For a while I have found this argument irksome. Not just unhelpful, it is false, it obscures, and it constrains our thinking.

1) Speciesism is ahistorical. To be a speciesist is to discount the interests of those who do not belong to the species ‘Homo sapiens’ and thus to commit the error of determining moral worth on the basis of biological categories that are of no moral relevance. However, the concept of ‘species’ was coined only in the seventeenth century, whereas the systematic exclusion of non-human animals from the moral community stretches back to the dawn of agriculture. If speciesism’s explanatory force depends on a concept that emerged only recently, then it cannot adequately account for the centuries of animal exploitation that preceded it.

By contrast, the notion of ‘anthropocentrism’ (or ‘human supremacy’) fares better. The dismissal of animals here is understood in terms of their distance from what is considered properly ‘human,’ which isn’t a biological category, but a normative ideal which serves the function of sanctioning the subordination both of other members of our own species, as well as of non-human animals.2

2) The analogy does not work. It holds the badness of animal injustice to be akin to the badness of human injustice insofar as both consist in arbitrary discrimination. While I can agree that arbitrary discrimination is common to both, the seeming implication that the badness of racism, sexism, and other forms of human oppressions is reducible to arbitrary discrimination is certainly false. To believe this is to fail to appreciate how the badness of human oppression is largely to do with the subjective experience of dehumanization. To be dehumanized is to feel one’s humanity denied and debased, one’s self-esteem eroded, one’s agency undercut from within. Much of this harm isn’t directly attributable to arbitrary discrimination. Instead, it is a product of unconscious stigma and other societal forces that are out of our control. And while it is undoubtedly true that animals suffer when we impose ourselves on them, their experience of that imposition will be different from the experience of dehumanization.3 As Syl Ko writes: “nonhuman animals cannot subjectively experience a lack of humanity… we cannot override their subjective perspectives such that we could program them to suffer what it is like to feel less than human.”4

3) The widespread and popular use of the argument from analogy has alienated justice movements with whom we ought to be building alliances. Obvious examples of this can be found in the infamous PETA exhibits The Holocaust on Your Plate (in which harrowing scenes from Nazi concentration camps were displayed alongside images of animals suffering in modern-day factory farms), and Are Animals the New Slaves? (in which images of captive animals reared for human consumption were displayed alongside images of the 19th-century African slave trade). Both exhibits were widely condemned, especially among those historically oppressed groups with whom animals were being compared. The reason is fairly straightforward: though the intent may have been to amplify the suffering of animals to the level of human tragedy, there is nothing in the analogy itself to prevent one from reading into it the exact inverse: a reduction of humans to the status of ‘Animal’—that is to say, worthless and expendable. It’s no wonder then why many Black and Jewish communities have interpreted these comparison as dehumanizing—or worse, as similar to those tactics used by the Nazis and slaveholders to justify acts of violence and domination.5

The breeding of such resentment should worry animal advocates insofar as it can result in deep and lasting rifts between animal and other social justice movements—what Claire Jean Kim has called a ‘posture of mutual disavowal.’ When this happens,

“each group elevates its own suffering and justice claims over the suffering and justice claims of the other group, either partly or wholly invalidating the latter as a matter of political and moral concern. Disavowal, an act of disassociation and rejection, can range from failing to recognize that one is causing harm to the other group to refusing to acknowledge that the other group suffers or has valid justice claims to actively and knowingly reproducing patterns of social injury to the other group.”6

4) Very few of us are actually speciesists. A speciesist is usually defined as someone who consistently assigns the same (greater) weight to the interests of humans and the same (lesser) weight to the interests of non-human animals, no matter the context. This implies that a speciesist would never discriminate against humans because of the group they belong to, or consider the interests of some animals as equal to the interests of humans depending on the species of that animal or one’s relationship to them. Those who advance the argument against speciesism are therefore implicitly committed to the bewildering view that discrimination against humans is entirely a thing of the past. They also have no way of accounting for the fondness of many supposed speciesists for the animals that inhabit their homes, or for dogs, cats, primates, dolphins, whales (etc.) in general.7

5) One doesn’t need to be an anti-speciesist in order to align oneself with the aims of animal liberation. It must be made clear, first, that there are a few different kinds of speciesism, not all of which are incompatible with the aims of animal liberation. Here are a few examples of what I will call ‘benign’ forms of speciesism:

• When interests are alike, those of humans ought to take precedence over those of animals simply because they are human interests.

• When there is a clash between survival interests, humans always ought to take priority over animals.

• When it comes to making decisions about whose interests to promote, even the most trivial of human interests always ought to take priority over the advancement of the interests of animals, however significant they may be.

