đ«AIP 111 Why I'm Becoming A Flexible Vegan
Imagine you're at a fantastic restaurant with your friend.
The room glows with soft, warm light, and you're both served "the house special," a delectable hearty portion of meat seeped in gravy. You dig in, savoring each bite as the flavors tickle your tongue.
After five minutes your friend sets their fork down and informs you the meat on your plate: it's actually from a golden retrievers hind legs.
Your fork freezes midway into your mouth. You get a sinking feeling in your stomach. A Golden Retriever?! Those fluffy, magnificent balls of resplendent joy.
Your friend slaps their leg laughing. "I'm just joking, it's pork."
You return to your meal in silence but find yourself struggling to enjoy the meat in the same way you did before. After five minutes, you give up entirely, setting your fork down and pushing your plate to the side. You've lost your appetite.
Most of us cringe at the thought of eating a dog. They're mans best friends. Pets. Cute. Intelligent.
Yet, many cultures around the world, like China, eat dogs as a normal part of life. In the U.S., we eat pigs in the billions. Yet many studies show pigs might be more intelligent than dogs, with the same degree of empathy and, to some extent, cuteness.
Look at global slaughter statistics, according to Faunalytics, and most people don't realize the number has long passed the tens of billions each year.
It's easy to see that chickens are the most numerously slaughtered land animal, followed by pigs, sheep, and cows. This seems counterintuitive to the visual representation because the chicken line is the lowest on the chart. But because chickens are slaughtered in such high numbers, each unit of measurement counts for 1,000 individuals, which is how the UN FAO presents their data as well.
This begs the question: why do we love dogs, yet treat other animals so poorly?
Asking this question just a week ago sent me down a deep, deep rabbit hole. I ventured into the psychology of malicious ideologies like Nazism, the benefits of plant-based diets for fighting climate change, and how to break free from the invisible ideology affecting all of us: carnism.
I've been a meat eater and hunter my whole life. But after only a week of diving into this rabbit hole, I became a flexible vegan.
It wasn't a choice.
It was the inevitable outcome of becoming aware of the atrocities animals are suffering. This is your warning. Reading this article will change your relationship with animals and animal products forever. Even if you don't change your diet, you will certainly open your mind.
To be clear, I don't think you're a terrible person for eating animals. I don't think I was a terrible person for eating animals. I ate them for 21 years before becoming a veganâI know I'm not a high schooler, surprise!
Iâm also not saying you should instantly convert to being a full vegan or even that surviving off a fully vegan diet is healthier than a fully carnist one. Iâm simply saying the degree of animals most people eat is unecessary for nutritional needs, ethically horendous, unproductive, and bad for climate change.
That being said, this article will mostly focus on the ethical side of becoming vegan as that's been the most convincing argument for me. The fact is our culture makes it as easy, convenient, and pleasurable as possible to consume and wear animals and their products without feeling bad. Once you wake up, you begin seeing how it feeds us, literally, everywhere.
Let me open your eyes.
The Invisible Ideology We All Operate UnderâŠ
Everyone knows we operate under ideologies that shape how we interact with the world. Some people are Christians, some vegans, and some particularly strange types like 12th-century Norscan poetry. But there's one ideology almost everyone in the world operates underâan ideology you've likely never heard of because it's so present, so all-encompassing, it might as well be oxygen in the atmosphere.
I'm talking about what Dr. Melanie Joy in her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, And Wear Cows calls carnism.
Carnism is the invisible ideology that supports the belief that consuming meat, fish, and animal products is normal, necessary, natural, and practical, as well as enabling and hiding the atrocities committed by businesses that sustain these practices.
Why have you never heard of carnism?
Because carnism doesn't want you to have a name for it. If you don't have a name for something, it's invisible. If it's invisible, it's practically non-existent. If it's non-existent, you can continue to consume meat, fish, and animal products without feeling a wick of shame.
