Veganism, the crazy idea that we should leave animals alone. But is this really natural? After all, as human beings, we have been eating, wearing, and using animals for thousands of years. And, as the argument often goes, refraining from doing so, and breaking with the rituals of our ancestral past, is unnatural, and anything unnatural is just not good.
Well, as the intelligent species we claim to be, let’s think about this argument for a moment.
Haven’t we humans been doing a lot of things for thousands of years, like waging wars on each other? If the idea of breaking with tradition conjures emotions of uneasiness, and often outright rejection, simply because that tradition is deemed “natural”, shouldn’t things like slavery and state-sponsored genocide still be commonplace today? After all, our ancestors have been committing these acts for thousands of years, and refraining from doing so could easily be considered unnatural, right?
Eating animals
But the notion that eating animals is “natural” in modern civilization is quite ironic, especially when we consider that animal agriculture, that is, the meat, dairy, and egg industry, is the leading cause of tropical deforestation on the planet. Why? Well, for one, approximately 70 billion land animals are bred into existence and killed every single year (for comparison, there are close to 8 billion humans on Earth today).
During the few years these animals are alive, they require lots of land for food. In fact, today’s livestock systems occupy approximately 45% of the Earth’s ice-free, habitable land and are the leading drivers of species extinction while also contributing between 14.5% to 18% of all human induced global greenhouse emissions, more than the entire global transportation industry.
The meat, egg and dairy industries also consume 33% of the Earth’s freshwater reserves (the average meat hamburger requires 460 gallons of freshwater). That’s simply because all those crops to feed all those animals need to be irrigated on a regular basis. Some people like to blame the production of soy for the voracious destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but the reason so much soy is being harvested is because 70–75% of it is used to feed animals destined for the slaughterhouse.
How natural is that?
“Natural” food?
Here are a few more not so fun facts. Most livestock animals throughout the world today are given veterinary drugs, including antibiotics, growth hormones, and antiparasitic drugs. In many countries, including the US, 80% of medically important antibiotics are used for farmed animals to promote growth or fight disease, which is often rampant in the animal agriculture industry, particularly in factory farms (in the US, 99% of farmed animals are in factory farms).
In the egg industry, egg-laying hens are genetically modified to lay up to 30 times as many eggs as their wild ancestors. This frequently causes their bones to break, since the calcium in their bodies is diverted for the formation of eggshells. Since male chicks are of no economic value, they are often dumped into a massive grinder and ground up alive, shortly after birth. Others are either gassed or thrown into garbage bags, where they suffocate or die from dehydration.
Some people argue that veganism is “unnatural” because vegans need to supplement vitamin B12, which is also found in animal products, but the main reason meat contains this vitamin today is because most B12 supplements are administered to factory-farmed animals, where most of the modern world’s meat supply comes from.
The truth is there is nothing “natural” about eating meat today. And even with labels that claim the meat is “organic” or “free-range”, the animals are frequently subject to the same horrors of those raised in factory farms, as numerous investigations have shown.
Many of these “free-range” animals also die from sickness or thirst while being transported to the slaughterhouse, the final destination of all of them, no matter how «free» they supposedly were in life. For those that do not die during transport, the process of stunning them -to prevent them from suffering before the coup de grâce- is not always efficient, and many are still alive, and terrified (quite possibly by the smell of blood from other cows) before their own throats are slit and their bodies dropped into scalding water (inefficiencies in the stun and kill process may result in animals being boiled alive, regardless of whether they were “free-range” or not).
The truth is, the industrial-scale killing of animals, where efficiency is everything and profit is King, makes any form of animal welfare, however short-lived, very difficult, and virtually impossible.
Let’s get natural
Our ancestors would feel deeply insulted if they saw us today, living inside climate-controlled homes with running water and electricity, where murder is illegal, bathing with soap and shampoo is encouraged, and not so natural toothpaste is used to keep our teeth clean and our breaths smelling fresh.
In all seriousness, the natural argument can harbor some validity when something considered unnatural also happens to be unhealthy and/or harmful to the air we breathe and the water we drink. Whole plant foods that are more natural than processed foods tend to be better for our health by default, for example, while chemicals, pesticides and air pollution are unnatural and also terrible for our health.
But poison ivy plants are natural, and so is cactus and so is feces, and it is not recommendable to roll around in either of these, no matter how natural they are. Modern medicine is unnatural, but for many of us, life expectancies would be much lower, and life in general would be more miserable for many people, without it.
If we assume everything natural is good and everything unnatural is bad, solely for symbolic reasons, then we pave the way to a world without reason, where we can find myriad ways to justify some of the worst atrocities imaginable.
As the intelligent, civilized, and highly evolved species we proclaim ourselves to be, we should be striving to become a better version of ourselves instead of ceaselessly appealing to nature to justify anything we are capable of doing, no matter how perverse. It’s about time we forget about what we deem natural and embrace reality, logic, and most importantly, compassion in this ever-changing world.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to check out my most recent fiction novel, The Shadow in the Mirror, and find out what’s actually going on with Harold Hopkins.
Harold’s only wish is to lead a normal life. Yet for reasons he can’t comprehend, he is shunned by all living things. No matter how hard he tries, he is unable to garner attention from the woman he loves, nor can he foster genuine friendships or find a decent job. Meanwhile, since childhood he has been haunted by his own reflection in the mirror, which frequently acts as a window to another world. The person on the other side is everything Harold wishes he could be, like a clone of himself leading the fruitful life he was destined to lead. He finally sets off in search of answers, where he learns about the unearthly events that took place when he was born, and discovers the tantalizing truth about his own existence…
Available on Amazon both in paperback and Kindle here.