If taken to mean just this, speciesism isn’t on its own able to justify the exploitative industries that liberationists are seeking to dismantle; and, if not, then there’s no reason for it to be the primary target of our critique. Such industries can be defended only if one ventures much further and holds that advancing the most trivial human interests justifies thwarting the most important animal interests.8 But if this is the position that is entailed in our complicity with those industries that ravage animal bodies without compunction, then is speciesism really the right word or is it altogether too weak to describe the severity of our moral failing?

6) In claiming our fault to be merely that of holding onto an irrational belief, one deflects attention from a range of other vices and failings that are also manifest in our treatment of animals. What is said to be the matter with speciesism is, as we’ve seen, that it signals an inconsistency: we would not treat humans in the ways we treat animals and we can give no good reason why—we cannot, in other words, justify the discrepancy in our behavior. But here we can ask: Is this really all that this behavior amounts to—an inconsistency? Is there not, as David E. Cooper writes, also hatred “recognizable in people’s malevolent attitudes towards what they regard as vermin and pests?” Or “negligence, insensitivity… manifested by… irresponsible pet owners who leave their animals hungry or lonely”? Or vanity “observed in the boasting of shooters, in wearing fur and carrying bags made of reptile skins”? Or “indifference and willful ignorance [in] a public content to put out of mind the impact of their supermarket purchases on the lives of the animals they eat”? And is it not greed “that impels people to demand that they can have, at every meal, meat at a cheap price that only animal factories can provide”?9

Consider also that most of us are wildly inconsistent about a great deal—our commitment to waking up early, to losing weight, inconsistent also in our political opinions, our choice of friends, our taste in movies, etc. None of these, however, carry nearly the same kind of moral weight. The charge of speciesism does not then go far enough: it aborts the investigation before reaching what is truly abhorrent about our relationship with animals. What it fails to ask, in other words, is what this seeming discrepancy reveals about our character.

Of course, what it might end up revealing is that there really isn’t much of a discrepancy at all. It could be, after all, that we would treat humans just as badly if it turned out we could get away with it; and that the only reason we don’t is because other humans, even the weakest among us, hold some power over us and so, to some extent, can retaliate. The inconsistency in our behavior could thus stem from the fact that with animals we can simply get away with it. If all this is true, then speciesism isn’t the problem; the problem is deeper and wider reaching than that.10

7) By focusing on individually held prejudices, the charge of speciesism risks obscuring the institutional systems and economic structures that are also responsible for their exploitation, and for the formation of such prejudice in the first place.11 By this I mean that the powers at play in the subjugation of animals aren’t always or entirely under the control of the individual, but sometimes operate in and through us without our ever being consciously aware of them. Our behaviors are conditioned by outside forces, our attitudes shaped, and our perception of reality distorted—all in ways that render us complicit in the violence perpetrated against animals.

Consider, first, the failure of the law to confer protections to the most vulnerable individuals—rats and mice that are experimented on, for instance, or to chickens raised for food or exploited for their eggs—while categorizing them as property. In the case of animals experimented on, the law not only permits but mandates animal testing for many medications and consumer goods. Market pressures likewise reward efficiency and cost reduction, pushing industries to intensify production at the expense of animal welfare. And there is, finally, the fact that our culture and our institutions fails to inculcate in us the virtues that would allow us to respond to animals and their plight in the way that is ethically required.

“How will they kill them?” I asked.

”Decapitation,” she said.

“Can’t you adopt them out?”

“Well, no, not really.” I expressed my disapproval, she echoed it, and that was the end of the matter.

Or so I thought. A few days later, I get a text from that same woman. She had gotten my number from a mutual friend, she said, and was wondering if I could meet her that night outside of the science building. I knew exactly what I was in for, so I didn’t ask any questions. She met me by the darkened back entrance holding a shoe box rattling with activity.

“There are two rats in here and I can’t take them with me because I live in a sorority and I have a roommate and all of them would be totally freaked out and I even know what they would do.”

I said I’d taken them. Then I asked if she had given them names.

“No, I couldn’t. They said I couldn’t.”

When I was in the privacy of my dorm room, I opened the box. In it were two male albino rats, paralyzed with fear, staring straight up at me: Gregor and Shaftesbury, as I was later to call them.

I had no experience with rats, and they no experience living with (as opposed to being tormented by) a human, so the learning curve was steep. I did not know, for instance, what or how to feed them. I had no money to buy them pellets at a pet store (nor the car to drive there with), so I ended up having to smuggle them into the dining hall, hidden in my sweater or messenger bag. I’d drop them an assortment of different food, and I’d learn what they’d like based on whether or not they’d crawl over and devour it. What they liked best, it turns out, was to lick (or sometimes suck) the peanut butter off my finger casually inserted into their lurking space. Only my most devoted friends tolerated any of this. And even with them, it was always tenuous.

