Why vegetarianism isn’t enough

Growing up I was always taught by my mum to be kind to animals. We never had less than 5 rescue animals in our home. My mum would put food out for hedgehogs, and tend to them when they were hit by cars. My dad even lassoed a starving german shepherd from the back of a moped. True story. I was told bullfighting and dog fighting was abhorrent, that vivisection was deplorable and that fox hunters were the scum of the Earth. My mother wouldn’t talk to our Australian cousin that shot kangaroos for sport.

But I never questioned why we sat down and ate animals for dinner every night.

As an adult I would move earthworms and snails from the path, lest they were trodden on, on my way to KFC. I never could stomach spare ribs or chicken on the bone because it reminded me that my food was once an animal; everything had to be reshaped and covered in euphemistic breadcrumbs. How could I exhibit such conflicting behaviour for so long?

It wasn’t until I was about 24 that I decided I couldn’t eat animals any more. So I became a vegetarian. But I still wore and even bought new leather, and cooked meat for others. It was half-arsed.

It wasn’t until I was 28 and I began to read more about animal rights that I started to consider veganism.

What did happen to all the boy chicks that are useless in egg production, and all the baby boy cows that don’t produce milk? What happens when the adults’ milk and egg production rates dropped off and they were no longer profitable? Do they live out their natural lives in retirement homes, a golden handshake for their years of sacrifice and hard work? No, they had the same fate as the animals that ended up in breadcrumbs.

I learned that animal products are morally indistinguishable from meat.

Millions of cows and chickens die every year as a result of the egg and dairy industry.

Baby boy chicks are gassed, or ground up and fed back to their parents. The female chickens have been bred to lay egg after egg, whether they’re free range or battery. No wild bird would use up precious energy on this travesty of a menstrual cycle.

Dairy cows are repeatedly impregnated from the moment they are fertile, their young ripped away from them so they don’t drink the milk meant to nourish them, often sent for veal production or simply bolt-gunned on the day they are born. Meanwhile their mothers mourn, locked in a cage for 16 hours with pumps attached to their nipples, machines sucking their grotesquely swollen, optimally bred udders until they bleed. And when they’ve been through this 3 or 4 times, they are strung up and slaughtered along with their meat-producing brethren. Many are pregnant when this happens, and the soft, velvety skin of their foetuses is used to make expensive leather gloves and bags. Dairy is the ultimate appropriation and commodification of motherhood.

Sure, you could argue that you could keep a cow on some land and milk her guilt-free, but as any mammal would, she would stop producing milk once her baby was weaned. We can’t allow that, we want her milk. And sure her pendulous udder is prone to infection and cancer because we’ve slowly deformed her through selective breeding, generation after generation to produce pints of the white stuff. But who wants black tea?

Maybe we could keep some chickens and take their eggs, they don’t need them? But if we stopped breeding for superfluous egg production the birds would start to choose their own mates and return to their earlier phenotype, and stop laying so many eggs. They don’t owe us anything.

The egg and dairy business is particularly brutal in the context of capitalism, where we exterminate the slackers and dispose of the males. But as adult humans, should we really be drinking milk from somebody else’s breast, someone who isn’t even the same species as us? Do we really need chicken ovulations on toast every morning? Especially when it comes at such a price.

We are keeping them captive and treating them as objects because we like their secretions, and it results in a life of suffering and a premature death. It doesn’t matter if the sticker says organic and free range; these labels are there to make people who don’t want to harm animals feel ok about harming animals.

Veganism is a commitment to refusing to treat animals as property, and it was very hard to accept as an animal lover and a vegetarian, that i was doing just that.

If you don’t want animals to die for your dinner, then you have to give up eggs and dairy.

I may not like the taste of vegan cheese, but the taste left in my mouth from my research into the dairy industry was far harder to wash away.

I implore you, do the research yourself, and if you care about what happens to animals, go vegan.