On 2022 Jan 1st, I decided to become a vegan.

This page contains reasons why I made this decision and also some resources if you are open minded and would like to know more about veganism. You can find many quotes related to veganism here. Sorry, if this page offends anyone.

Contents

1. Reasons
   • Moral
     • Dilemmas
   • Environmental
   • Health
   • World hunger
   • Holocene extinction
   • Antibiotic resistance
   • Hormones
2. Resources
   • Nutrition
   • Arguments
   • Cooking
   • Videos
   • Other
   • Memes
3. My story

Reasons

Moral

• Meat and Dairy products are not necessary for humans to live a healthy life, and the practise of consuming these is easily the biggest cause of suffering in our current times. Each year we are violating the rights of TRILLIONS of our fellow sentient beings.

• The number of individual wild fish killed each year is estimated as 0.97-2.74 trillions (based on FAO tonnage statistics combined with estimated mean weights of fish species) [Source]. The FAO numbers do not include illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, nor discarded fish. If these are included and over-reporting by China subtracted, the totals increase by about 16.6% to 33.3% [Source]. A similar estimate for the number of farmed fish slaughtered each year is 0.037 to 0.120 trillion [Source]. Also check wikipedia’s Fish slaughter.

Source

• Currently each year 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for food. Sources: 1, 2
  

This is the most important and compelling argument for veganism. Maybe after some centuries we will be advanced enough to kill animals and eat their corpses without causing pollution, cancer, heart diseases etc. But even then it is not morally OK to not be a vegan because of the ethical issues since it is totally unnecessary.

“Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering.”

“Yet from the viewpoint of the herd, rather than that of the shepherd, it’s hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Their evolutionary ‘success’ is meaningless. A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks. The contented rhinoceros is no less content for being among the last of its kind. The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures.”

― Yuval Noah Harari

Dilemmas

Vivisection: It is easy to understand that unnecessarily killing and eating animal dead bodies (“meat”) is cruel. It is not easy to understand whether vivisection is evil.

Read the following articles

1. vivisection-part-one-the-necessity-of-vivisection
2. vivisection-part-two-the-moral-justification-of-vivisection
3. on-vivisection-and-violence
4. animals-used-for-experimentation
5. navs

Humanity should invest more on alternative ways of medical research instead of vivisection and in the long term should completely move away from this method of research. But until those areas of research are developed I think it is justifiable to use animals for testing as long as large¹ number of humans will benefit from it AND it can’t be done in other peaceful ways. But there is a claim in the 3rd reference that “the results of vivisection are “no more informative than tossing a coin,”” if that is true then all types of vivisection are unjustifiable. Also vivisection for curiosity, i.e just to understand how the body of the animal works is not justifiable under any circumstances if it doesn’t help a large number of humans and such research should be banned. In plant agriculture also a lot of insects die, we say it is necessary and we don’t search for alternate ways where we don’t kill insects, so can we justify vivisection similarly by saying it is necessary? I don’t know. It is not clear as of now whether insects are sentient or not. This is not an easy question to answer. Also many mice (they are also the most commonly used animals for medical research) are killed in plant agriculture, which are sentient.

But I should add that there is a difference between suffering in vivisection and suffering during plant agriculture. In the former the suffering is intended where as in the later it is an unintended incidental thing. Directly inflicting suffering is definitely more evil than unintended incidental. So, vivisection is more evil. In the incidental insect deaths in plant agriculture, they are not claiming to “own” the insects, in the direct deaths in animal agriculture they are claiming they somehow “own” animals like chickens and cows. The commodity status is the main problem.