Thinking back, I was impressed by their ingenuity. Every night while I was sleeping, they’d rearrange the random items I had furnished their plastic tub with into a makeshift staircase in order to escape. Then they’d somehow make it into my bed. I’d feel them crawling over my body, dribbling urine, looking for a warm crevice to nestle themselves into—perhaps under my armpit, between my thighs, or along my neck. The other thing that impressed me was this: that despite enduring months of torture by one of my species, they still found it in their hearts to consider me suitable to cuddle with.

The next semester, I reached out to the woman who had given me Gregor and Shaftesbury. “How many do you think we could rehome before anyone would take notice or care?” I asked her. I had found students willing to take them in.

Perhaps this seems odd. I admit that I had no sense of strategy then, did not consider the possibility of, for instance, pressuring the faculty into not using rats in the first place, or at least not making it mandatory for students to torture them for a grade. A covert rescue operation seemed the only and obvious solution. If the rats are caged to be killed, then what you must do is set them free. I do not think like this anymore, and sometimes that saddens me. It is honest and brave, even if not prudent.

In any case, the sorority girl agreed to pass along a few, and I began to distribute these rat refugees (as I called them) to the broader student community.

Inevitably, this campaign of mine was short lived. It was only a week or so in that I was discovered by the campus police. A student on my floor had offered me a brownie, and while I hardly smoked weed then (and had never done edibles), I also was not the sort of person to turn down a novel experience, especially when free. Within an hour, I was baked, basically ‘cabbage’ as they used to say. And, in my stupor, I foolishly left both the door of the cage and the door to my room open, and rats began pouring out in the halls.

When the campus safety officers stormed into my room, I remember that I was staring blankly at a TV that was broadcasting a totally blue screen with the words ‘no signal’ written in green in the corner. I was already dimly aware of how much I had fucked up, and yet had not been able for the life of me assemble a plan to make it all better.

“I cannot believe it is you,” said one of the officers who I happened to have a good relationship with.

“I cannot believe it is you,” he said again, louder, getting angrier.

The rest is a blur, but I remember still being stoned, crawling on the floors goading and chasing the scared rats around the floor behind furniture and into rooms and under clothes as one or two of the cops towered over me, supervising my progress. While I was able to keep Gregor and Shaftesbury (they now lived under my bed), the operation itself was over. I was upset at myself for the mistake; it was a mistake that cost lives.

But, overall, I did learn something from this experience. I learned that if one truly believes that the wanton cruelty that is inflicted upon animals to be one of the greatest imaginable evils, then you will not simply remain content to talk about it. You will act, and you will act because you must. No number of uttered words can stand in for that requirement. What it is specifically that you end up doing is not so important by contrast. Strategy comes second, comes later, comes only after you have committed yourself by your conduct to be an agent for animals.

The reason such a lesson is worth harping on is because we live in a context which has allowed “talkers to look like doers,” to use the words of Peter Young (39). I have seen this among activists, yes, but it is especially common among academics (like me) who make a career out of voicing the right opinions and publishing them widely. “The people who talk the loudest are the ones doing the least,” Young says (69). What is ultimately missing here is the “urgency, which is the elevated level of empathy where you actually see the world through the eyes of the victims, the animals” (68).

Works Cited

Young, Peter. Liberate. Warcry, 2019.

Shortly after college, having by this point already found my calling in the fight for animal justice, I worked for a time with PETA traveling the country visiting college campuses. As is to be expected for an organization with far more money than good sense, the outreach we did was rather unorthodox: we were entrusted with a state-of-the-art virtual reality simulator into which we had been instructed to feed hapless, ill-informed students who would be transformed into chickens then sent to slaughter. I’ll admit that this all sounded pretty ‘dope’ to me, at least at first, at least in theory. (How couldn’t I be thrilled about the prospect of beginning a conversation about the wrongness of eating meat by virtually slaughtering my interlocutor?) In practice, however, the simulation failed on us more often than not, and on those occasions when we were fed up with the mind-numbing amount of troubleshooting required to get it back online, we’d just shrug and say, ‘fuck it’ and revert back to the old-fashioned way of doing things.

Fortunately, in college I had studied philosophy and done a little bit of debate, and so I was well-equipped to carry out the kind of proselytizing that predominates in vegan advocacy ‘After Singer,’ the Holy Father of our movement. Roughly, you begin by hearing out their ‘excuses,’ then you proceed to debunk their claims—either by pointing out inconsistencies or by referring them to ‘the facts’—and finally you hit them while they are stunned with your iron-clad argument and in this way subordinate them to the authority of your command: Go Vegan.

