Vegans Are Largely Correct About Meat

Killing and eating animals is incompatible with liberal religion

I’ve always dismissed veganism. When I first learned of the existence of people who, on principle, did not eat meat, I thought they suffered from a mental illness. That is partly because meat, in my country, is like caviar in the west. As a child, I was only entitled to one tiny piece of meat per day (on days where I had the meat to even eat) and could only take it as part of dinner. So eating meat, to me, is the highest from of culinary luxury. To then discover that some people did not partake in this delicacy because of some principle just seemed to me like regular white-western shenanigans.

As I grew older I refused to consider veganism based on its logic. I just regarded vegans as stupid. But they are not and their stance on eating meat is correct to the extent that it is coherent with western liberal moral philosophy.

Vegans do not eat meat because it is the product of the torture and murder of animals. They argue that animals are living beings who can feel pain, and as such killing and torturing them is about as immoral as killing and torturing another human being. In essence, vegans believe that since animals are also sentient beings who can feel pain, they should also be protected by the same common laws that protect human beings. The core of veganism can be reduced to the liberal shibboleth do no harm. It is hard to imagine what class of beings this principle applies to more than domesticated animals who can do no harm to humans even if they wanted.

The Gospel of The West

The third world and the West have an interesting relationship. On one hand, the third world resents the West for colonialism, racism and a thousand other isms. And on the other hand, the third world trudges along, as if like a blind man, after moral the philosophies of the West. Take Nigeria for instance.

A sizable portion of the country is Christian, and even those who aren't believe in such fantastic Western inventions such as human rights, right to fair trial, presidential systems of government, an independent judiciary and even individualism! Other such inventions include worship of the written word (legalism), freedom of the press, and last but not least democracy.

Even the most crazed “muh whitey bad” beret-wearing and Walter-Rodney-reading crooner is unlikely to utter even the vaguest bad word against democracy. Those who do only do it to the extent that democracy is a bad way of judging the people’s will — suspiciously never disputing the Lockeian ideal that the governed must consent to be governed for governance to be legitimate. Of course, all of the aforementioned are as Western as modern physics, chemistry, or Burger King.

While third world states are usually atrocious at aping the effectiveness and usefulness of these beliefs (Christianity, for instance, is become a hodgepodge of Oogabooga superstition, the rule of law is accurately described as the rule of the rich, human rights are a given as long as you have power to grab them, and freedom of speech exists to the extent that you can defend your freedom after speech), it's hard to say they don't implicitly accept their assumptions. They accept the assumptions and believe them — they are just really poor at acting them out.

Nevertheless, we have roughly the same assumptions about the validity of civil liberties. Humans should be free, and should have certain rights. These liberties aren't just granted to third worlders, but to every human being. After all, it's called human rights, not citizen rights. These rights are granted on the assumption that humans are sentient beings that can feel pain. What would be the point of them if there weren't an entity to feel their absence?

These cache of assumptions is what I call the liberal religion, and I make the brave observation that even third worlders — such as you and I — have been baptized right into it.

These are the assumptions black people use when they argue against racism; the assumptions muslims use to argue against Islamophobia; and the assumptions gay people use to argue against homophobia.

The Vegan Argument

From the perspective of all animals, humans are the worst beings to ever exist on the planet. We are basically psychopathic demons from hell who rear them to drink their blood and share their flesh. We are the worst beings ever made, and there's no comparison. A recent study published in Nature found that humans instill a level of fear in animals that even super predators like Lions do not.

The study found that animals reacted more negatively to the sound of women talking than to the sound of Lions roaring. Do you understand the implications of that? To the deer, antelope, or any of the animals we regularly hunt for sport and feed, the human being is the incarnation of a thousand demons. Of course they might not be able to articulate this, but they have brains that can feel this. Unconscious fear and trepidation is still fear and trepidation.

The vegan argument, as I can understand it, is this; humans shouldn't impose this much fear and pain on animals. Vegans further make the argument that the fear and pain we subject animals to is immoral, evil, and inconsistent with our liberal religion. It is hard to disagree.

For years scientists have studied the ability of animals to feel pain. And all of them have come to the conclusion that animal pain is about as real as human pain. Like humans they have a nervous system, and like humans that nervous system is attached to a brain. And like human minds, that mind can feel pain. Of course this isn't quite as simple as I'm putting it — for instance, we know for certain that animals react to painful stimuli, but we don't know if they reflect on that pain or suffering (the evidence suggests we do, but it's not so clear cut). In any case, that reflection, though important, isn't necessary for the point of this article.

When I consider animal pain here, I consider it at the point of death. Whether we agree that animals reflect on pain or not, it's clear that the act of murdering them, many times through brutal slaughter, is a terribly painful one for animals. One cannot just wish that pain away. It's real pain, and we are the ones inflicting it on billions of animals every year.

If we argue, as liberal moral philosophy asks us to, that man shouldn't cause undue pain to others, then it follows that the act of killing and eating animals is immoral in itself.

Meat Eating is Incompatible With Liberal Religion

Meat eaters argue that animal pain is two things. First, they say it's irrelevant, and second they say it's necessary. They say it's irrelevant based on the assumption that animals do not feel pains like humans do and aren't conscious. But that's a bad argument for several reasons. One, human babies and other human mental invalids are about as stupid and retarded as many animals, yet we don't think it is moral to kill them and eat their meat. In fact, it's difficult to think of something just as immoral.

The second is the argument that it's necessary. Even if it were necessary, that still wouldn't make it compatible with liberal religion. We don't forgive killers and theives who deem their crimes necessary, and since animals don't attack us it's difficult to make an argument of self defense. Hence, even if all humans would die off without access to meat, that still wouldn't make meat eating good. Importantly, this is under the assumption that meat eating is even necessary (there is very limited evidence for that).