1. A review of insect cognition and sentience in relation to their use as food and feed
2. The-importance-of-insect-suffering

Honey and Silk: Evidence is increasing that honey bees are sentient although it looks like the matter isn’t completely settled. For silk worms not much research is done. But it is always better to assume insects are sentient if we don’t know. These are also quite different from the plant agriculture as these industries inflict intended suffering compared to the insects that die in plant agriculture which are incidental.

www.collectivefashionjustice.org

Wildlife suffering: From rights point of view we are not responsible for the suffering caused by non-herbivores. But from utilitarian pov we need to do something like Herbivorize Predators (they are already doing research in this direction). Now lets say we need to do cruel experiments on non-herbivores to force them to evolve into herbivores. Is it justifiable to take the rights away from non-herbivores for few generations until their future generations will be herbivores? I don’t know. I generally follow rights only until a threashold after which I believe in negative utilitairansim¹.

Environmental

• Animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than ALL transportation emissions combined. [Source] See this paper PMC7929601 for a much more conservative estimate putting it equal with ALL transportation emissions combined.

Health

• Processed meat and red meat cauce cancer. [Source: World Health Organization]
• This comprehensive meta-analysis reports a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet versus the incidence and/or mortality from ischemic heart disease (-25%) and incidence from total cancer (-8%). Vegan diet conferred a significant reduced risk (-15%) of incidence from total cancer. Source
• The World Health Organization has classified processed meats including ham, bacon, salami and frankfurts as a Group 1 carcinogen (known to cause cancer) which means that there’s strong evidence that processed meats cause cancer. Eating processed meat increases your risk of bowel and stomach cancer. Source
• The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and Dietitians of Canada consider well-planned vegetarian and vegan diets “appropriate for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes”. Source

World hunger

• One in nine people in the world today are undernourished, yet we feed around a third of our global crop production to animals. If we cut out the middleman and ate the crops ourselves, instead of feeding them to animals, we could feed an additional four billion people – more than enough for everyone, for many years to come! We all know how wasteful old gas-guzzling cars are – how long before livestock farming is viewed in the same way: As a shameful, inefficient waste of resources. Source

Holocene extinction

• Since 1970, the collective weight of free-living animals has declined 82%. Instead, a small number of farmed animals (mainly cows and pigs) dominate the global biomass. They account for 60% of mammal species by mass, 36% goes to humans, and just 4% are free-living animals. Animal agriculture is considered one of the prime factors contributing to the current biodiversity loss crisis. Sources: 1, 2

Antibiotic resistance

• Worldwide an estimated 73% of antimicrobials (mainly antibiotics) are consumed by farm animals. As resistance to antibiotics becomes more common there is greater need for alternative treatments. Calls for new antibiotic therapies have been issued, but new drug development is becoming rarer. Source

Hormones

This is not an important reason. I am mentioning it here because a lot of insecure conservative men believe in the conspiracy that vegans have less testosterone and are not manly.

• Results: Obtained results showed that total sperm count (224.7 [117-369] vs. 119.7 [64.8-442.8]; P = 0.011) and the percentage of rapid progressively motile sperm were significantly higher in the vegan group compared with the non-vegan group (1 [0-7] vs. 17.5 [15-30]; P < 0.0001). Furthermore, the oxidation-reduction potential (0.4 [0.3-0.9] vs. 1.5 [0.6-2.8]; P < 0.0001) and the proportion of spermatozoon with DNA damage (14.7 [7-33.5] vs. 8.2 [3-19.5]; P = 0.05) were significantly higher in the non-vegan group in comparison to the vegan group.
  Conclusions: Results obtained in this study provide additional evidence about the favourable effect of a plant-based diet on sperm parameters. Source

• Vegans had higher testosterone levels than vegetarians and meat-eaters, but this was offset by higher sex hormone binding globulin, and there were no differences between diet groups in free testosterone, androstanediol glucuronide or luteinizing hormone. Source

Resources

• 3movies
• Vegan Cheat Sheet
• Vegan Starter Kit
• Abolitionist Approach
• HowDoIGoVegan.com

Nutrition

• Nutritionfacts.org
• Mic the Vegan
• Veganhealth.org (somewhat pessimistic view but still as evidence packed as the above 2 links)
• Veganfitness.com
• Vegan society

Arguments

• Carnism debunked
• veganspeak.org
• Arguments for veganism by philosophical vegan
• vegansidekick
• vomad.life
• ADAPTT
• Dontwatch.org
• www.collectivefashionjustice.org

Youtubers:

• Earthling Ed
• Erin Janus
• Lifting Vegan Logic
• David Ramms
• Joey Carbstrong

  Cooking

1) Andrew Bernard
Example video:

2) Simnett Nutrition

3) Cheap Lazy Vegan

4) The Vegan Gym

5) Pick Up Limes

6) Gaz Oakley

7) Rainbow Plant Life

8) Yeung Man Cooking

9) The Happy Pear

10) Rachel Ama

11) Sweet Simple Vegan

12) cookingwithparita

13) Vegan Richa

14) Sarah’s Vegan Kitchen

15) Sauce Stache

16) Lauren Toyota

17) Edgy Veg

18) Julia Ayers

Videos

Other

• Vegan sidekick
• Animal clock

Memes

My story

When I was a child I was a vegetarian (because of religious reasons meat was not eaten in my home) and I used to think that there is nothing morally wrong with drinking milk since we are not killing the cows or buffaloes. In the middle of my 9th class my biology teacher said that eating meat is necessary to be healthy and he gave several reasons why it is beneficial to health. Because of that I became a meat eater (I was living in hostel not home and also was an atheist) and ate chicken in 2 meals for the next 4 years. Now I know that he is wrong and it is actually healthier to be a vegan. But looking back even if it was true that carnism is slightly more healthier than veganism it is not morally OK to eat meat.

Roughly speaking, $\frac{1}{4}$ chicken is needed per 1 meal per 1 person at my high school hostel. Each week I ate 2 times chicken during the 4 years in hostel. So the total number of chickens that are killed because of me is $4\times 52 \times 2 \times \frac{1}{4}=104 \approx 100$ chickens. Let us assume that an average human life is roughly 100 times more worthy than a chickens life. In that case what I did is as bad as murdering a single human being. Of course these are not exact calculations and if you say an average human is roughly 10 times more worthy than a chickens life then that would mean what I did is as bad as murdering 10 human beings. These are called Fermi problems which only give an estimate of the order of magnitude. Also I can decrease the number of chickens I killed by like 15% percent because I only ate them when I was in hostel and when I went to home for vacation I didn’t eat meat.

Edit: The above para was written back when I was a welfarist vegan. This kind of comparison doesn’t go well with abolitionist veganism.

In early 2020, I found out (for the 1st time) what actually happens in the dairy industry by watching this and some other videos posted by Arvind Animal Activist. But I was not sure if it was healthy to go vegan. But after watching many videos of Erin Janus (her DAIRY IS SCARY! video was the final video that made me realise that I can no longer support the dairy industry) and Earthling Ed I decided to go vegan. But then covid lockdown happened. After covid started I became a lacto-vegetarian (just like I was in childhood.) but not a vegan because of some stupid reasons (like my parents will be angry at me and won’t allow etc.) which are definitely not good enough excuses to support the cruel dairy industry for another 2 years. On the night of 31 Dec 2021, I boarded a train to Mumbai from my hometown because, after almost 2 years, the COVID-19 lockdown was over, and my university was again open. From that day, I became a vegan. I only informed my family more than a year after I became vegan, and as I expected, I did receive negative responses, but later on, they told me to do whatever I wanted. If COVID (it happened due to animal agriculture) never happened, I would have become a vegan 2 years earlier.

Until the middle of May 2022 I was a welfarist vegan or utilitarian vegan. Then I found Gary L. Francione’s website abolitionistapproach.com (especially his Six Principles) which converted me into an abolishanist vegan.

If I want to live as a responsible man, I must do something in life to repent for participating economically for 20 years in the commodification of sentient animals.