Again, I started out hopeful of such an approach. Philosophy, after all, had trained me to communicate in precisely this way. Not before long, however, I began to realize that—just as with our nifty virtual reality simulator—this method of persuasion fared better on paper than in practice. In practice, argument rarely yielded the sort of result I was aiming for. “Sure,” my interlocutor might say, “I can see why you think I am being inconsistent and/or irrational. But so what? I don’t care.” To which I could think of nothing to say. And that was only if I succeeded in enticing another to engage with me; more often than not they resisted all my attempts at initiating conversation, presumably because I had little in the first place to offer them that they saw of value.

Ultimately, what I took from my time with PETA is this: that disagreement often goes deep, deeper than (because prior to) a difference in explicitly held principles or a conflicting grasp of the empirical facts. Instead, when I disagree with another it can be more fundamentally because we to an extent live in separate worlds. And when the distance between us is so great and the differences so various and encompassing, argument stands little chance at bridging the gap and making a claim on the other.

Not being able to find the right language to articulate these intuitions of mine, they remained for a while inchoate—and all the more troublesome for that. It wasn’t until much later, while I was in grad school (largely to make sense of my failures as an activist), that I stumbled upon the particular word around which my scattered thinking on this matter was able finally to coalesce, and I experienced the intellectual catharsis that I had so long been searching for. That word was ‘vision,’ and I encountered it in a little-known essay called “Vision and Choice in Morality,” published in 1956 by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. In this paper, Murdoch observed that modern liberal morality was inclined to think of the “essence of moral life as sets of external choices backed up by arguments which appeal to facts” (79-80). According to this picture, when we disagree it is either because we subscribe to different principles (that is, we have chosen to define concepts such as ‘right’ or ‘good’ in relation to different states of affairs), or it may be that we share the same principles but “differ about what exactly the facts are” (which in turn results in a difference in what it looks like to act according to those same principles). However, when we attend to all those activities that may be said to “constitute an important part of what, in the ordinary sense, a person ‘is like’” (80)—for instance, “their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny: in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation” (80-81)—then “moral differences look less like differences of choice, given the same facts, and more like differences of vision… We differ not only because we select different objects out of the same world but because we see different worlds” in the first place (82).

Such an analysis, Murdoch believed, had implications too for what is required to bridge a gap of understanding between different individuals: “communication of a new moral concept cannot necessarily be achieved by specification of factual criteria open to any observer (‘Approve of this area!’) but may involve the communication of a completely new, possibly far-reaching and coherent, vision” (82). In many cases, that is, we simply cannot take for granted that all the facts at our disposal will be the same, even to the diligent observer; and, if this is so, having one’s stance understood requires a sharing of one’s unique perspective with another, describing to them how the world appears from one’s own particular vantage point.

But here there may arise the following compounding difficulties: first, the words used in such a description might in turn possess a dimension of meaning that corresponds to the personal, largely private experiences of the user; and, if one has not had those experiences, these words will in turn remain inaccessible to them. In such cases, getting one’s message across may necessitate first inviting the other to attend to the way that things are and thereby to discover and to experience for themselves that concept’s meaning and worth. There may then be the further difficulty that the other not even have access to the psychical environment that could ground such an experience in the first place. “Words,” writes Murdoch, “have both spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts. We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their context… Often we cannot” (325). Which is not to say that the task of understanding of another’s conceptual scheme then becomes impossible, only more challenging in that it requires one to supply the context that is missing.

Ultimately, Murdoch’s notion of vision as that which makes one different from another (morally speaking), and as that which we can share in order to come to a deep mutual understanding I find attractive because it opens for us the possibility to imagine and develop an entirely new approach to persuasion beyond simple argument—the approach that continues to predominate today in animal advocacy despite how ineffective it has been at moving us towards the goal of total liberation.

• For a concrete example of what the sharing of a vision might look like, read my earlier pieces: Every Vegan Should Have an Origin Story and The Urgency of Action.

• For a more detailed look at the importance of context for getting a message across (and how to create such context in cases where it is missing), read Missing is the Context.

Work Cited

Murdoch, Iris. 1998. Existentialists and Mystics. London: Routledge.

Once I believed in the sincerity of such questions asked in such contexts. I took them as stemming from genuine curiosity or a response to a sudden pang of self-doubt—in either case signaling a willingness to reevaluate certain assumptions, entrenched habits, personal failings; so, I’d share with them something of my own story, my own reasons, my overall perspective. And, of course, I’d try very hard not to make explicit my disapproval of their decision to order precisely the item on the menu that they did. Instead, I saw myself as opening up a new possibility for them that perhaps they had not considered before this conversation, at least not in the exact terms in which I was presenting it.