But now, we've broken the veil. We've given a name to the invisible ideology most of us have operated under all our lives. The next step is to understand how carnism perpetuates and how it breaks down so we can empower ourselves to break free from the bubble.
How Carnism Works: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, And Wear Cows
To understand how carnism works, we must first understand perception.
The first major aspect of our perception is it's inherently transjective.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are. We don't see objectively or subjectively. We see it transjectively, in the relationship between ourselves and the world. This transjectivity is molded by our values, upbringing, relationships, beliefs, experiences, genetics, social identities, and so much more.
This is why most people, when they see a medium rare steak, get a tingling in their stomach and perhaps even saliva in their mouth. But when a vegan sees it, they perceive the sad life of the cow sitting in its pen, its anxiety as it nears the slaughterhouse, and abject terror as it hears its fellow cows being murdered before ending up on your dinner plate.
The second major aspect of our perception is it's molded by time, space, and relation.
Humans have an innate ability to empathize and feel compassion. It's what makes us say "awwwww," when we see a little puppy dog, or a baby, or a tiny kitten. It's what makes us willing to jump into a lake to save a drowning child, even if we're wearing a suit. Our ability for empathy and compassion is a large factor in what has allowed humans to cooperate and reach the top of the food chain.
But this ability to feel empathy and compassion is diminished over time, space, and relation. For example, you likely feel immense empathy and compassion for your pet dog, or a dog around you, when they're suffering right in front of you. But it's unlikely you feel the same for the millions of dogs being killed right now in China. You might think it wrong, but it's so distant in time, space, and relation, it's harder to feel anything.
Carnism leverages this, understanding there are three things we can do when we feel a contrast with our behavior and values:
- Change values
- Change behavior
- Change the perception of behavior to match values
So, carnism takes these two aspects of our perception and weaponizes them to distract us from animal atrocities.
Slaughterhouse complexes and animal product industries are hidden in the countryside, far from human eyes. Many people can go their entire lives without ever seeing one of the animals from their plates being slaughtered. We're completely disconnected from what we're putting into our bodies.
Then carnism distracts us by building our love for the animals we do see. Our culture does everything it can to make dogs seem lovable. We see commercials with dogs chasing after balls thrown by owners. We share sayings like dog is "man's best friend." We don't even serve dogs as an option at restaurants because to do so would be unthinkable. We individuate dog breeds and specific dogs for having unique personalities.
The exact opposite is done for farm animals.
Farm animals are dichotomized as precisely that, farm animals. They aren't pets; their purpose is to be used, to be slaughtered--I'm sorry, put down, if we want to use carnisms euphemisms.
When pigs come to mind, we think dirty, unintelligent, rowdy. This is despite the fact that pigs are likely more intelligent than most dogs.
We deindividuate farm animals. Instead of seeing a single pig, we abstract them into the billions of pigs already being sent to slaughterhouses.
Our media hides the truth too. Commercials don't showcase the process of animals being killed and sent to restaurants and supermarkets. Some commercials go as far as to show chickens getting up and dancing, fork, and knife in hand, begging us to eat them.
Do you see that happening anywhere else in nature? "Here we see the wild, African Gazelle. Watch as it coats itself in olive oil, salt, and a touch of cumin before willingly jumping into the mouth of a gaping lion. Isn't it beautiful? The cycle of nature my friends."
The very labels we use are abstracted. We don't eat cow, we eat 'beef.' We don't eat pig, we eat 'pork.' I mean, even serial killers are more direct--they don't call their victims "human nuggets."
You even see it in how we teach our children. Kids' books are full of happy farm animals living their best lives. Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O... they never finish that song with "and then we turned their flesh into hamburgers."
That's quite a plot twist for a 5-year-old.
Once we open our eyes to the way our culture alters our perception of animals we see the fundamental logical errors underlying them. Let me be frank: there is no difference between dogs and pigs. One could just as easily see a world in which pigs were in dogs shoes, and dogs in pigs. The culture would simply feed us into seeing dogs as food instead of pigs. And even if there was, we'll explore in later sections why that still doesn't give us a right to kill and eat them.
