What Would Happen To The Animals?
Print This Post
A fellow vegan recently posed this question to a veg group: If the world went vegan, what would happen to all the farm animals?
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the question. Here is my answer:
The question you raise is one I think is actually funny. “What would we do with the animals?” It is a question raised by Barbara Kingsolver in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (the link is to my review of her book). Here is my answer:
Over time, if the world goes the way we’d like, fewer and fewer “industrial” animals will be bred. Eventually they would go extinct. If a few get mixed into the wild herds we may have some interesting animals but their survival will depend on how well they can handle that environment. Many will likely be kept in sanctuaries until they die (and not allowed to breed).
That’s how I see it going. The world is not going to stop eating meat and other animal products suddenly. I cannot imagine any scenario where that would happen, even if all of the health issues became common knowledge (people still smoke). I am too cynical to believe everyone will suddenly develop a conscience about animals, though I would love to be proven wrong (in fact, I would so much love to figure out how to reach that tipping point, when people start thinking about food animals differently). Therefore, the best I can see happening is a dramatic decrease in meat eating, along with a rising belief in the wrongness of it, leading eventually to fewer and fewer farm animals being raised.
Another thing Barbara asked was what about the milk? Those cows need to be milked! It was a shock to me to read that, because she is not lacking in knowledge about animals. It did not occur to her, however, that cows are like humans. When the demand goes, so goes the milk. Strange that she – and so many others – would not understand this simple bit of biology.
This is one question we really don’t have to worry about – but I wish we did.
People who worry about what would happen to farm animals if everyone went vegan aren’t really interested in farm animals’ wellbeing. Because it’s clear that even if they’d all die, that’s still not a good reason to torture, kill, and eat them.
Ultimately, there is no good reason to eat animal products. Nonvegans are merely grasping at straws with arguments like “what would happen to all the farm animals?”
I had this exact conversation with a workmate yesterday and he accused me of wanting all the cows to die! I pointed out that *he* wanted all the cows to die, and he replied, ‘No, I want to eat them.’ I had thought him an intelligent person up until then.
There’s a pretty funny thread about this on the
PPK…perhaps the cows will take over the world?
Amelia´s last blog ..Remember, Remember
Eccentric – the person who asked this question is a fellow vegan. That is one reason I thought it such an odd – funny – question. He genuinely worried about it.
Amelia, that is one funny conversation over there on PPK.
I wonder if this “fellow vegan” is also someone who supports kill shelters on the premise that there simply “aren’t enough hearts and homes” for all the cats, dogs, and rabbits in shelters.
These people have small minds and can’t think outside the narrow box of what currently exists. They simply cannot imagine a better world and so they let their lack of creativity determine their reality. Sad.
Here’s my response to people whose imaginations can reach far enough to pose ridiculous hypothetical scenarios yet can’t reach further to find realistic solutions:
IT DOESN’T MATTER.
The future of animal agriculture is not in your hands. What is in your hands are your individual actions. When you eat animals, you have blood on your hands.
You choose what kind of person you want to be: someone who eats like they care about animals, the environment, and human health, or someone who doesn’t.
This fellow vegan, Eccentric, cares so deeply about animals – in any situation – that he gets tangled in knots, distressed that he is unable to make the whole world vegan right now. His question was honest and sincere. He was not baiting or trying to catch anyone up.
Perhaps I should have elaborated on the question. He had thought a lot about it and wanted to know what other people thought. This is not a person with a small mind, but instead one with a huge heart.
I’m highly skeptical of such people, but if you say he’s legit, he’s legit. So… here’s how I would respond to him:
First, what if people worried about these kinds of issues in other circumstances? For example, what would happen to all the people who are currently starving or dying of disease if the world suddenly changed and no one starved or died of disease? There would be consequences and some would be bad, but should we worry about those consequences or should we continue to prevent starvation and cure disease?
Second, OK, so what if the world went vegan? Let’s think about our vegan utopia. Let’s make a plan. Let’s imagine it and visualize it and TRY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.
I still think you are making too much of this, Eccentric. Too much of a question thrown out to other vegans, not to anyone else.
I know this person. I have had conversations at a potluck with him. I have read his passionate discussions in our forums. We have been to the same events.
He is not just sitting around worrying about this one thing! This was one question of many, and it reminded me of others who have asked that question, who were less sympathetic characters.
If I only knew him online I might be suspicious, too, especially if all he did was agonize over that question (but that’s not the case). I did not provide a full bio because it was the question I was addressing, not the questioner.
And yes, this person is one who thinks a lot about how to make the whole world vegan. He’s impatient. He wants it NOW. That may be why he got to thinking “what if…?”
To add another perspective: I think this IS an important question, not because of its content but because of HOW it is used. I often here this argument used to say that veganism is unethical, because it advocates the extinction of farm animals. It’s a rhetorical strategy used to avoid discussing the ethics of meat eating itself.
So I think we need to take it seriously by not taking it seriously- point out what the question is doing. But I do NOT think veganism is about exterminism (Donna Haraway’s term- if you don’t know her work she’s a prominent scholar of animal studies that is fervently anti-vegan). We’re such a long way from a vegan world that this is not an issue. IF in some future world cows and pigs started to become endangered species, then that will be dealt with accordingly. Also, there is not a universal set of farm animals in the world. Cows, for the obvious example, are treated differently in other counties, just as dogs are in much of the western world. The exterminism scenario will NEVER happen
But I think the question functions as mentioned above. The questioning vegan was probably just trying to figure out how to answer it.
Stephanie, I think that’s it, that’s what this vegan was doing. He wasn’t sure how to answer it so he was asking others what their thoughts were.
And yes, mostly it is used to attack veganism.
Agreeing with Stephanie, I think the main issue for most people who ask “what would happen to the animals” are more interested in extinction than in overpopulation. I answered this question at the Soapbox over a year ago: http://www.vegansoapbox.com/cattle-will-go-extinct-if-we-dont-eat-them-absurdity/ where I said:
“We don’t have to eat something in order to make sure it doesn’t go extinct. It’s more than a little ridiculous to think we’d have to eat animals to keep the species from going extinct. There are other things we can do.”