Invariably, after having opened myself up to my dining companion in this way, thus making myself vulnerable before them, offering them some piece of me that I treasure, they’d most likely respond with a joke. Jerking the wing as if it were attempting a desperate flight, they might begin to cry out, “Please don’t eat me! Don’t eat me, please!” before bringing it back into their mouth with a self-satisfied grin.

Once I believed in the sincerity of such questions asked in such contexts; now I no longer do. Now, I see them for what they are: an expression of insecurity, an attempt at self-consolation, and ultimately a deflection of a consideration of the wrongness of what they do. By soliciting from me what is implicitly a critique of their actions, they become thereby able to diffuse that critique, render it innocuous. And what, in turn, makes it possible for them to do this? It is precisely the material context which forms the backdrop to our conversation: the animal turned to meat; the meat in their hands.

I have found that when sitting at a table upon which animals are being served and eaten, it is senseless, at best perfunctory, for me to share my reasons for my convictions. Before the question “Is it wrong to eat animals?” can even be asked, the answer has already been given to us by the context, is taken for granted, and thus cannot be given up, placed back on the table for serious consideration.

It is my view that the context in which one speaks, while seldom discussed, is nevertheless a crucial factor determining just how persuasive the vision of human-animal relations that we share with another will be—either it will expound on and corroborate a vision, or else render it shallow and puerile.

Ostensibly, most effective activists already possess an intuitive grasp of this principle (as evidenced in their tactics and campaigns). Perhaps the clearest example I can think of is that of Anonymous for the Voiceless (AV), in which slaughterhouse footage broadcast on television screens on public sidewalks is made into the backdrop for structured conversations on the wrongness of eating meat. Here, to accept the invitation to attend to the suffering of animals is to enter a space within which the prevailing dogma dictating to us the terms of our relationships to animals can be called into question. This approach, in turn, has its roots in Singer’s Animal Liberation. There too we see an argument brought to life by the details that surround it—in this case, the unflinching exposition of the cruelties that daily we inflict upon animals.

But though it may provide a valid critique, I cannot help but find this sort of context—found not only in Singer and AV, but also characteristic of all vegan outreach—both impoverished and uninspiring. At most, it can ground a vision in which animals are depicted as little more than passive victims of human misdeeds, and humans as feckless gluttons in need of discipline and restraint. It is my experience that if images of that sort do elicit any response at all (and usually they do not), at best it might take shape as feelings of guilt and remorse, coupled perhaps with a vague expression of concern.

While not in itself inappropriate, I have my doubts as to whether that in itself could serve as the impetus for a thoroughgoing transformation of one’s soul. It doesn’t seem likely, in other words, that it would be sufficient to spark in another a deep yearning for change. On the contrary, if the imagination is called on to contemplate the tribulations of the victims of our brutality, wouldn’t the more natural response be to recoil, to turn away, and to attempt to comfort oneself?1

And while I can grant that the pressure of critique and condemnation, if tenaciously applied, can perhaps push one into conformity with a more principled way of life, still there is always the risk that when the pressure lets up, the mind unsupervised will soon manufacture an escape: some excuse for why previous and more convenient patterns must be reverted to. This is why I think that lasting change instead requires more than just a push, but more importantly a deeply felt pull towards something understood as valuable. What we need is a stirring of desire by a positive articulation of what the human-animal relationship could amount to.

Though to be fair, I should acknowledge here that there is some positive vision, however slight, that corresponds to the depiction of animal suffering given to us by AV and the others in this tradition. In renouncing the practices that contribute to such evils, they can be taken also as implying that it is desirable to be (and thus one ought to strive to become) the sort of person who governs themselves according to a set of rationally derived principles—meaning both logically consistent and a proponent of equality. However, in practice, I wager that this element in fact contributes little to the persuasiveness of the strategy as a whole. First, their positive vision resides dimly in the background, encounterable only if and then afterone assents to the critique. Relatedly (second), it does not really suggest to us modes of engagement with animals that can replace those which are critiqued. That I consider one ‘equal’ says little about the sort of life I may then go on to lead with them.

Is there a better alternative? In what follows, I briefly sketch three possibilities.

• First, I’d like to propose a variation of the approach that I earlier associated with AV, in which slaughterhouse footage is presented as an accompaniment to efforts at outreach. Though I find the specific footage they use somewhat ineffective because uninspiring, I do think there is something to be said about the use of imagery as an anchor to conversations, that is, as a way of reigning them in whenever red herrings or philosophical questions in the vicinity threaten to deflect attention away from the living/dying animal under discussion. My proposed amendment would simply be to juxtapose the depictions of suffering already in use with images of animals who have been liberated, perhaps being cared for, taking pleasure in their freedom.

