly something that we find uncomfortable about the whole thing. It need not be some crusade for animal rights either: maybe all that is challenged is our idea of ourselves as somehow enlightened creatures, above the predatory hierarchy that we might love to imagine we’d left in the distant past. I doubt it. Perhaps we are as monstrous as the monsters we fear in the wild, we’re as predatory as the best of them, and we’re as wild as our circumstances compel us to be.

So, yes, I think vegans have a point. Not that I’m arguing that this is some moral litmus test or anything. It is merely something I’ve observed as I’ve critiqued my attitude towards meat-eating with sincerity. This has only been food for thought, which has, thankfully, not been the death of anything.