This leaves us with the glaring hole of carnism. If we have so much empathy and compassion for our dog and cat pets, then we have no good reason not to regard other animals in the same regard.
Arbitrary love isn't love. It's cultural programming.
Even with this realization, it's hard to break free from carnism because carnism has three more arguments for why we should stay inside the ideology.
Three More Arguments Carnism Has To Keep Us Asleep
First, carnism is normal.
Everyone else is doing it. According to The Vegan Society, perhaps 1-2% of the world is vegan. It couldn't possibly be bad then could it?
Something being normal isn't necessarily a reason for it being right or good. Most of society used to think sickness was caused by wrong amounts of the four cardinal elements of fire, water, air, and earth in the body. Does anyone believe that now? Perhaps Aang, but we aren't talking about Avatar The Last Airbender here.
We can't accept carnism simply because it's normalized.
Second, carnism is necessary.
We need meat, fish, and animal products to feed the world. They're nutritionally essential. Without these products, we'd surely starve. So many traditions and cultural norms rely on these products--would you really sacrifice that? They're used in many products like clothes, skin care, and even random things like tennis balls. How are we going to make these things without animals?
Firstly, something being hard isn't a moral reason to not do it. Yes, switching to more plant-based sources will take time, hurt some aspects of the economy, some people will lose jobs, and animals won't be a common food anymore. But we've made huge societal shifts like this many times before once we realize something is wrong. Slavery, for example, seemed impossible at the time, but when enough people realized its terrors, society changed remarkably quickly. We can do the same with animals.
In addition, it could be argued plant-based foods are more necessary than animal ones. We get three beef calories back for every 100 plant calories used to get a hamburger onto your table. It takes 100s, if not 1000s, of gallons of water for one pound of beef. That's dreadfully inefficient. If you had a worker who was this inefficient, you would fire them immediately, and yet we don't do the same for the animal industry.
Finally, there's no proof most people need the degree of animals we eat to meet our nutritional needs. With nutrition supplements, the ability to eat largely plant-based is easier than ever. If you look at our evolutionary narrative, it doesn't seem we were meant to eat the amount of meat we do now. Our teeth aren't shaped like carnivores but more for crushing tough nuts and vegetables. Our intestines are long because it takes more time to digest fibrous plant foods compared to meat.
Again, this doesn't mean I recommend you switch immediately to a full vegan diet. Talk to your doctor and consider your own health before doing so. But it's likely you would be fine if not better with less meat, fish, and animal products.
Thirdly, it's natural.
Predators have eaten prey ever since the dawn of life. Humans are at the top of the food chain. It's only natural we should be able to eat meat, fish, and animal products as omnivores.
The problem is something being natural isn't a reason in itself for its goodness. There are plenty of natural things in nature that will literally poison you. Being natural can be an aspect of an argument. But it's not a good ethical argument in itself.
If all three of these arguments don't work, carnism has one more strategy: attack veganism.
Last Strategy Attack Veganism
Because vegans are in such a minority, it's often us who are expected to conform to the rest of society. And like with any minority group, a whole hue of stereotypes has grown regarding vegans from the carnist main culture.
Vegans are often seen as emotional, protein deficient, self-righteous, and more. Vegans, like animals, are often abstracted under a single header of "vegan" and given several negative associations. Often, vegans who want to eat at a more vegan-friendly place are seen as controlling and demanding. If they would like the cheese served on the side of the salad so they can have it too, they're considered unreasonable.
Put yourself in the shoes of the vegans. Many, when they enter a place with animals and animal products, don't see food; they see corpses. That would traumatize you too.
Why do they see corpses?
Slaughterhouses. Most of us know in the back of our minds when eating these products that somewhere, someplace, there are animals going through endless suffering to make this possible. But the ideology of carnism makes it so easy to ignore.
