11 Things Nobody Cares About Until They Learn You’re Vegan
Suddenly Everyone Becomes An Advocate For Plants’ Rights and Fieldmice…
Have you ever noticed how, whenever the issue of veganism comes up in conversation, there’ll always be someone who becomes a passionate advocate for plants’ rights? Or the rights of mice in wheatfields?
If you’ve been a vegan for more than about 5 minutes, you already know what I’m talking about. That moment when someone offers you a slice of cake and you casually say, “No, thank you.”
“Oh, go on! Why not?”
“I’m vegan.”
Well, now the floodgates are open! Sometimes, you might just get the bog-standard, lazy reply of, “Oh, I’d love to go vegan, too, but I adore bacon too much!”
“You mean this chocolate cake has bacon in it?!”
…and they’re off. I previously wrote about some of the ridiculous excuses people come up with in 10 Reasons NOT To Go Vegan.
But what can be even more interesting to watch is how people suddenly develop a passionate concern for fringe issues you thought they knew nothing about and cared about even less.
I’m talking about fast-food junkies who develop a sudden overwhelming interest in nutrition, or racist bigots who are suddenly filled with concern about the low pay of immigrant crop-pickers. All in an effort to deflect attention away from their own guilt and make you look like the asshole.
To explain what I’m talking about, here are 11 of the most common concerns that nobody cares about until they learn you’re vegan:
Fieldmice
Few people really like mice. To the average man or woman in the street they’re vermin that carry disease and damage crops or buildings. Yet those same people who will happily put down poison or set glue traps, where mice die long, slow, agonising deaths, will suddenly start preaching to you about all the mice that are supposedly killed in fields during harvesting of crops to feed your fat, greedy, vegan face.
The irony of their own hypocrisy doesn’t occur to them, since they are too busy trying to prove yours. Nor do they consider that, as a vegan, you almost certainly care more about the welfare of fieldmice than they ever will and have probably pondered and researched this subject a whole lot more than they have.
So they’ve probably never read any of the studies on crop deaths — studies such as Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture — published in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics in 2018, which concluded that numbers of crop deaths have been grossly overestimated and that, in fact, mice tend to run away when a huge, noisy combine harvester approaches (hardly surprising, really).
In fact, while mouse populations in fields have been observed to have decreased immediately after harvesting, there is a commensurate increase in the mouse population in the field borders. In other words, they just get out of the way!
What most of the anti-vegan mouse-rights advocates also fail to consider is that 80% or more of crops such as soya, for example, are fed to cattle. The huge amount of energy lost in the biological process of turning beans into meat means that it takes up to ten times less land to produce vegan food than it does to produce meat.
Hence, even if you do care more about mice than about cows, you should still be vegan to limit and reduce crop deaths.
Plants’ Rights
“Plants have feelings, too” is one you’ve almost certainly heard before. Of course, plants don't have a central nervous system. They don't have pain receptors, nerves or a brain and so cannot feel pain in the same way as animals such as pigs, sheep, cows, fish, chickens or humans do.
The 'plants have feelings' brigade are generally basing their dubious opinions on either some sci-fi fiction story they once watched on the telly, or some widely referenced research conducted by the tobacco industry on tobacco plants. This research did indeed find that certain plants emit ultra-sonic sounds when stressed — when they got too dry, for example, or when the stems were cut.
What remains a mystery is why anyone would equate emitting a noise with sentiency. Your cooker emits a noise when it heats up and cools down. Paper emits tiny, often imperceptible noises when it dries out and right now, as I’m typing this, my washing machine is disturbing me with its spin cycle.
None of these indicate sentience, so why would we assume that it does so in plants. It’s a bit like in days of old when people assumed that thunder was the gods being angry. Nowadays, we know better and it’s generally understood that to have feelings you first have to have a brain and central nervous system.
But even if plants did have feelings, this would still be a compelling reason to be vegan. As mentioned above under the heading ‘Fieldmice’ feeding crops to animals instead of eating them directly is highly inefficient and it takes several times more land to produce a kilo of beef, for example, than it does to produce a kilo of soya.
