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faketrain:

itsthefirstday:

Reblogged for commentary, because I’m tired of seeing “eating meat” conflated with “speciesism” and paving the way for a lot of straw-man arguments on both sides. I think that speciesism is a real, overlooked form of oppression that is deep-seated and tied in with a lot of other fucked-up things in our world, and I mean, yeah, it can be difficult to navigate discussions about this in a way that isn’t tokenizing or insulting to various people. I find Eris’ opinions on speciesism to echo a lot of my own feelings; it’s valid and important to vocalize the fact that people assume dominion over animals and that that’s so fucked-up, but don’t express it in a way that cheapens or undermines other liberation struggles. I mean, I guess that goes without saying for any type of anti-oppression work.

I’ve been devoted to animals for more or less my whole life. Taking a course to mobilize and provide shelter for animals in crisis situations; fostering homeless pets; constantly learning more about how to properly care for dogs and cats (ideal diet, integrative animal-focused medicine, respectful ways of training that are individual-focused and based on positively reinforcing an animal’s desire to do animal things, etc); doing the whole “spay and neuter your pets!” shtick and trying to get the word out that there are affordable ways to do it; trying to figure out how my interest in animals relates to my privileges as well as the fucked-up things that I’ve endured. I’m planning on working in the veterinary field for the rest of my days. I know, so reformist. All that said, I don’t agree with animal liberationist philosophy. I’m actually not profoundly opposed to the domestication of animals (maybe partly because everyone I’ve ever known who has been vociferously anti-domestication was more or less just using that as a front for disliking animals), because I don’t see it as an inherently dominant/subordinate dynamic. And I’m not vegan. I find lifestyle veganism thoroughly obnoxious. I eat meat. But I’ll be damned if I let anyone say “they’re just animals” around me. (And I don’t think that any of these things contradict each other. Maybe I’m morally repugnant; I don’t know.)

I suppose that my idea of anti-speciesism is to let a honeybee be a honeybee; let a dog be a dog; let a finch be a finch. Stop being anthropocentric douchebags.(I think that the best way that speciesism could be summed up is one of my professors from college talking about how spiders are amazing! Spiders are so great; they have extraordinarily complex habits and profound abilities to roll with changes and to use physical laws to their advantage. But what good does that do humans!? So spiders are yucky and gross, while some octopus who can open a jar lid is SO INCREDIBLE OH MY GOD THEY’RE JUST LIKE PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!1) Don’t paternalize animals. Try to understand their needs and their individual, unique ways of communicating. And don’t assign more intrinsic worth to one species over another. I can respect the ways that folks in completely different circumstances than my own also keep animals and manage to do it in harmonious, non-fucked-up ways. And so yeah, it’s not about whether or not you eat meat or use the byproducts of their bodies or keep them in your community or your house or on your land or if they do work that benefits you (and by extension, how you supposedly belong in the depths of hell if any of that applies; oh dear, poor me); it’s about respecting other life-forms and respecting what they have to offer. I wish that people would stop fucking up productive, important discourse on speciesism with their veganism bullshit.

 Bolding of Gray’s response is mine for emphasis/agreeing.

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You say “Food choices are personal and you can’t tell people what to eat or what to do with their lives, even.” I don’t see how this is in anyway a defensible statement. First, reading through your blog, there are examples of you advocating for a position or reblogging posts/quotes advocating for something. If you ever accept “You can’t tell me what to do with my life, it’s personal” as an acceptable argument, discourse is dead. There can be no argument if that kind of line is worth honoring. If we never tried to persuade anyone to change, the world would be stagnant and the status quo would reign supreme. The world is very far from perfect, but I think it’s safe to say it’s a lot better for many people than it was 100 or 1000 years ago. If we want change for anything (and I don’t know of any person that doesn’t want some kind of change), it will require people being persuaded to change their personal choices. 

Sure, one individual choice has little effect, but such things do not happen in a vacuum. A world heavily reliant on eating meat has serious consequences for the world as a whole. Since you implored readers to argue facts and not opinions, here are some relevant facts from a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: 

• Worldwide, 30% of land is dedicated to livestock production (26% for pasture, 4% for feed production (which is 33% of all cropland)).
• In the US, livestock production is responsible for 55% of soil mass erosion (with 40% of that contaminating freshwater supplies). 90% of US cropland is losing soil.
• The livestock sector is responsible for 1/3 of Nitrogen and Phosphorous load into freshwater sources, causing accelerated and excessive eutrophication.
• Worldwide, livestock production accounts for 18% of greenhouse gases (and notably 65% (and increasing) of nitrous oxide, which has 310 times the potential of carbon dioxide for global warming).
• In the US, half of all antibiotics are used for animals (which then end up in our water supply).
• In the US, corn and soybeans are the primary source of feed for livestock (60% of all corn and 40% of all soybean production) and 70% of all herbicide use is for corn and soybeans.
• Globally, 70% of rangelands are considered degraded, causing less water infiltration and greater soil saturation. Moderate grazing reduces infiltration to 75%, heavy grazing reduces it to 50%. 60% of US land is overgrazed.
• Globally, 24% of world fishery production is for fishmeal and fish oil for feed. 
• From 1991 to 1997, global demand for fish increased 31% while supply increased only 9%. 52% of world fisheries are fully exploited, 17% are overexploited, and 7% are depleted.

These are but a small selection of the data from that report. I recommend looking through the whole thing for greater context and more information. The point, though, is that there are serious consequences to our dependence on meat for a large portion of our food.

One might say, well, if we went to non-meat sources for our food, wouldn’t we still have all these problems? We wouldn’t. In fact, we could produce a far greater quantity of food — a not unimportant consideration considering the world population is projected to swell to nine billion before reaching a leveling off or declining period. Why is this so? Many reasons, but the one overriding one (to me) is differences in trophic levels. The energy flow from a lower trophic level to a higher one is very inefficient because of heat loss; a (very rough) approximation is that 90% of the energy is lost. So, a piece of meat that’s worth 1000 calories to you would have been 10000 calories if you had eaten the plants that were required for that animal to eat. It’s biological reality.

As you can imagine, removing that kind of inefficiency in our diet could have a profound impact on our environment. Eating meat is a personal choice that has a deleterious effect when multiplied by billions of consumers. I don’t think it’s inherently evil. But, given the current state of the world, if you have the option to not consume meat, it is a good choice to make. And a lot of people who do have that option do not exercise it. Even small reductions in our meat consumption (10-20%) would have a major impact, which is all the more reason to advocate for a shift to a vegan diet. 

It’s good that you’re a vegan. However, relegating that decision behind the invincible barrier of “personal choice” is not helpful. Even if you lived near some local, free range, humanely killed, cheap meat, I still don’t think eating meat would be the correct course of action. That meat is ever cheaper than fruits and vegetables is because of a systemic decision to subsidize the production and sale of meat, not because it is inherently cheaper (think of what animals must be fed with, after all). So, in that case veganism isn’t the problem to target, but the governmental subsidizing and corporate influence that has made it so. 

I could probably go on and on, but I should end this post somewhere. I just wanted to focus on the idea that regardless of the moral or ethical status of an individual choice, collective choices have real impact on our world and, so far, the decision to increasingly favor meat has become a negative one.