It's time to break further from the bubble.
In the next section we will explore the horrors of carnism.
The Horrors of Carnism
In August 2021, there was a systematic killing of 243,016 pigs in the Midwest during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-June 2020). The process, clinically detailed in a veterinary journal, involved sealing pigs in retrofitted barns and raising temperatures to 130-170°F with 90% humidity. The animals took approximately 95 minutes to die--30 minutes for the temperature to rise and another 65 minutes until they fell silent and still. This process was repeated 138 times, contributing to an estimated total of 1 million pigs "depopulated" in the U.S. The industry cited COVID-related slaughterhouse closures, overcrowded facilities, and lack of alternative euthanasia methods as justification.
This is just the beginning of the horrors of carnism.
A hundred years ago, meat was a luxury food. For most people, having chicken at the dinner table was like eating caviar. Now, it's common to have meat at least once a day. In just one week, more animals are killed than all humans in wars throughout human history.
How is this possible?
The answer is industrialization.
Meat Chickens & Hen Laying Chickens
Meat chickens, or broilers, are bred to grow unnaturally fast, often reaching slaughter weight in just six weeks. This rapid growth leads to severe health problems, including heart failure and skeletal deformities, as their bones cannot support their body weight. They are packed by the thousands into windowless sheds, living in their own waste with high levels of ammonia that cause painful burns on their skin and respiratory distress. The slaughter process is brutalâmany birds are improperly stunned and experience excruciating pain before dying.
Hen-laying chickens endure even worse conditions. They are crammed into battery cages, often with several birds in a space so small they cannot spread their wings. This extreme confinement prevents them from engaging in natural behaviors like perching, dust-bathing, or foraging. The constant stress and frustration lead to feather pecking and self-mutilation, so their beaks are painfully trimmed without anesthesia. After about a year, when their egg production declines, they are slaughtered, often enduring transport without food or water for hours.
Milk Cows & Meat Cows
Dairy cows undergo a relentless cycle of impregnation, birth, and milking. They are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination and have their calves taken away within hours of birth, causing severe distress. Male calves are often sent to veal crates, where they are kept in near-total immobility before slaughter. Dairy cows are pumped with hormones to increase milk production, leading to painful udder infections (mastitis). After a few years, when their milk output declines, they are sent to slaughterâexhausted, weak, and often unable to walk. During transport their utters--selectively bread for artificially high milk production--often swell painfully because of not being milked leaving their last moments in suffering.
Beef cattle face different but equally harsh conditions. Many start their lives on pastures but are quickly moved to overcrowded feedlots where they are fattened on unnatural grain diets, causing digestive pain and liver abscesses. They live in filthy, confined conditions, standing in mud and manure. Before slaughter, they endure long, stressful transport in extreme weather. At slaughterhouses, improper stunning methods mean many are still conscious as they are skinned and dismembered. They die piece by piece. Getting cut while still alive.
Pigs
Pigs are among the most intelligent farm animals--perhaps even smarter than dogs--yet they are subjected to extreme cruelty. Breeding sows are confined to tiny gestation crates, barely able to move. Piglets have their tails docked, teeth clipped, and testicles removedâall without anesthesia because they often bite at the tails of other pigs from the overwhelming stress and boredom of living. In factory farms, pigs live in overcrowded, filthy pens with hard concrete floors, leading to severe injuries and infections. They often develop stress-related behaviors like cannibalism. At slaughter, many are improperly stunned and remain conscious as they are boiled alive in scalding tanks.
Fish
Fish suffer immensely, but their pain is often overlooked because they are so alien to humans. In industrial fishing, massive trawling nets capture fish by the thousands, crushing and suffocating them. Many die from decompression or are gutted alive. In aquaculture, fish are crammed into small, filthy enclosures where disease and parasites spread rapidly. Many suffer from oxygen deprivation and injuries from rough handling. Slaughter methods are brutal, often involving slow suffocation or being skinned while conscious. Because fish lack vocal cords, their suffering remains largely ignored.