• At the risk of stating the obvious, I think there is no better context than that which is found in farm sanctuaries. Here, we encounter a positive vision of human-animal relations already embedded in the relationships between the animals and those who care for them, in the practices through which the ongoing story of their lives are recorded and shared with visitors, and in the trust and affection they may come to display towards humans (no small thing for many of them, given their traumatic pasts). And when these visitors are invited to feed and care for the animals, they are given the opportunity to go beyond merely observing this vision from the outside: they can embrace it as their own.

• Lastly, a context is provided also by those who work to liberate animals from the industries that exploit them. Whatever conjectures one may have about the mental state of a person who is willing to risk their own freedom for the sake of a few mink in a fur farm or beagles in a laboratory, it cannot be denied that such actions bespeak an inordinate amount of selflessness and courage. The presence of these traits alone is enough to command respect, which in turn can function as an invitation to imagine oneself into the perspective of the liberator, and thereby to see animals anew—that is, as creatures for whom it is in fact quite reasonable to risk one’s freedom in exchange for theirs.

And if you were wondering, now, when I’m sitting at a dinner table where meat is being served and am asked, “So why is it that you’re vegan again?” my answer simply is this: “Come with me to a protest, to a vigil, to a feedlot, a slaughterhouse, or even to potluck, a gathering of like-minds—then maybe you will begin to understand.”2

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When invited to speak to student activists, I sometimes introduce them to my concept of a ‘vegan origin story’: the account of how one has come to embody the values that led them to the advocacy work that has become so defining of who they now are. Then I will ask (mostly at this point as a rhetorical question), “Could an appeal to such a story form part of a broader strategy of persuasion, that is, as an invitation to another to consider animals in a way that they hadn’t before?” I present them with an example drawn from my personal history, a story that I have often employed in my own work as an activist:

When I was young, maybe 10 or 11, I would take the bus to and from school. Sitting by the window, usually alone, I’d amuse myself by tracking the changes in the scenery. I lived in the suburbs of Miami, so mostly it was stuff like strip malls, gas stations, non-descript warehouses, canals, and phosphate mines. There was, however, one notable exception to this endless repetition of the same: a small fenced-off pasture with nothing on it but a large oak and a solitary cow. I often looked forward to seeing this cow. She seemed always to be standing at the edge, looking (a little like me) out at the world with uncomprehending curiosity as it circled round her at a frenetic pace. Was she happy? Why was she always alone? Would it always be this way for her? I remember asking these questions. Likely they were asked just as much of myself as of her. Our lives were lived in parallel. And sometimes even, as our bus drove past her, our eyes would momentarily meet.

But it wasn’t every Friday that I’d take the bus home from school; some days either my mom or my dad would come to pick me up instead. Those rare occasions were always marked by a short detour to a fast-food restaurant of my choosing. It was on one of these happy occasions that a question occurred to me which I had never before considered. Unwrapping the burger on my lap, I asked aloud to my mother, What is this burger made of? Cows, she said.

I felt shock, betrayal. Why had I been allowed to do this? Why had no one ever told me? I wrapped the burger back up again and I declared that I did not want to eat this cow, cows were not to be eaten. I do not remember exactly her response, but I think it consisted of what you’d expect: she pointed out that eating cows was in fact normal—everybody did it—but that my response was not. And so, reluctantly, I unwrapped the burger for a second time and began to eat it.

On the drive home, we happened to pass by the plot of land where the same cow lived, but I found now that I could not turn my head to look; I could not face her for fear of her looking back at me. I knew then that I had to decide: either to be ‘normal,’ which meant never again asking the question of who it is I am eating, never returning the gaze of the animals, abused and exploited, who are always there at the peripheries of our lives, becoming thereby complicit in their increasing invisibility, or I could refuse to eat them, whatever the social cost, and thereby continue to live just as I was: I was a curious and impressionable child attuned to such things as the strange beauty of a cow in a field in the suburbs of Miami, yet to know the shame, remorse that for so many others accompany a meeting of the eyes, instead having known only wonder.

“How do you think I chose?” I will ask my interlocutor. When they answer correctly, I smile and say, “Yes, I have not eaten animals ever since. The person that I was I still am.”

After having shared this story with the student activists, I ask them to put themselves in the shoes of a person who eats meat but who hasn’t yet given the matter much thought. How would they imagine such a person to react to my story?

“Well, it is a little sappy,” someone might say.

“Yeah, but at the same time he does make himself vulnerable,” another chimes in. “I can’t imagine someone going on the defensive after hearing a story like that. Which is good, because it is true that non-vegans usually go on the defensive when it comes to the topic of eating meat; sometimes before you even get around to making an argument.”

