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The New Vegetarianism For a very long time, people have been turning to vegetarianism as an
ethical alternative to meat-eating. Ask why someone is vegetarian and in
many cases you will get an answer based on compassion for animals, an
ethical choice, an alternative to the cruelty of the meat industry, and so
on. This has been accepted for many years as a self-evident truth. Yet, as every vegan knows, it is far from it. The uncomfortable truth is
that a vegetarian diet is not ethical. No, really, it isn't. It is
every bit as unethical to eat cheese as it is to eat meat. Why? Because the
dairy industry is just that - an industry. It exploits animals, and just
like the meat industry, it turns a blind eye to suffering in the name of
profit. You may argue that the meat industry takes animals' lives whereas
the dairy industry only takes their produce. You would be totally wrong.
Calves are killed routinely to keep the milk industry in business; without
the wholesale slaughter of calves there would be no milk for you to drink.
Chicks are killed routinely (in the most horrific manner possible, thrown
alive into a grinding machine) to keep the egg industry going. And the
animals that survive have a miserable and painful life, treated by their
owners as nothing more than organic machinery. For a long time I believed, like many, that at least vegetarianism was a
step in the right direction, a stepping stone on the road to full
compassion; that it demonstrated a willingness to embrace the issue of
animal exploitation; and that people should be encouraged to see it as such.
But gradually I have changed my view. If you genuinely have
compassion you would not stop halfway and continue to eat products that owe
their existence to abuse and exploitation. Vegetarianism provides a
convenient safe haven for those who like the idea of an ethical diet but
erect all sorts of barriers to actually adopting one. Vegetarianism is essentially a falsehood. It is an irrelevance and a
potentially dangerous one. For any meaningful sense of the word 'ethical',
veganism is the new vegetarianism.
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