How are the workers at these locations fairing?
The industry's turnover rate for a year is over 100%, meaning most workers don't last a year before leaving. Humans must be desensitized to do this killing since most don't want to kill. Even during war, most people shoot too high, and many fewer people die than if everyone was shooting well.
Those in the killing plants experience terrible trauma, danger, and often drug problems even for years after they leave. Those near the plants often are contaminated getting awful sickness, unplanned abortions, and more.
Why you may ask?
All so that meat and animal products can be food for the common folk rather than luxury items. I would make a joke here to diminish the extremity of the situation. But for once, in my writing, I don't feel it would be respectful to do so. I'm simply speechless.
This is just illuminating the suffering of animals. There are a host of other reasons carnism is bad for culture, including climate change, health issues, land usage, and more. Exploring this is outside the scope of this article, but I highly encourage you to look more into it yourself. With our understanding of how carnism works and the horrors it engages in, we can move back to what I mean by flexible veganism and what that might mean for you.
What Do I Mean By Flexible Veganism?
Flexible veganism means I stick to vegan principles most of the time but am willing to bend them in certain circumstances and contexts. To understand those circumstances and contexts we need to understand the ethical assumptions veganism is based under.
The essential moral tenet underlying veganism is we should prevent the unnecessary suffering of any conscious being.
Why? Let's apply it to humans first. We intuitively understand that suffering is felt much worse than an equivalent amount of pleasure. Most people adapt to new pleasuresâlike a hot tub or a raiseâafter a few weeks or months. Suffering however, like not having enough food to eat or feeling chronically lonely, isn't adapted to nearly as much. Meaning and happiness become forgotten memories, like coins tossed into a wishing well.
Based on this principle of suffering and the fact that we have a finite time on this planet, I believe as long as we're here, why not make that time the most meaningful and happy we can for each other?
On this human journey, we've invented many great things like human rightsâwow! Every person has a right to life, to liberty, equality under the law and more.
Here's The Question Veganism Asks: Why Not Apply This Moral Tenet To Every Conscious Being?
As said earlier, negating suffering is more important than giving pleasure.
The pleasure we get from eating animals and animal products can't possibly validate the suffering we inflict on animals. While their consciousness might not be as complex as a human's, what gives a pig, a chicken, or a cow less of a right to a happy life than a human? They can suffer tremendously. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in Sapiens, a need shaped in the wild continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer necessary for reproduction and survival. The vast majority of animal farms humans create don't mirror the natural environment of those animals. When the needs shaped in the wild aren't met, the animals experience great suffering.
A pig in a cage barely large enough for it to turn around feels terrible not being able to roll around in the mud among its friends. A cow hates having its calf taken away from it just moments after being born.
Some carnists will say the conscious of these animals isn't as great as humans, so they can't suffer as much. But would we allow this degree of suffering for a mentally impaired human, simply on the grounds they are mentally impaired? Of course not!
I admit, I believe human suffering can be greater because we have the ability to project ourselves into the future, and we're super social creatures. In the above example, the mentally impaired human feels different than another animal because we will suffer more knowing that human is suffering than another animal will knowing one of their fellow animals is suffering. Regardless, do animals experiencing less suffering still validate us making them suffer? It doesn't seem logical.
Some carnists will say if we give the animal a good life, it wouldn't have had otherwise, what's wrong with ending it early?
Putting something into existence doesn't validate you doing whatever you want with it. Parents can't do anything they want to their children on the grounds "they wouldn't have existed otherwise." We should use the same logic regarding animals.
What about animal products? The animal doesn't die, then. That's true, but the vast majority of animal production also inflicts great suffering on animalsplored in the horros of carnism up above, as we explored. What right do we have to take their products if they inflict this degree of suffering?