It's obvious that by killing and eating animals human beings are applying an arbitrary line to who moral conventions apply to. Even worse, we apply this line based on pure human tribal affiliation; it's fair game to kill the smartest chimpanzee, but horrible to smash the brain of a year old against the wall.

Even worse (if you can imagine it), this tribal demarcation, is something that humans, as given by liberal philosophy, eschew in other humans. It's bad to be racist, or sexist, or homophobic, when it's essentially the same tribal division used to prosecute such ills. The black meat-eater doesn't stop to think his argument for eating meat is the same one white men had for subjugating the black race. He doesn't realize that the only difference now is that moral conventions place black men within the human in-group when they did not 300 years ago.

It's the same argument prehistoric and premodern humans use to conquer other humans. The Mongols, and Romans and Spartans who killed others and conquered them did it because they placed an arbitrary line on who their own moral conventions applied to. The Roman army, for example, couldn't cross the Rubicon. The Mongols didn't turn their cavalry upon themselves. They couldn't because they applied their own moral conventions to their people alone. A Roman general killing another general would be a crime, but killing a Gallic general wouldn't carry the same punishment. Today, we see this arbitrary tribalism as abhorrent, but think it okay to do the same to animals.

By seeing people who do not belong to their in-group as unworthy of sympathy and consideration, humans are able to completely conquer them. It would be difficult to rationalize that if they really saw them as part of the in-group.

So we have a situation where humans find it totally acceptable to kill and murder another class of beings for their enjoyment all because those beings do not belong to the same species as they do.

There's a lot of talk about dehumanisation when it comes to committing ills like genocide and the likes, but all that process refers to is a method of in-group/out-group sorting. People may see certain people as humans yet deem them unworthy of life because they do not belong to their in-group. This tendency of human beings to create categories based on obvious signifiers like language, skin colour and others is one of the reasons why the liberal shibboleth now is that race is a social construct, when it in fact has an obvious basis in biology. The good thing is that humans have never had to dehumanise animals to hunt and kill them — despite being similar to us, they are so obviously different from us that the argument need not be had. But perhaps it could have been had if animals could speak for themselves. However, they can't so it turns out the reason we don't care about them is precisely because they cannot complain. Can you imagine a more psychopathic thing?

To see just how incompatible this belief is with liberal assumptions, consider how Westerners feel about their pets. Last year, a football player Kurt Zouma was almost hounded out of his team because he kicked a cat. It was such a huge issue that his coach had to give him a talking to, and he had to give a public apology and donate to charities concerned with animal rights. This shows that people understand that animals have feelings and feel pain, but they somehow forget all of that when it's time to eat a juicy turkey leg.

Even the fact that certain countries have animal rights that are bestowed upon certain animals show just how incredible this state of things is. It doesn't make it better that the more humans like an animal, the more rights the animal is likely to get under such animal rights law. For instance, it's unacceptable to set a trap for a dog or a cat to kill it, but it's perfectly reasonable to exterminate rats by the dozens. There's no word to describe this but psychopathic. Even the animals we give human protection only get it because we love them. Others? Well, they can get fucked.

Why I Eat Meat Anyway

The proper Nigerian response to this article is this — oh stupid Elewa, you've said so much about how eating meat is bad, are you saying you're a vegan?

I'm not. And crucially, I've only really said that meat eating is incompatible with liberal religion, not that I believe it to be objectively bad.

I hate contradictions and incoherence, and I surely wouldn't eat meat if I were a believer in liberal religion. But I am not, you see. I believe it's totally acceptable and right for humans to kill and eat animals just because we can and because we think it's good to. There are many horrible extrapolations that can be made from this, and I leave you to make them in the knowledge that yes, I agree.

I don't believe in the rights of man, and I don't believe in civil liberties or freedoms or any of the other trappings of liberal religion. I don't believe in them partly because they are incoherent (as human behaviour towards animals shows) and also because they do not guarantee the success of my goals, which is prosperity for me and my ilk (crucially not for the majority, for the majority may indeed be lost and retarded beyond saving). In total, my philosophy is that might makes right, and strength and will to power must be the fundamental tools man uses to view the world. I understand that the demarcation between humans and animals is arbitrary, and my serious answer to that is this; what of it?

I believe it's okay for humans to impose pain and torture upon animals because we derive pleasure from it. That's what we do anyway, and I believe it's inevitable and proper. I also believe all animal right laws are stupid because they are incoherent — what's the point of protecting animals from sexual abuse and torture when factory farming and the cannibalism of their flesh is legal and socially acceptable? It seems like a psychopathic joke to me.

Again, there are many extrapolations one can make from this, and they are all extrapolations I accept. For example, one might ask; if this is the way you view the world, why do you think cannibalism is evil? If you viewed other humans as part of your outgroup, would you accept cannibalism?

Yes, I would. But thankfully, I do not. I find cannibalism disgusting for the same reason I find gay sex disgusting; I've been indoctrinated into believing it is. I've been indoctrinated into seeing the mass of humanity as beings that one shouldn't eat, and I'm thankful for that. It revolts me to think of it now. However, I'm not so arrogant to believe that if I'd grown up in a society that saw people from other tribes as animals I wouldn't have ate their flesh. I think cannibalism is evil, but I also understand that it's merely a difference of opinion to be had with a cannibal, and the only useful tool for navigating that difference of opinion is power.

In the end, I eat meat because I find it enjoyable. I find moral rules around it to be tiresome, and since I don't believe in the objectivity of those rules anyway I'll continue to eat animal flesh.

But what about you? You surely don't go down this horrible path of Might-Is-Rightsm with me. So what's your excuse for eating animal flesh?