Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion Article from All-Creatures.org

Without Consent: A Vegan-Theological Argument Against Animal Ownership

From Allison J. Van Tilborg, Animal Rights Watch / Medium
May 2023

Regardless of whether animals are treated as ‘pets’ or industrial commodities, they lack freedom, which posits them as non-human slaves. This contradicts the vegan value of freedom by removing their agency and using force to bend animal behavior to our human needs, without consideration of what the animal really wants.... In this article, I will frame veganism as a religious practice that disallows adherents from purchasing animals, weaving in stories of my journey through veganism. Then I will go further to elaborate on the vegan values of freedom and non-harm.

Photo by Chewy on Unsplash

It is my theological conviction that animal ownership is incompatible with veganism. The problem begins with the very act of owning another sentient being and ends with the inevitable decision to end the life of said sentient being. This applies not only to pets but any animal one may own: for food, for milk, for eggs, for riding, for fun.

The concept of the ownership of another living being affirms the institution of slavery, which has fallen out of favor in the human realm but persists in the animal one. Owners are practically free to do what they wish with their animals without legal repercussions. Impregnate them. Take away their young. Give them surgery. Molest them. Put them under house arrest, under the claim of ‘giving them a good life.’ Kill them, even.

Every animal owner, regardless of whether they view their animal as a pet or an industrial commodity, has the final say on not only life and death, but range of movement, eating patterns, and what we deem ‘veterinary care.’ This is fundamentally at odds with the vegan ethics of freedom and non-harm.

To be clear, this paper is intended for a vegan audience. If you eat meat, owning an animal isn’t really incompatible with other lifestyle choices. This paper is written in a very direct way, not to be inflammatory, but to be very clear in my arguments. This is written from a vegan perspective, specifically to pose questions to a vegan audience. With the exception of a few pieces (online and print), I feel this topic has not been explored deeply.

In this article, I will frame veganism as a religious practice that disallows adherents from purchasing animals, weaving in stories of my journey through veganism. Then I will go further to elaborate on the vegan values of freedom and non-harm.

In doing so, I will demonstrate the parallels between animal ownership and slavery, which is at odds with the vegan value of freedom. I will also challenge the assumption that all animal life, including human life, is inherently valuable, by exploring the vegan value of non-harm. I will draw a relationship between what we consider pet ownership and animal agriculture ownership.

IS VEGANISM A RELIGION?

Religion is difficult to define. It is often constructed as a mix of beliefs and actions. The practice of veganism incorporates both. Meriam-Webster defines a vegan as a “strict vegetarian who consumes no food (such as meat, eggs, or dairy products) that comes from animals.”

But the practice of veganism is also an ethical philosophy that speaks to issues of animal liberation (see Peter Singer), labor issues, environmentalism, and even healthy living.

I began my journey to veganism as a high school junior. The year was 2016, and non-dairy products were beginning to enter the mainstream. On the way to picking up my younger brother at school, I stopped by a grocery to grab a drink. In disbelief, I saw non-dairy chocolate milk on the shelf of the dairy section in Target.

As a Bible-thumping conservative, I scoffed and found offense to the display. Yet, by some strange pull, I ended up taking the product off the shelf and drinking it on my drive. Questions began to dance in my head.

Why is there a demand for this product? If dairy was meant for humans, why are so many folks (like me) lactose intolerant? What was the original diet of Adam and Eve, and why is mine so different?

Immediately, I threw myself into the theological study of diet (a discipline I’ve not left since). I was introduced to the concept of The Genesis Diet by Gordon T Tessler, which was essentially a Christian primer to veganism. I, at first, decided to keep kosher (at 16 years old), then I cut out dairy, then I became a flexitarian (consuming meat only three meals a week), then I went full vegetarian, and finally, through the COVID pandemic I took the leap into veganism.

Veganism began, to me, as a theological exploration. From theology, it morphed into activism, which showed me that veganism is much bigger than just food consumption. Veganism, rather, is about rejecting the system of oppressive structures that harm animals (including those we consider pets) to the benefit of humans.

