Your Positions

• We should all be vegetarian. Animals should never be killed or mistreated, but it is OK to use them for milk and eggs, because it can done without harming them. (Start over)

• Look, it’s already hard enough already not to eat meat, you are basically demanding perfection if we have to cut out every little thing. Plus, the vast majority of people still eat meat, so we should be focusing on that before worrying about relatively minor things like dairy or eggs. (Go back)

Things to Consider

We’re not asking perfection of you, we’re asking you meet a minimum standard of decency. Dairy and eggs are not “minor” to the animals who are exploited for them. Many would argue egg-laying hens and dairy cows actually have it worse that animals raised for slaughter, because not only are they slaughtered, but they are exploited for their reproductive systems along the way.

This is how you sound to a vegan:

“Look, it’s already hard enough already not to rape, you are basically demanding perfection if we have to cut out every little thing and not sexually harass people either. Plus, a huge number of people still rape, so we should be focusing on that before worrying about relatively minor things like sexual harassment.”

By all means, use those plastic straws. Go on unnecessary road trips burning fossil fuels. Take really long showers and waste that precious fresh water! I mean, you are kind of a huge dick if you do these things in excess just to pown the libs. But these are the kinds of problems that can be solved by instituting some kind tax like cap-and-trade to push people through financial incentives to use fewer resources and pollute less. You can be an environmentalist if you waste energy sometimes. But you can’t say you care about feminism if you sexually harass people sometimes, and you can’t say you care about mistreatment of animals if you eat eggs and dairy sometimes. If you really cared, you would never do these things.

It sucks that there are so many messages out there about how to live your life. What diet to follow. What clothes to buy. What exercises to do. It can get tiring to have to sift through all of this, and many people approach the message of veganism as they would approach a message about the health benefits of a new type of Kale smoothie or an MLM marketing scheme. But what you should understand is that vegans are not trying to get people to go vegan out of some kind of self-interest (at least the real vegans, and not the corporations trying to profit off of it as if it were just another trend). They also aren’t trying to do it because they think their lifestyle will make you happier or healthier or whatever. They are doing it to protect others who have no ability to defend themselves against the horrible things humans are capable of.

So many people see images of brutal factory farms, and think, “This is horrible. This should never happen, and fuck the people supporting this, and arrest the people perpetrating it”. But they often don’t realize it is they themselves who are responsible for what happens in those videos. They are misled by propaganda put out by the animal agriculture industry into thinking that these are the animals that go into other people’s food, not their own. It’s hard to overstate how powerful an image of a cow or a chicken overlaid a lush green field is on the subconscious of an individual consumer. Your brain associates these images with the food you are eating, and it is a complete and utter lie. We’re in a similar situation to when domestic violence PSAs first started coming out. So many domestic abusers looked at these graphic images of a tough man beating their defenseless wife, not realizing that this PSA was about them. Not realizing that the scary drunk husband slurring his words was them. Because in their own mind, they didn’t identify with that tough-looking man: they got in a disagreement and things got heated, but they didn’t really mean it, and they weren’t really trying to hurt her. There’s a similar situation again with drunk driving. People see these images of someone completely drunk and not staying inside the lines and think, “Geez, I can’t believe people drive so dangerously when they are that wasted”, while themselves driving over the limit because they “aren’t that drunk” or “know how to drive safely when drunk”. So take a moment to think about it. It’s not always obvious that you are the one responsible.