“And that vulnerability might also be good if it gets the other person to respond in a similar manner.”

“And what might that look like,” I ask, “to respond in a similar manner?”

“I guess, ideally, they would search inside of themselves for some experience that is in harmony with yours.”

I allow discussion over the merits of this approach to persuasion to continue until it seems like they have a good sense of the various components that make for a compelling origin story. Then, I have them break out into groups of two or three and task each of them with coming up with one for themselves in collaboration with their partner (the best stories after all are forged in conversation). After a few minutes, I ask if anyone is struggling to think of something. Inevitably, a few will raise their hands, and to them I propose an entirely different assignment. “Can you come up with an argument designed to convince someone of the wrongness of eating meat? And unlike an origin story, I want you to try to make this argument as impersonal as you can. This should be an argument that everyone, no matter who they are or what they happen to care about, ought to accept.”

When it comes time for us reconvene and to share the stories and arguments that have been workshopped, a pattern seems to me to emerge. On the one hand, the stories are touching, mysterious; we find ourselves wanting to know more, understand why; we are reminded of similar happenings in our own lives, feel compelled to share in turn; conversation then leads to distilling the deeper meanings and implications of these stories—theirs and ours. When a precious thing is given, I tell them, the instinctual response is to give something in return.

The arguments, on the other hand, inevitably strike us as cold and perhaps even arrogant by comparison. The speaker seems to be setting themselves up as an authority over the other, wanting to coerce them into a conclusion that was settled in advance, according to some calculus in which the other had no say. Perhaps the pattern is this, I propose to them, to share is to invite another to look along with you, calling on their sympathetic imagination, whereas to argue is to issue a command, which is likely to be resisted because nobody likes to be told what to do.

The reasons commonly given for why we all ought to be vegan are not as strong as its proponents seem to think. Even if true that industrial animal agriculture is one of the greatest evils in the world today (which I certainly believe), still it isn’t clear what the individual is required to do about it. To abstain from animal products entirely might, after all, come at a huge cost to oneself while being negligible in terms of its impact on aggregate demand. And sure, we may demand of each individual that they ‘play their part’ in addressing societal ills, but why insist specifically on veganism as the basic non-negotiable obligation that applies equally to each and every one of us? Surely a humanitarian aid worker who travels into warzones and puts their life on the line can be excused if they decide they haven’t the energy to worry also about what not to eat.

And even if we do make it a top priority to reduce animal suffering, still that wouldn’t always necessarily require us to be vegan. Eating animals you have hunted yourself is likely less bad in terms of aggregate welfare than is consuming plants sourced from intensive farming operations (given all the collateral damage caused by the machinery used and fertilizer runoff, etc.). The same goes for roadkill, for flesh that would otherwise go to waste, and of course for cultivated meat.1

And if it turns out that the aversion is simply to the consumption of flesh itself, then veganism may in turn be symptomatic of a desire to extricate ourselves from natural processes characterized by relations of edibility (we eat and are eaten in turn). Surely such an anti-ecological posture can be nothing but self-defeating for a movement that has as its aim to reestablish a more respectful relationship with non-human others.2

For the above-stated reasons, a vegan identity as presently understood provides at best a shaky foundation for the work of animal liberation. There are two ways that I can think of addressing this problem: Either we march on towards a post-vegan animal advocacy, or we entirely rethink what it means to be vegan. Here I want to briefly sketch out what the second approach might look like.

It isn’t necessary that veganism be tied, as it currently is, to the aim of increasing aggregate welfare and/or to a strict condemnation of flesh itself. The former we saw isn’t enough to motivate action; the second can implicate us in potentially regressive and sinister ideologies; and both fumble and waver when it comes to offering prescriptions, dictating proper conduct. But it is possible, I think, to change ‘veganism’s’ object, its essential meaning, while keeping it as a unifying marker of identity and a compelling alternative to the status quo—maybe even morally compulsory for everyone in a western developed society.

So, the following is what I propose: that veganism be thought of primarily as a method, a practice, designed to be maximally disruptive to what is arguably the most foundational and malignant of all false ideologies: Human Supremacy. Let me break this down:

1) Human Supremacy is a perspective, a mode of taking up with the world, grounded on the belief that the possession of ‘Humanity’

• makes one essentially distinct from the rest the world,

• of greater importance than the rest of creation, and therefore

• entitled to the limitless use of all them who are not ‘Human.’

2) Ideologies maintain their hold on us through ritual reenactment. Rituals in turn are characterized by

• a progressive inward alignment with a certain value laden perspective, a manner of arranging the world and relating to it,

• an exchange whereby one gives something up to obtain another more desirable thing, and

• a building up of a material environment that is both conducive to the continuation of such rituals, and that reifies the perspective embodied in them.