The takeaway: if you care about animal rights, go vegan. If you care about plant rights, go vegan.
Nutrition
Have you ever noticed how the people most likely to bring up concerns about not getting enough nutrition from a vegan diet are usually the ones currently eating the crappiest diets?
Anyone who’s actually concerned about optimising their nutrition for real has generally read up extensively on the subject and so knows perfectly well that a well-balanced, whole-food, plant-based diet can easily provide all the nutrients a body needs for every stage of life.
They would probably know that a lot of world-class athletes credit their outstanding performance to their plant-based diets (see Why Are So Many Top Athletes Vegan?)
They will also be aware that some of the top killer diseases in the Western world — heart disease, cancer, diabetes — are in large part linked to a diet high in meat, dairy, eggs and junk food which, ironically, is almost certainly what this wannabe nutrition advisor is currently eating.
Just smile and offer them a Rennie.
Cultural Imperialism
“What about Eskimos? You can’t expect them to be vegan,” is an excuse I addressed in Forcing Veganism on Indigenous People. According to Wikipedia, Eskimo is an exonym used to refer to two closely related Indigenous peoples: the Inuit (including the Alaskan Iñupiat, the Greenlandic Inuit, and the Canadian Inuit) and the Yupik (or Yuit) of eastern Siberia and Alaska.
It’s a term that many Inuit, Yupik and Aleut (of whom the term is also occasionally and erroneously used) find deeply offensive and derogatory, being a racist term used by colonisers. But most people who use this excuse for their own meat-eating habits don’t know that because, of course, they aren’t really that interested in the rights or culture of indigenous peoples until they hear you’re vegan.
Racism aside, it’s also a pretty stupid argument. Yes, if you were stuck in the middle of the Arctic for months or years on end with limited modern resources and no supermarkets, takeaways or Deliveroo service, you might well feel the need to slaughter the occasional walrus or caribou to ensure your own survival or that of your family. But come on, Dude, you’re sitting in Starbucks eating chocolate cake!
Our ancestors’ diet
“Without a diet of meat, our ancestors could never have colonised every corner of the globe or evolved to what we are today.” This is a similar argument to the one above, relying on the fact that, as early humanoids spread out into more hostile territories, reliance on a certain amount of flesh in their diets often meant the difference between survival and starvation.
A lot of archaeological and anthropological research suggests that typical hunter-gatherer societies probably ate far less meat than we have previously been led to believe. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that the ability to digest animal products helped fuel our evolution as a species. And how far we’ve come! The invention of tools, the iron age, scientific enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the digital revolution… the goddamn space age!
Such huge leaps in our evolution are surely to be celebrated. So why the f*** would you want to live like a caveman? Nothing else you do is even vaguely reminiscent of their lifestyle. Do you wipe your ass on leaves from the garden? No? Because with the invention and mass production of toilet tissue, you no longer have to. You no longer have to run down and kill small animals to survive, either — you’ve got abundant, cruety-free, vegan food readily available in the form of pastas, pizzas, salads, veggie burgers, grains, pulses, mock duck, tofu, curries, soups, stews and This Isn’t Bacon™
It’s time to take the next step in your evolution — it’s time to go vegan.
Desert Islands
“What would you do if you were stranded on a desert island with just you and a pig?” This preposterous question gets asked of vegans with surprising regularity.
There’s never a backstory — never a feasible or convincing reason why you would end up on a deserted island with just a pig for company, yet non-vegans faced with a choice between addressing their own cognitive dissonance or trying to put their vegan acquaintance on the back foot, seem to be obsessed with this one.
It’s always struck me that their time would be better spent planning for more likely contingencies such as being mugged, their house catching fire or the breakdown of society due to climate change but, hey, we’ve all got our own particular fears and if yours is one day being on a sinking ship full of pigs, with nothing but a life jacket and a butcher’s knife, who am I to argue?
Factory farms
Many people will argue that, while they agree with you in principle that animals should not be exploited or abused, we should be targeting factory farms, the very worst sector of the animal agriculture industry.
