(Re) becoming Vegan
What made you go vegan? I’ve seen people pose this question to the vegan community on Twitter multiple times, and the most frequent answer seems to be: a documentary (usually Dominion). The leap to veganism doesn’t come out of nowhere, of course. People tend to become vegetarians first, like I did ten years before I reached my own ‘tipping point’. And yes, it was due to a documentary, in my case Hogwood: A Modern Horror Story, about multiple investigations by Viva! into a brutal pig farm in Somerset.
That moment of realisation that there is something fundamentally wrong with what humans do to billions of animals on a daily basis, and that avoiding the consumption only of actual flesh is no longer going to cut it, is profound. If you were someone who thought you could never go vegan, you suddenly wonder how it could have taken you so long to get there. You see how you were living under comfortable delusions about who it’s acceptable to confine, kill, and consume, delusions fostered by other (often wilfully) deluded people in a deluded society.
But the beliefs and attitudes that enable us to eat animals as well as the products of their bodies and labour do not all unravel in this single moment of revelation. Often it is an ongoing process of unlearning the social conditioning that instilled those views in us in the first place and rediscovering something many of us knew intuitively as children.
Social conditioning
We’re not born speciesists. Psychologists Erin Hahn, Meghan Gillogly, and Bailey Bradford from Furman University have found that children aged seven and younger are often “unsuspecting meat eaters”, as they don’t understand that meat - and, to a lesser extent, eggs and dairy - comes from animals. They also tend to classify animals as “not OK to eat”. Other research by Oxford philosopher Guy Kahane and Harvard and Yale psychologists Matti Wilks, Lucius Caviola, and Paul Bloom shows that children, unlike adults, generally value the lives of dogs and pigs as equal or almost equal to human lives. Asked to choose between saving a human and saving multiple dogs or pigs, most children chose the animals, and many chose to save one dog over one human or could not decide between the two. Familiarity with dogs seemed to explain why they held dogs in slightly higher regard than pigs.
So what happens to these moral intuitions? How do we come to accept the idea not only that human lives have more value but that animal lives, particularly of certain species, have so little? Some people will say we simply outgrow such notions. But would we apply, let alone accept, this explanation for any other issue of justice? Would we say a sexist adult had simply grown out of their non-sexist childhood beliefs? No, we would think they had developed these attitudes through living in a sexist society and ought to correct them.
Moreover, it wouldn’t actually be accurate to say we simply stop believing that some animals have moral value and are not OK to eat. Instead, many people do not wish to harm or kill animals yet will eat meat - a form of cognitive dissonance famously known as “the meat paradox”. Omnivores tell themselves a tale, writes Rob Percival in his recent book The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy and the Future of Meat, “of consent … Our story tells us that [animals] have consented to their fate, that they desire to be eaten, that their death was part of the deal they struck to enjoy their life. The story allows us to retain an empathetic self-image and uphold our identity as animal lovers, even as we force non-consenting animals to their end.” But, he argues, this “narrative of consent” is insufficient to resolve the meat paradox. Omnivores thus employ a variety of strategies to cope with the psychological discomfort it generates. Being detached from “the process of meat production” helps, since we tend only to see the end product shrinkwrapped in the supermarket. Psychological studies show that people also “disengage” from the moral discomfort eating meat causes them by, for example, downplaying animals’ capacity for suffering or telling themselves that it is “natural, normal, necessary, and nice”.
Researchers from Exeter and Oxford Universities recently set out to establish at what point in life “some of the psychological processes that make moral acrobatics possible in relation to humans’ treatment of animals” develop in a paper entitled “The Development of Speciesism: Age-Related Differences in the Moral View of Animals”. Authors Luke McGuire, Sally Palmer, and Nadira Faber found that speciesist attitudes and “motivated cognition practices” (i.e. those moral acrobatics) emerge during adolescence, theorizing that this is when “socially constructed” beliefs that species memberships “determine’s a living being’s moral worth” begin to “coalesce”.
