One of the many powerful essays I’ve read about veganism comes from J.M. Coetzee.

The article has various titles depending on the publisher; it’s known as “Animals can’t speak for themselves - it’s up to us to do it” in one place and “Exposing the Beast: Factory Farming Must be Called to the Slaughterhouse” in another.

Here is just one section of the article. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing:

“The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it impossible to ignore. It came when in the mid-20th century a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the processing - of human beings.”

“Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been up to. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it - a crime against nature - to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!”[...]

“The campaign of human beings for animal rights is curious in one respect: the creatures on whose behalf human beings are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in which animals do not know what is wrong - they do certainly not know what is wrong in the same way that humans do.”

“Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to animals, the animal rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to end.”

Humans are the ones with a choice about what to eat and how to act morally. We can choose to behave ethically and reject the use of non-human animals in our food, clothing, medicine, and entertainment. Or we can choose to behave unethically and reject respect, morality, logic, compassion, health, love, and peace.

This article also serves as a reminder of what we can do as activists. At the most basic level of armchair activism, we can write letters and articles about animal rights and veganism. We can publish those letters in newspapers, magazines, and blogs.

Sections: Vegan Theory
Topics: Theory, veg, Vegan