Arguments given for why we ought to eschew all animal products and go vegan are not nearly as persuasive as those who advance them would like to believe. Even if true that industrial animal agriculture constitutes one of the greatest injustices perpetrated by our species and that we collectively have an obligation to dismantle it (both of which are hard to dispute), still it isn’t clear that this generates any obligation for the individual. To abstain from animal products entirely might, after all, come at a huge cost to oneself while being itself negligible in terms of its impact on overall demand (see, e.g., Harris & Galvin 2012, Chignell 2016, Warfield 2016, Budolfson 2016, Fischer 2020, Schwarz 2025). And sure, we may require 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 time nor the energy to worry also about what not to eat (see Fischer 2020, 2-3).
And even if the aim of minimizing our individual contributions to animal suffering were just a commitment voluntarily assumed (as opposed to an obligation incumbent on all), still that wouldn’t always necessarily mean, in practice, that we ought to be strict vegans. Eating animals you have hunted yourself is likely less bad in terms of aggregate welfare than is consuming plant foods sourced from intensive farming operations where animals are sometimes accidentally killed by machinery or intentionally poisoned (Demetriou & Fischer 2018). The same could be said for eating roadkill (Bruckner 2015), for meat that would otherwise go to waste (Rachels 2011), and maybe even for some small scale ‘humane’ farms (Cuneo 2016).
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 (Plumwood 2000).
The untenability of the claim that ‘consuming animals is always bad and all of us have an obligation to eschew it,’ I think is enough to disqualify a vegan identity, as presently understood, from serving as a foundation for the work of animal liberation. Consider that an identity in large part determines the methods, messages, and priorities of the movement it corresponds to—hence the focus on evangelizing, the reliance on the argument that ‘you must go vegan or else you are prejudiced and irrational,’ and the oft-toted aim of ‘maximizing conversions’ that characterizes the orthodox wing of animal advocacy (here think PETA and Anonymous for the Voiceless). Thus, far from being a tangential concern, the coherence and adequacy of an identity ought to take center stage in deliberations about strategy.
There are two solutions to this problem, at least that I can see: Either we march on towards a post-vegan animal advocacy, or we entirely rethink what it means to be vegan. The former is already being explored, is increasingly gaining momentum, and is poised to become the default for the movement. It is centered on corporate and legislative welfare campaigns and incentivizing meat substitutions (think Humane World, Mercy for Animals, The Good Food
Institute, The Humane League, etc.). Yeah, that’s fine, but also how boring, how lacking in verve and in vision. The latter is the one that interests me—if anything, because yet unexplored. In what follows, I sketch one possibility for a new vegan identity and all it might entail.
I want us to rethink the assumption that veganism must be tied to the aim of increasing aggregate welfare and/or to a strict condemnation of flesh itself. The former we saw is not enough to motivate action (because causally inefficacious); the second can implicate us in potentially regressive and sinister ideologies (meaning anti-ecological); and so both ultimately fail to provide us with a robust defense of a vegan identity. What ought to be reimagined is the object of ‘veganism’; what ought to stay the same is its service as a marker of group belonging (a banner under which to fight), and as a compelling alternative to the status quo. So, what I propose is this: that veganism be thought of as an identity arising out of a practice, a counter-ritual, that aims to disrupt what is arguably the most foundational and malignant of all false ideologies: Human Supremacy. Let me break this down.1
Human Supremacy as False Ideology
As it resides inside us, Human Supremacy appears as the idea that the possession of ‘Humanity’ makes one essentially distinct from and of greater importance than every other being, and its corollary: that we who are Human are therefore entitled to the limitless use of them who are not.
To clarify, I don’t mean by ‘Humanity’ a reference to the scientific category ‘Homo sapiens’; instead, I mean it as a normative ideal—typically associated with the possession of certain traits like reason and agency—against which both humans and animals can be measured. Likewise, the label of ‘Animal,’ although originating as a justification for our subordination of literal animals, can be metaphorically extended to speak of—degrade—all those of our kind we consider to be ‘sub-Human.’ Thus, Human Supremacy (as it operates inside us) allows us to explain how it is that some animals (like ‘pets’) can be seen as possessing a greater degree of Humanity than some humans (like immigrants, who are treated as ‘pests’). This makes its diagnosis of the problem notably different, and I think more appealing, than those who take it to be a matter of
‘speciesism’—defined simply as the arbitrary discrimination against all those who are not Homo sapiens—and who therefore cannot explain why many of our own are wholesale excluded from the moral community, while some animals are enthusiastically let in (on this point, see Calarco 2024).
