Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle From All-Creatures.org



"Vegans Harm Animals, Too!"

From Lee Hall, Vegan Place The Art of Animal Liberation
August 2023

Yes, we know. Mice and other small animals lose their spaces to make way for our homes. Our crops use land that might have been habitat. Even the gentlest gardener dispaces a few snails or worms. Vegans try to challenge the idea of humanity as Commander-in-Chief over Earth’s living beings. We’d like to transcend all those thousands of years of playing the master role. We’ll never be perfect but that’s not the point.

lovely Snail
Photo source: krzysztofniewolny, via Pixabay

Yes, we know. Mice and other small animals lose their spaces to make way for our homes. Our crops use land that might have been habitat. Even the gentlest gardener dispaces a few snails or worms.

Plus, most vegans I know use cars. Roads mean deforestation and fragmentation. Toads, deer, and many others can’t get from their birthplaces to their lifetime habitats. This is changing the course of evolution as well as displacing living communities. And what about the oil runoff?

And so on.

Maybe we’ll make changes as our discomfort with this reality grows. Yet even bike components and book glues are not always vegan; the list is long.

We’re serious about opting out of deliberate exploitation, in any case. And we needn’t accept the domestication of wolves, wildcats, ferrets, fish, and rabbits or the breeding and breaking of horses. Veganism means we strive as diligently as possible to avoid harming and manipulating conscious life, and we do the best we can to ensure other living beings are enabled to thrive in their ways.

We never said it was easy. (And if we did, maybe we need to rethink that.)

We are making a difference in the world. A vegan spares more animals a year than most any sanctuary in the world can take in! If the sanctuary is doing something real by helping animals in a hands-on way, then the vegan is also accomplishing something real—and working at the very roots of the troubles that force animals to need rescue.

All the while, we’re human. Yes, we vegans harm animals too. It’s part of the structure humans have built for more than ten thousand years, a structure which we inherited.

I ask myself: In what ways can I tread more lightly on Earth, buy less, waste less, use less, keep it local and get more into nature’s scheme of things? Gotta list the changes will I make. Gotta keep adding to the list.

Meanwhile, a note to those who seem to think we should throw up our hands because perfection isn’t achievable. Please understand that vegans try to challenge the idea of humanity as Commander-in-Chief over Earth’s living beings. We’d like to transcend all those thousands of years of playing the master role. We’ll never be perfect but that’s not the point.

Could a transformed human identity release us, and every other community still evolving on Earth, from a spiral of ever-worsening emergencies? That’s the key question for us today. The time we live in cries out for a paradigm shift. I’d love to find out what veganism can do.

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