Ethical questions stirred in me each time a pet was put down. The first pet I ever had put down was a puppy. A few days after taking him home, we discovered he had a misshapen heart, and we were advised to euthanize him immediately. He was practically a baby and it was painful to be put in that situation (outside our control). Nearly a decade later, another childhood pet was put down after becoming fairly ill (cancer, liver failure). He was clearly suffering, and it again, was painful to be put in this position. And finally, just one year later, we put down another dog at the onset of kidney failure (but before he was ‘suffering’ like my first pet was). This loss is still fresh.

As I deepened my practice of veganism, I could not help but ask: is this right? Is there any way to avoid the fate of choosing when to take the life of your best friend?

A traditional fundamental vegan belief is that animals do not deserve to die because of humanity’s insatiable stomach, especially when (most) homo sapiens can live on plants alone.
In this article, I will expand the argument to move beyond just one’s stomach, but also to one’s heart. To harm animals, especially sentient ones, is seen widely as cruelty. Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher, is famous for posing the fundamental posture of animal liberation literature: “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?”

There is no ‘humane’ way to murder a being (for food or otherwise) who fears death–whether they are healthy or sick. Indeed, a throughline of veganism is the desire to prevent needless suffering for those with the capacity to experience it.

Many individuals, including non-vegans, can theoretically understand this set of beliefs. But what makes veganism a religious practice is the combination of these beliefs with a strict lifestyle that omits the purchase and consumption of animal products (in contrast with vegetarianism, which just omits meat itself, making animal ownership fully compatible with vegetarianism).

In doing this, veganism impacts personal philosophy, financial decisions, and, obviously, meals (including festivities). Following this strict set of practices, on the one hand, unites vegans together under one cause, but on the other hand, alienates them from broader society.

In 2018, Gallup reported that 3% of the United States population adhered to a vegan lifestyle. That is almost as much as America’s Jewish (2%) and Muslim (1%) populations combined! This community-building, action-based ethical philosophy of veganism puts itself on the same stage as a global religion as other faiths.

ANIMAL OWNERSHIP AS SLAVERY

In 1975, Ethicist Peter Singer published a book titled Animal Liberation. This book was one of the first philosophical works to explore the concept of veganism in an academic way. The work rejected both the animal testing and factory farming industries in favor of a concept of ‘animal liberation’ which would mean the freedom of animals from the direct suffering of humans. But freedom from what?

To own something means to see it as a possession. Women, for time immemorial, have been seen, alongside animals, as property. Like cows, women have been raped, impregnated, had their ‘unproductive’ young taken from them, and have had violence afflicted upon them to the point of death. Being owned means having no agency. Being owned, put simply, means consent is a non-issue to those who own you.

With human-to-human ownership, at the very least, individuals can protest. They can overthrow governments or set factories aflame. They can run for office or express their concerns in the press. Animals, however, are voiceless. Like toddlers, although they cannot verbally consent, this does not mean that they do not experience a capacity to suffer.

In the animal agriculture industry, the ethical dubiousness is salient. Animals do not want to die, yet we kill them to satisfy our stomachs. But animals are owned in more contexts than just industrial factory farming. Humans also own animals through pet ownership, which allows overseers not only to determine when an animal lives or dies (in the U.K., 90% of pet deaths are by euthanization), but also the confines in which they are allowed to walk (for example, not past the front door), whether are genitally mutilated (colloquially known as ‘fixing’ them), and whether or not they must bear children (breeding).

Even the most lavishly treated animals are put in circumstances where they are put fully at the mercy of their owners. One misstep (like biting a guest) and they could be forcibly euthanized by their own doctors or the government.

Regardless of whether animals are treated as ‘pets’ or industrial commodities, they lack freedom, which posits them as non-human slaves. This lifestyle contradicts the vegan value of freedom by removing their agency and using force to bend animal behavior to our human needs, without consideration of what the animal really wants.

Like a drunk woman at a party, pigs, cows, dogs, and chickens are unable to speak and thus unable to consent. Do we take their silence as an excuse to do with them as we will?