All this is fantasy, of course. Operating as ideology, Human Supremacy misrepresents to us how things actually are, both disguising domination and then reimagining these same relations as ‘the way things ought to be.’2 It’s not that each individual is duped into believing a lie, a lie which they act on and thereby inscribe into reality; it is rather the reverse: that our practices repeatedly affirm as truth what is really just a fantasy, and in this way make us into subjects within which these lies are then inscribed. Human Supremacy thus operates primarily at the material level—the level of institutions, its prescribed practices, and the rituals that govern those practices—and only derivatively at the level of ideas. Here again we see a stark contrast with the
view that the fundamental error is that each of us are ‘speciesist,’ having chosen to act according to a prejudice that is arbitrary and thus irrational. What this fails to appreciate, however, is that our material context has conspired to make us into the subjects that we are. To the extent that one behaves in ‘speciesist’ ways, it is only because the ideology of Human Supremacy has been successfully realized in them. And if such is the case, the non-speciesist identity will not even appear to them a choice.
The Consumption of Animals as Ritualized Enactment of Human Supremacy
The consumption of animal flesh in particular is the most central of the complex of rituals that perpetuate Human Supremacy. Partly this is due to just how often animals—their bodies—appear on our plates, and the extent to which our identity is predicated on how and what and when and with whom it is we eat. Partly it is historical: the domination of today has its roots in the domestication of animals millennia ago for the purposes of eating them; the other ways we dominate them (for scientific research, entertainment, fashion, etc.) can thus be thought derivative. And partly it is because no other form of animal exploitation comes close, in terms of scale and severity, to the machinery of death that is industrialized animal agriculture.
Thought of as ritual, the various practices associated with the preparing, serving, and eating of animals have as their aim the progressive inner alignment of a subject with a certain value laden perspective. Materially, this ritual consists in the transforming of living beings into inert and passive matter, matter upon which our designs are then imposed, designs that have as their aim of gratifying of our desires. Symbolically, this ritual allows for 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. As a result of this process, a subject will find themselves inhabiting the status of master (separate and superior) over the subdued and subordinated Animal other.3
Preserving a ritual’s meaning and proper functioning, ensuring its persistence in the lives of its subjects—these are the tasks undertaken by institutions. In the case of eating meat, these institutions include, but are not limited to: the corporations that raise and slaughter animals by the billions; the government and its officials who these corporations pay in exchange for subsidies, exemptions in the law, the promotion of its products, and the incarceration of its enemies; and the media that represents to us the world as distorted by ideology while claiming it the truth. In all three examples, what we see is the reproduction of the material conditions that the ritual in question depends on; by extension, also reproduced is our own subjection to the prevailing ideology of Human Supremacy.
Counter-Rituals and the Formation of a New Vegan Identity
Having accounted for the practices and institutions through which Human Supremacy inscribes itself in the individual, what now remains is to reimagine veganism as an identity that can serve as its antithesis: disrupting its operations while establishing itself as a more compelling alternative. With this aim in view, I propose that veganism, understood as identity, be thought of as arising from a set of what I call ‘counter-rituals.’ These counter-rituals would have as their function: (1) the creative affirmation—forcefully making visible—the subject implicit in the animal flesh prepared for consumption; (2) the public renunciation of the impulse to degrade and impose our will on them who are powerless to resist us (thereby placed into the category of the
sub-Human); and, most importantly, (3) the introduction of friction into the machinery of Human Supremacy. The best example of this is found in the grassroots pressure campaign. The format is as follows: an institution devoted to the continued exploitation of animals is targeted; a demand is made—ideally one that is winnable, and yet costly to them; and then pressure—gradually escalating—is applied in the form of disruption to what for them constitute ‘normal operations.’
The demand could be for a restaurant to remove foie gras from their menu, a grocery store chain to stop selling eggs from hens kept in battery cages, an investment firm to cut its ties with an especially egregious corporation, or the liberation of animals from confinement.4
The value of such rituals, to be clear, extends beyond the impact they might have on the animals exploited by industrialized agriculture. Just as important is their symbolic function and, by extension, their role in the formation of a certain kind of subject: that is, one whose actions express both a repudiation of the view that our species belongs at the top of some hierarchy and an affirmation of the inherent worth of all beings. This can be clearly seen in the performance of rage and indignation at protests, particularly in the ritual of call-and-response chanting, in which one person begins a phrase that is then completed by the group. Take the following three examples:
We will not back down
Until you stop the killing
Raise your fist and raise your voice
Innocent animals have no choice
For their freedom and their lives
We will never compromise
In their response, each individual recognizes themselves as the subject being called. That is, they become the person these words call on them to be, the sort of person of whom it can be said that they will ‘raise their voice,’ ‘not back down,’ and ‘never compromise’ in the fight for animal justice. Participation in this ritual thus serves the function of constituting an individual as a vegan.