Understanding These Principles Of Veganism We Can Move Back To What I Mean By Flexible veganism
I'm flexible in that I'm not a vegan in a true sense. I believe some animals don't have the degree of consciousness to invalidate us from eating them, such as mussels, oysters, and many insects. I would be fine eating animals in these cases because from what I can tell (admittingly from limited research I must do more of) is they don't suffer much.
In addition, I believe killing animals is sometimes okay.
For example, hunting is moral when there is natural animal overpopulation. Those animals would experience a worse death, starving, or dying to a predator. The difference is that we didnât consciously create overpopulation compared to factory farming. And sometimes like in the case of deer's in my hometown, the overpopulation leads to human death. In these cases, killing an animal swiftly and painlessly through hunting is ethical to me, and I would be willing to eat the meat of an animal that died this way.
I'd also eat animals to avoid wasting calories. If I was given the wrong dish at a restaurant and I knew itâd be thrown away if I sent it back, I would eat it to avoid wasting calories. I would also eat animals off of friends' plates if they weren't going to finish them.
In addition, I believe some forms of animal production are fine as there is no undue animal suffering, including the suffering of having their product taken from them.
Cows, for example, probably don't suffer from us taking some of their milk, provided we raise them ethically. Chickens don't seem to mind when their eggs are taken from them, provided again they are raised ethically. Wool from sheep is okay to take, provided the sheep are raised ethically.
This technically makes me vegetarian. But I intend to live most of my daily life as a flexible vegan because the vast majority of animal production is also unethical. I don't want to run into any misunderstandings where I tell someone I'm vegetarian, and then they give me an almost certainly unethically gotten animal product.
What Now? Hope For Animal Rights In The Future
You may, like me, be feeling a number of things after learning of the truths of carnism. You may feel anger, sadness, disgust, or something else. The question is, what do we do with this information?
For me, the answer was becoming a flexible vegan. The less money we feed toward the animal industry, the more we encourage societal change. Of course, policy changes and other movements will also be needed, but this is an individual change many can embark on. However, I would never be self-righteous or naive enough to ask that you become fully vegan without knowing your own circumstances.
All I can ask is this: think about how the decisions you make are influencing the suffering of animals.
Is there any way you could make your way towards becoming more vegan than you already are? You don't necessarily have to become veganâyou can just implement one more vegan food in every meal.
Try and understand the vegan perspective. And if any vegans are reading, try and understand the carnist perspective. Healthy relationships don't come when each side harshly judges the other. It comes through compassion, empathy, a push to understand the other side.
Thankfully, there is hope. If you brought up animal rights a few decades ago, you would have been laughed at. Society no longer finds it absurd. And animal rights do seem to be getting better.
Take How Now Dairy. In 2012, Les Sandle, a third-generation Australian dairy farmer, partnered with animal rights activist Cathy Palmer to create a revolutionary ethical dairy farm.
Unlike conventional dairy operations that separate calves from mothers immediately after birth, How Now allows calves to stay with their mothers and nurse naturally for four months until weaning. The farm uses innovative solutions to make this ethical approach viableâthey use sexed semen in artificial insemination to ensure only female calves are born, and have cows calve every 18-24 months instead of annually. Their 64-acre farm features cows grazing freely in paddocks dotted with trees.
While conventional dairy farms treat cows like milk machines, How Now proves there's another way. They've produced over 700,000 liters of milk without ever separating a calf from its mother or killing a single calf. Though their milk costs more than conventional dairy, the business has thrived because customers are willing to pay a premium for ethically produced milk.
How Now Dairy demonstrates that it's possible to run a profitable dairy operation while prioritizing animal welfare, directly challenging the assumption that commercial dairy production requires cruel practices.
Even if you don't become vegan yourself, simply talking about what you learned in this article, will help you spread the message. Thank you for reading this far. I'm sure it's been, quite the journey... Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cry with my vegetable girlfriend.