LIFE AS INHERENTLY VALUABLE?

Female animals particularly experience a painful reality. In 1990, theologian Carol J Adams wrote The Sexual Politics of Meat, which explored the intersection of animal rights and feminist philosophy. In her work, she observes a double exploitation of female animals.

Female animals are not only valued for their ‘meat’ (a once-and-done commodity) but their sexual organs and reproductive function (milk, eggs, children). They are expected to reproduce and reproduce until they are “spent goods,” at which point they are also killed, after years of “service.”

Vegans attempt to break the cycle of animal exploitation by abstaining from the economy of animal product production. They believe that, in some sense, by saying ‘no’ to ordering a cheeseburger or chocolate ice cream, they are ‘saving’ a cow.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that saying ‘no’ to animal products does not mean, in the immediate sense, that an animal is saved. Through veganism, very few animals are saved. They are just unborn. Veganism, when done effectively, lowers the demand for animal products in the market, which causes fewer animals to be ‘produced’, and, thus, less suffering inflicted.

In this vein, vegans do not believe that all animal life is inherently valuable–to be protected at all costs. Rather, the best good a vegan can do (under current circumstances) is to prevent animals from coming into the world to save them from bloodthirsty humans.

Breeding animals can often experience similar fates to those of female cows. They are valued for their reproductive abilities, without, again, the role of consent. Breeding animals, like dogs or cats, are expected to be forcibly impregnated (also known as rape) and deliver children until they die. As a cherry on top, most (if not all) of their children are destined to be taken from them and denied their care after just a few weeks.

The industrial pet industry can only exist under these conditions. Mothering animals are seen, frankly, as sex slaves, and children are raised in perpetual servitude. No matter how well humans ‘treat’ these animals does not change the reality of the power dynamic. Humans call the shots. We determine in what conditions you live, and when and how you die.

No location brings the detrimental effects of the breeding industry alive the way that animal ‘pounds’ do. Prison cells containing thousands of dogs, many of which are deemed ‘mixed’ (carrying racial overtones), are euthanized daily because they do not behave or look the way humans want them to. An aesthetic ‘issue’ as trivial as heterochromia (different colored eyes) is grounds for death.

Like the factory farming industry, the breeding industry must be dismantled in a vegan framework. The goal then would not be to ‘save’ as many animals as possible (this would be impossible), but to prevent them from coming into existence in the first place. Ending animal breeding for the sake of pet ownership is the only way we can prevent pets from the harm and suffering we inflict upon them.

CONCLUSION

The fundamental issue of vegan ownership of animals is one of agency. There is no freedom without consent, and animals, by circumstance, are unable to consent. Humans have misconstrued their might with right–their ability to overpower (“take care of”) other animals, with an endorsement to do so.

Just as the characterization of women as property has fallen out of fashion, and the enslavement of fellow humans has lost its zest, so too, I pray, the view of animal ownership loose its appeal one day. Animal ownership, whether for food or company, denies the owned animal a life free of human-inflicted suffering.

It is not easy to accept the role that, we as vegans, play in causing suffering to our pets. But it is undeniable that veganism and animal ownership are incompatible with our values of freedom and non-harm. Instead, we must look toward a model of synergistic relationships that exist outside the schematic of ownership. But that’s for another piece…

WORKS CITED

• Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat — 25th Anniversary Edition: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
• Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.
• Reinhart, RJ. “Snapshot: Few Americans Vegetarian or Vegan.” Gallup News, 1 August 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/238328/snapshot-few-americans-vegetarian-vegan.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=NEWSFEED&g_campaign=item_&g_content=Snapshot%3a%2520Few%2520Americans%2520Vegetarian%2520or%2520Vegan. Accessed 30 April 2023.
• Pegram, C., Gray, C., Packer, R.M.A. et al. Proportion and risk factors for death by euthanasia in dogs in the UK. Sci Rep 11, 9145 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-88342-0
  Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic. HarperCollins, 1975.
  Tessler, Gordon S. The Genesis Diet. Be Well Publications, 1996.

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