And although this isn’t an identity that one could argue all moral agents are obligated to embrace, that’s not to say there aren’t good reasons to do so.5 Human Supremacy, as I claimed at the outset, is among the most foundational and malignant of all false ideologies. To restate a point made earlier, this partly because our domination of animals is in some sense conceptually prior to, and thus legitimizing of, unjust forms of domination directed at marginalized human populations. By this I mean that 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 those members of our own species that lack the power to contest their being categorized as ‘Animal.’ Furthermore, because predicated on a denial of our own ecological provenance, the case can also be made that Human Supremacy is at the root of our neglect of the health of the wider ecosystem of which we are an integral part. In repudiating the animal that we are, that is, we obscure the ways we depend on, and must collaborate with, the wider ecosystem for our survival and our flourishing.
To be clear, I am not here making the lousy, commonplace argument that those who care about human injustice and environmental degradation ought therefore, on pain of inconsistency, to care about animals too.6 On the contrary, my point is that a vegan identity, as I have been defining it, is valuable in that it can offer us a way of understanding what seem on the surface like unrelated injustices as being in fact manifestations of the same logic. In fighting against one, you are actually fighting against all. Regrettably, we have seen activists fighting for animal, human, and environmental liberation become increasingly siloed, paying lip service to other struggles only when convenient and disavowing them when a liability (on this point see Kim 2015). Because predicated on an insight into the underlying structures of domination, then perhaps bridging these existing divides ought to be taken up as a priority for veganism as I have reimagined it.7
Conclusion
I have presented veganism as an identity capable of exposing and disrupting an ideology that sanctions and reproduces our domination of other animals—what I have called Human Supremacy. As it stands, however, this identity remains largely negative, defined by what it stands against. And though this may be a necessary first step in creating the space for a more positive identity to emerge, it does not yet tell us what our relations with animals ought to look like instead. The work that remains is thus to integrate into this activist identity a positive vision of human-animal relations that we ought to strive towards.
Bibliography
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I will admit that I’m not crazy about the word ‘vegan.’ Mostly it’s because it comes from the word ‘vegetable.’ Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-vegetable. Far from it! It’s just that I worry that it carries with it the implication that one fights for animals by eating vegetables—which is precisely the connection that I want to break. Maybe a different word is called for. In Spanish, a distinction is made between a vegan and an ‘animalista’—the latter implying that, in addition to not eating meat, one also engages in activism. I wish we had a word like that in English. ‘Animalist’ doesn’t really sound right to my ears, otherwise I would’ve already appropriated it. Here’s hoping that a better word comes along. Until then, ‘vegan’ will have to do.
Here and in what follows, I’m going to be relying on Louis Althusser’s concepts of ideology, ritual, and subject formation as presented in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (2014).
I should clarify that I am not implying that the practice of meat eating always everywhere functions as a ritual reenactment of Human Supremacy. It’s likely not the case, for instance, that eating meat from a dumpster reproduces relations of domination.
Advocacy of this kind is becoming increasingly common; recently formed groups such as Animal Advocacy Collective (AAC), Coalition Against the Fur Trade (CAFT), and International Council on Animal Welfare (ICAW) have been leading the charge.
A similar argument is made by Fischer (2020), who grants that “people have reasons to go vegan; even good reasons” (2). I part with him, however, when he claims that individuals “have a fair amount of discretion in [choosing] their moral projects” (3), which he considers to be analogous to the sort of discretion one has in deciding with their partner whether or not to have an open relationship (158). While I can agree that we have some discretion in choosing which moral projects to commit ourselves to, surely we can distinguish between projects that are more or less worthwhile. Comparing the decision to that between monogamy and polyamory, by contrast, makes it seem almost arbitrary.
For a systematic critique of this argument, see my article “Racism, Speciesism, and the Argument from Analogy” (Cantens 2025).
Of course, I am also sensitive to the fact that the animal rights movement has comparatively fewer members and much less funding.