It’s no wonder that our intuitions about other species’ moral worth are so often overridden as we grow up. Not only do children usually misunderstand the origins of the meat on their plates, but parents who experience the meat paradox may “skirt the truth through vague terminology” rather than deal with the fallout of a child learning the reality of meat production (such as having to cook separate meat-free meals). The obscuring of animal lives in the names given to meat products and the opaque nature of industrial meat production further contribute to this confusion. By the time we’ve reached adolescence, speciesism sets in to justify lifelong eating habits which are also tied up with cultural and gender identities, with family and seasonal traditions. Some of these associations are clearly toxic and should be broken - meat-eating as a sign of masculinity in particular - and some are deeply cherished and hard to let go.
All this is encouraged and normalized not just by our families and broader social groups but by a meat industry that benefits hugely from people not thinking too hard about what their meat-eating really entails. In the UK alone there are more than 1,600 intensive farms, with upward of a billion animals killed for food every year (mostly chickens). This is a multi-billion pound industry - yearly sales for the UK’s largest chicken producer Moy Park come to around £1.6 billion, with its highest paid executive raking in over £2.5 million a year - with profits made at the expense of animals. All this is bolstered by governments who not only subsidise meat production but pour millions into promoting its products to consumers.
Documentaries such as Dominion show the truth behind animals in farming.
As a result, we are confronted daily with messages that meat is necessary for a healthy diet, that eating it is a wholesome activity and it always comes from happy animals. These narratives are fed to children from an early age, through cutesy books, nursery rhymes, and television shows about farmed animals. Problematic gendered messaging around meat consumption is common in meat marketing, reinforcing the idea that men who don’t eat it are less masculine. Certification schemes like Red Tractor and RSPCA Assured promise high welfare standards, which is what most people actually want for animals, but rather than illuminating how animals are actually treated on farms they can serve to obfuscate the realities by giving people false assurances so that they don’t bother to look beyond the labels. Some animal products are promoted as sustainable or carbon neutral to alleviate consumers environmental concerns, even though plant-based foods are better for the environment than meat or dairy. Even the way supermarkets are laid out and promote products encourage people to eat meat and dairy. When the reality of how meat or products like dairy are produced is shown to the public, the industry decries “one bad apple” and employs a host of other tactics to defend itself.
With these powerful and complex forces operating to keep us unquestioningly eating animals and accepting their exploitation, rediscovering the moral intuitions of one’s childhood may be no small challenge.
Going against the grain
I’ve been lucky with my family and friends. When I went vegan in 2020, nobody gave me a hard time about it. Friends willingly accommodated me when cooking meals and choosing restaurants; nobody told me I looked pale and needed a steak; I haven’t had a guest insist on bringing their own meal to my house rather than suffer through an evening without eating a bit of animal. But I know from Twitter (where I encounter more vegans than in my offline life) that many vegans often have fractious interactions with incalcitrant omnivores. Though veganism has moved into the mainstream with rising numbers of people signing up for pledges like Veganuary and a booming plant-based food sector, a belief in animal rights remains rare.
None of this is intended to dole out praise or criticism to those who do or do not manage to stick to veganism, but to highlight how remaining vegan can take ongoing emotional and social effort. This effort, however, does not - or should not - end with forgoing the consumption or use of animal products. It should inform our politics, as we put in the work to understand the links between the various kinds of animal and human oppression that society is built on. It is easier to abhor the slaughterhouse worker who cuts animals’ throats day in, day out, than to recognise how they are caught in the same system of exploitation and oppression that harms animals. As Aph Ko - who wrote the seminal book of critical essays on animal liberation, race, and feminism Aprho-ism with her sister Syl Ko - says in her book Racism as Zoological Witchcraft, “veganism isn't just about kicking a meat-eating habit and getting some veggies into your diet. It's a powerful rejection of a racist food system and a racist, cannibalistic politics that characterizes animals and nonwhite people as disposable and consumable.”
Becoming vegan, then, involves both rediscovering something most of us grasped as children and going beyond those basic moral intuitions. Not only do we not “grow out” of childhood anti-speciesist beliefs, we can grow into a deeper and more rounded set of beliefs that reject injustices and oppression in all their forms.