3) The consumption of animal flesh in particular is the most central of the complex of rituals that uphold Human Supremacy. Thought of as ritual, the eating of flesh has as its function

• the transforming of living subjects into inert and passive matter, upon which our will can be exercised freely,

• the projection of our own animality onto the sub-Human other who is then sacrificed as an expiatory offering, thus delivering us from aspects of ourselves that point to our continuity with the natural world, and

• the consequent setting up of the Human as master over the subdued and subordinated sub-Human other.

4) In this light, veganism can be construed as a counter-ritual, having as its function

• to creatively affirm, forcefully make visible, the subject implicit in the animal flesh prepared for consumption,

• the renunciation of the impulse to degrade and impose our will on them who are powerless to resist us (and thus placed into the category of the sub-Human), and

• the introduction of friction into the machinery of Human Supremacy.

5) And finally, veganism can be argued obligatory for all those in western developed countries insofar as

• our domination of animals can be shown to be conceptually prior to, and thus legitimizing of, unjust forms of domination against marginalized human populations. Here’s how I think this works: the category of ‘The Human,’ though initially serving the purpose of setting us Homo sapiens above non-human animals, can also be deployed to exclude, denigrate, and license the exploitation of all those of our own species that do not have the power to contest their being categorized as ‘Animal.’3

• On a symbolic level, veganism can serve to express a belief in the worth of all beings, a rejection of the view that our species belongs at the top of some hierarchy, and a recognition of our species’ ecological provenance.

• Ultimately, veganism can create the opening for new kinds of relationships with animals to emerge and to flourish, relationships in which both parties meet as equal without the threat of violence looming overhead.

Too often other so-called vegans tell me (unprompted mind you) that the reason they do not speak out for animals is because they do not want to be a judgy/preachy/self-righteous/sanctimonious vegan. And always I find this declaration amusing. Though left unstated the following is implied: that vegans who do judge their cause favorably and make those judgments known are by contrast annoying/grating/patronizing/condescending/moralizing/perhaps even downright detestable. Which, of course, is a very judgmental stance for them to take.

What conformist vegans (as I judgmentally call them) fail to see is that any kind of justification for an action already entails a judgment. This is inescapable. To say ‘I do X because of Y’ is to judge Y as a good reason to do X. So, in the same way, to say ‘I do not speak out for animals because I do not want to be a judgmental vegan’ is to judge 'being a judgmental vegan’ a good reason against ‘speaking out for animals.’1

There is then a kind of chicanery to this declaration: while presenting themselves as taking a stance against all judgment, in truth they are taking a stance against one judgment in favor of another. They are saying, in effect, that the badness of having convictions over the treatment of animals outweighs whatever good we may think we do in advocating for them; that it is better that we conform than let our judgments disrupt the human supremacist status quo.

I suspect part of why conformist vegans disguise their meaning in this way is that it shields them from reproach.

‘No, no—don’t get so defensive you preachy vegan. I did not mean to legislate what is right and wrong for all humankind, only for myself.”

Dishonesty aside, there is something fundamentally absurd about this—about endorsing a reason for holding a certain stance and not intending it as binding for anyone else. Presumably, if morality really could be so idiosyncratic as this, akin to deciding on one’s preferred flavor of ice cream, then why bother offering a justification at all? To attempt a justification presupposes that others could at least in theory understand your reasons and, in understanding them, also potentially take them up as their own.

In any case, it is illuminating here to ask them whether they take the same stance in respect to other forms of injustice or whether it’s only this one. Go down the list, I am sure there is something they find intolerable. Once you find it, then there you have once again a comparative judgment: yes, child abuse for instance is bad enough to merit being judgmental about, but not the animal genocide—that I just find icky.

As to what might be motivating this disavowal of judgment, that is not so hard to guess at. It is cowardice: a fear of being oneself judged by others, shunned for one’s convictions. What is ironic and sad about all this is that it means one can be both an ally in the fight for animal justice and also inadvertently an enemy, perpetuating a stigma that still haunts and hampers our movement.

To be clear, I am not saying that the judgments vegan activists are in the habit of making merit no scrutiny at all. On the contrary, I believe we all need to think really hard about who and what merit judgment and of what sort. To what extent should we hold individuals responsible for their complicity in the system that ravages animal bodies at an industrial scale? What about those who directly inflict violence at scales much smaller? And if what they do is born of necessity, how much does that exonerate them? What if they themselves are victims too? Or perhaps our rage and condemnation should be reserved for the systems, ideologies, practices that perpetuate the conditions that animals now suffer through. And how much of the decision of who we blame is to be informed by a strategic consideration of the effects that blame?