They argue that many small-scale farmers treat their animals ‘with love and respect’ (although it’s hard to see how forcefully impregnating someone, murdering their babies and subjecting them to a short, miserable life of exploitation could be deemed ‘loving’ or ‘respectful’).
They argue that ‘responsible’ hunters shoot only enough victims to feed themselves and their families, and that they make sure the animals are killed ‘instantly and painlessly’.
They even argue that campaigning against all exploitation is distracting people from the real villains — the factory farms. Yet invariably, when asked which small scale local farmers or ‘ethical’ hunters they buy their own meat from, it turns out they get it from Sainsburys, Walmart or McDonalds like everyone else.
And when asked how you can join their campaign against factory farming they suddenly get a mysterious text message and have to leave…
Farmers’ livelihoods
If you ask me, livestock farmers are a self-important, entitled, over-valued bunch of jerks at best. Many of them would have long since gone out of business without the substantial government subsidies and handouts they’re always getting, but it never seems to be enough for them.
It seems that whenever they don’t get the increased financial support they’re always demanding, rather than do what any other reasonable and sensible business-owner would do — either increase their value, improve efficiency or change to another business — they’d rather blockade major highways or start randomly spraying slurry over everything.
The only other contact most ordinary people have with livestock farmers is when they’re chasing hikers off ‘their’ land or shooting people’s dogs. Unsurprisingly, given these overwhelmingly negative contacts with the general public, they tend to be thought of in mostly negative terms, when they are thought of at all.
Yet mention that you don’t eat meat or dairy and suddenly everyone’s concerned about some imagined social responsibility to ‘support our honest, hardworking farmers’. Well, fear not, because it may come as a surprise, but arable agriculture requires farmers, too. You can support farmers without having to support the animal abusing, climate-changing, dog-shooting, slurry-spraying ones — just go vegan :)
Underpaid workers
Like concern for ‘underpaid’ or ‘struggling’ livestock farmers, concern for underpaid and often exploited immigrant workers is something that only ever seems to bubble up to the forefront of most people’s otherwise-occupied minds when they’re looking for an excuse NOT to go vegan.
The rest of the time, they’re probably complaining about those very same immigrant workers driving down wages or stealing all ‘our’ jobs. You can tell they’re xenophobes in disguise because, in stark contrast to their arguments about supporting ‘poor’ livestock farmers by buying their produce, they argue that the way to support hardworking immigrant labourers picking our fruit and veg is to NOT buy their produce. Go figure.
If they really wanted to walk their talk they’d do well to look at the issue of slaughterhouse workers, who are not only largely underpaid immigrant workers, too, but are some of the most exploited (and traumatised) workers in any industry in modern-day Western society.
Or maybe it’s just yet another ill-thought-out, spur of the moment, half-assed argument against veganism that just doesn’t stand up to reason.
Avocado Production
I’m as opposed to cash crops as the next person, which is one of the reasons I prefer to buy chocolate made from ethically-sourced cocoa beans where possible, fair-trade cotton or locally-grown soya beans. I don’t use tobacco, I rarely drink tea and I avoid palm oil like the plague.
But I do eat the occasional avocado. They’re packed full of amazing nutrients and have some fantastic health benefits which benefit not just vegans but anyone. In fact, it’s estimated that non-vegans are responsible for around 95% of avocado sales, so why avocados should be used as an excuse to avoid going vegan is puzzling. It’s not like they’re compulsory. You can always choose not to eat avocados and still be vegan.
Then again, if these people criticising avocado production were genuinely concerned about the loss of habitat, loss of biodiversity, rainforest depletion, drought, and the destruction of traditional subsistence farming communities caused by cash crops, they probably wouldn’t be eating beef, which is one of the biggest causes of all those problems.
Lions
Ah, yes. Lions. The perennial silly excuse.
“But lions eat other animals.”
This excuse is so ridiculous and absurd that I almost never tire of hearing it. However, since I’ve addressed it here previously, I’ll simply refer you to my previous article on this subject, below:
