Question
What about human suffering?
Alternatives
You care more about animals than people. We should worry about humans first.
Summary
To think that people can only care about a single issue is false. Humans are complex; most of us can and do care about many things. Studies consistently find that caring about animals makes people more likely to care about other issues, such as human rights and the environment. The idea that we need to ration our compassion or love is a basic misunderstanding - widening our circle of empathy does not diminish, but strengthens it. People are animals too, which is why there is significant overlap between the compassion due towards humans and other animals. Being vegan does not reduce our compassion, but extends it to its necessary and logical conclusion of all that can suffer.
Discussion
What about human suffering? The premise of this statement is that some beings matter and others don't; that some suffering is legitimate to care about and some isn't. Humans apparently sit alone at the top of this hierarchy, so high above all other life in every way that too much consideration for other beings is immoral, even ridiculous. To say that we should care about humans before other animals is to say that so long as any human suffers in any way, we should not consider other suffering, no matter how egregious, widespread, or easily mitigated. Should we, for example, turn a blind eye to the suffering of the many billions that huddle in factory farms and slaughterhouses, suffering we could relatively easily eliminate? To some, the suffering of non-humans is a low priority because they see it as the suffering of far lesser beings, even morally irrelevant beings. Few positions outline human supremacy and speciesism more succinctly.
Speciesism is part of the morality underpinning animal agriculture. The treatment of animals in our farming system embodies the belief that even trivial human desires, like the preference for some ingredients over others, outweigh almost any rights a non-human being should have. The factory farming system takes everything from the animals within it, including the right to freedom, to life, to health, to family, to friendships, and to live according to their nature. The usually unstated philosophy called anthropocentrism that underlies animal product consumption is at the root of our oppressive relationship with all other life. Vegans want to bring this selfish, submerged philosophy into the light to provoke a discussion about whether our current human treatment of animals is consistent with our morality.
The idea that we cannot care about humans and other species should be rejected not only on moral grounds, but increasingly based on scientific evidence. Social science has studied whether people who care deeply about animal suffering consequently care less about other ethical issues, such as human suffering. The results of these studies show the opposite to be true, that the more people care about non-human animals, the more likely they are to care about humans as well. Kindness or its opposite appears to be a general product of our character, which applies regardless of the type of animal we interact with. Criminal science, too, backs up a wider view of compassion. Animal abuse is highly correlated, and often predictive, of abusive behaviour towards humans. Abusing one's power over another, whether human or non-human, is more of a reflection of a person's character than evidence that they have a thought-through hierarchy of a species' sentience governing their violence. Biological science has also, since at least Darwin, rejected the idea of humans as a completely separate kind of being. Evolutionary science has superseded religious notions that we have yet to completely jettison from our culture, such as the idea that humans alone have souls and that other animals were created for our use or dominion. The common evolutionary patterns we share with other animals in our bodies are so obvious that it is hard to believe that we failed to acknowledge them for so long. Only a religious story that we wanted to believe could stop us from seeing the common biological patterns between animals. Modern DNA evidence has even more comprehensively confirmed that animals are our kin, and some of our very close kin. We share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees, compared to the 99.7% we share with Neanderthals, with whom humans were able to interbreed. The call for greater compassion towards non-human animals is based not purely on moral intuition and common feeling, but on our ever-deepening scientific understanding of humanity's place within the web of life.
Focusing on difference
We have a noticeable tendency to focus on the difference between non-human animals and us. It is so common that we might call it a cognitive bias. For many years, I worked at a university and would attend public lectures on a wide variety of fields. The number of times eminent academics from a variety of disciplines would start a sentence with "The difference between humans and other animals is" was quite startling. I found it particularly noticeable because usually the words were followed by statements that were some combination of wrong, tenuous, incomplete or unknowable. Still, the audience would always seem to nod along in agreement. One has to wonder if our critical thinking skills go to sleep when we are being complimented by being told of our superiority to other animals. It's not even always a positive superiority either; it can be something quite damning of us, like "Humans are the only animals that hunt for pleasure". Still, people seem predisposed to want to nod along to it, regardless of whether it is true. Groupthink seems to be especially strong when the group is a whole species.
There is something special about humans, but putting our finger on it is a little harder. For centuries, humans were called "The tool users", and it was assumed our tool use was what made us unique, until it was shown just how many animals use, and sometimes make, tools: birds, mammals and invertebrates have all been documented making and using tools. The key difference between humans and other animals has been assigned to various aspects of thinking, rationality, emotion, culture and so on, which one after the other have been shot down by behavioural biology. Many academics and writers would have saved themselves an intellectual dead end if they had listened to Darwin, who in the nineteenth century pointed out that the difference between humans and other animals was one of degree and not kind.
When you tell people something they want to hear, that they are superior to others, you can expect a very sympathetic hearing. There is no doubt the human mind has unique aspects in the realm of abstraction and information processing, but the inaccuracy of almost all attempts to nail down the difference more specifically than this tells us more about the limitations and self-serving nature of our minds than it reveals about non-human animals. We have an incomplete understanding of our own consciousness and that of other animals; we try to clumsily point to the differences between them and us, but this is not knowledge, but theories that are a substitute for accurate knowledge.
Moral consistency
If we focused on the commonalities between humans and other beings, we would find far more fertile ground for humanity's intellectual and ethical progress. Again, Darwin pointed to how similar our internal emotional worlds were to those of other animals. We have a window into much of the lived experience of other animals because we are animals. Human suffering is animal suffering, human emotions are animal emotions: these things evolved long before humans, and we inherited these capacities, as did all of our mammalian kin. The species in our factory farms and slaughterhouses experience the feelings that we recognise in ourselves. Most animals are capable of experiencing pleasure, pain, fear, hope, hunger, thirst, anxiety, depression, affection, friendship, curiosity, parental bonding, and a full gamut of emotions. That their experience is different to ours, even if in some ways it might be less complex, does not make them unworthy of consideration and care. Like us, other animals are sentient beings thrown into existence, and seek safety, security and happiness. The violence inherent in eating and using other animals seems to have blinded us from seeing this clearly. In reclaiming our relationship with the animal world, we can look back to the origin of the word animal, rooted in the ancient Greek word anima, or soul. The commonality that this word represents should be the centre of our morality and philosophy towards all sentient life.
Martin Luther King said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This is not just an ethical statement, but a pragmatic one: the simplest morality to teach and internalise is one based on consistent logical principles. We can look at the techniques used in enabling wide-scale atrocities. One common strategy is to justify different ethical principles being applied to the desired victims from the normal ethics held in the society. A phrase pertinent and revealing to this and our wider discussion is "dehumanisation". Dehumanisation is a way to overcome our natural human empathy towards others by leaning into our speciesism. Perpetrators will try to dehumanise their victims by calling them names like snakes, rats, fleas, lice, cockroaches, sheep, pigs, cattle, or simply animals. Once you have associated the victim group with animals, they no longer need to be treated with empathy. Even victims often enter this framing. A common refrain is "They treated us like animals", as people describe being treated in ways that would be horrific regardless of the species on which it was inflicted. It is terrible that seemingly normal people can allow themselves to go along with the dehumanisation of others. We can find some hope in the fact that for most people it requires propaganda and lies to do so. The percentage of people who score highly on the dark triad of personality traits, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, is significant and overrepresented in those who seek leadership and power, but they are still a minority in society. To get most people in a society to behave badly requires a story that hides that behaviour under a cloak of ethics. Even some of the worst actors want to believe this kind of story and will go into elaborate justifications as to why their cruel behaviours were actually in the service of a higher morality.
It is because most people are mostly decent and fair that justifications for violence are necessary. These justifications are evident not only in how we act towards each other, but also towards all other life. The same process of deliberate removal of empathy plays out in our societal violence towards animals. The main justifications used to enable violence towards animals have been summarised by Melanie Joy as "Normal, natural, necessary and nice".
The ideology of oppression
It has been said that there was a large change in human thinking towards animals when we moved from the hunter-gatherer paradigm to grazing and farming. The hunter-gatherer paradigm tended to respect nature and other creatures, whereas the grazier/farmer paradigm tended to subjugate other creatures beneath humans. When you are slaughtering an animal, beating an ox, or taking a cow's children and milk away, it wouldn't be psychologically comfortable for you to think of them as kin, to think of their cries as similar to the ones you yourself might make in the same situation. To feel better about our oppression of others, we must emphasise that they are different and lower than us, and that their demeaned state means our poor treatment of them is therefore morally acceptable. We see this lack of respect in many of the words we use to demean other people while also demeaning the animals themselves. Whether it be to insult someone's intelligence, common sense, or their body shape, we often use the names of species that we breed and use in farming: cow, turkey, goose, chicken, pig, ass, dog, bitch, and so on. This disrespect serves a purpose, helping us to ignore our empathy to feel better about our participation in the oppressions of thinking, feeling beings.
A study had people watch films of traditionally farmed animals playing, and so on. The researchers gave each study participant a bowl of animal or plant-based snacks to eat while watching the films. After the film, the researchers asked the study participants to rate the animals on aspects like intelligence and moral worth. Those who watched the films while eating the animal-derived snacks rated the animals lower on all morally relevant measures than those given the plant-derived snacks. Eating animals leads people to rate those animals lower in intelligence. People know that there is significant cruelty in animal farming and need to justify their participation in this mistreatment by demeaning the sentience of the animals. One interesting aspect of this is that they don't appear to do this consciously. The intellectual mechanism behind this is called cognitive dissonance, a state where a person has two conflicting beliefs, especially ethical beliefs, that must be reconciled. The ethical conflict of carnism is fairly transparent: eating animals requires cruelty, but it is morally unacceptable to be cruel to animals. There are two paths towards escaping this dilemma: the first is to change our treatment of animals so it is less cruel, and the second is to create an internal narrative that justifies our cruelty towards animals. Our society has largely taken the second, lazier and more selfish path, one that requires us to demean the sentience of the animals we abuse. This is another example of how powerfully our perceived self-interest can pervert our thinking, something that often happens at a semi-conscious or subconscious level. Our brains are actively enabling unethical behaviour and resisting ideas and changes necessary to live more ethical lives. Being a more ethical person for many people will take a sustained effort of conscious will, self-questioning and introspection.
We return here to the revealing phrase that one hears when a person or group is being described as unjustly or violently treated: "They were treated like animals". This phrase falls very differently on the ears of someone who rejects speciesism. It seems to reflect an underlying conception that violence and injustice are acceptable when they target the appropriate victims. To look into the fearful eyes of a sentient being or to hear their cries, and to decide that you don't care about them, does not seem a wholly morally different action when directed towards one species or another. The human ability to feel positive and negative emotions, pleasure and pain, safety or fear, is inherited from our animal origins, not a product of our more recent higher consciousness. This speciesism, which has such terrible ramifications for animals, is also a short step away from deciding that some subclass or group of our own species requires less ethical consideration. Indeed, we don't have to hypothesise about this. The history of inter-human atrocities shows many that involved equating the targeted group of victims with animals. If we were more morally consistent in teaching compassion towards animals, it seems certain to have a positive effect on our compassion towards each other. There is much to be said for promoting moral consistency. Aristotle said: our morals are like a muscle that grows stronger through regular exercise. We will all benefit from widening our moral circle and rejecting speciesism.
Part of a whole
When we choose to care about an issue, we act as part of a wider system. This means that we should adapt how we work on an issue to its overall context. If everyone is working on some aspect of a cause, such as reducing suffering, then it might make sense for us to focus our attention on the more neglected aspects of that cause.
Philanthropy is an important way in which people who have spare economic resources can use them to make the world a better place. Personally, my own donations mostly go towards helping animals, particularly around the issue of factory farming. Although I donate to human rights and environmental causes, I consciously choose to weight more heavily towards animal issues. Someone might look at this and say that I think animals are more important than humans, but that would be an error.
Each person who donates to good causes is just one of many individuals and corporations worldwide who also do so. Looking at statistics from a Giving USA report, over six hundred billion dollars was donated in the most recent year. The main charitable sectors this was donated to are, in order, religion, human services, education, foundations, public-society benefit, health, international affairs, and to arts, culture and humanities. The total given to the grouping of the environment and animals, is less than 25 billion, or about 3.8%. The Giving USA report unfortunately doesn't break down how much of that is for animals or the environment, but we would assume environmental issues such as climate change would receive a larger percentage of this figure. Statistics from Charity Navigator then break down the total donations to animals, and find the vast majority go towards companion animals, generally dog and cat shelters. Of the relatively small amount of money that is donating to help animals, less than 1% of those donations target farmed animal welfare.
When many vegans donate, they take this context into consideration. Farm animals, and to a lesser extent wild animals and the environment, are relatively neglected areas of the charity sector. By targeted donations towards neglected areas, your money can be used more effectively. Charities will focus initially on what we call the low hanging fruit, the areas where the least amount of resources will have the biggest impact.
So it's not because we don't care about human rights or other worthy causes that we choose to funnel most of our charitable giving towards animals. We weight our donations towards farmed animals because most people do the opposite.
Holistic healing
A plant-based diet reverberates positively out into the world in many ways beyond the lives of farmed animals. Livestock’s inconvenient long shadow is involved in almost every environmental problem, from a local to a global scale. The way we farm animals is one of the primary drivers of the destructive Anthropocene, contributing to air pollution, water contamination, land degradation, species extinction, deforestation, invasive species and climate change. The scale of the livestock industry is almost unimaginable, with pasture covering over half the arable land of the Earth. Only a few per cent of the remaining mass of land animals are wild creatures, with the vast majority being either humans or their livestock. Two-thirds of the mass of all birds in the world is now farmed chickens. The land on which grain is grown to feed billions of livestock animals can be repurposed to provide for people in the remaining food-poor regions of the world. Most of the communicable diseases that have plagued humanity throughout history have been a result of our contact with animals, including colds and flu, COVID, the black death, smallpox, Ebola, and AIDS. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of global antibiotic production is fed to healthy livestock, a reality that threatens to undermine one of the great human health breakthroughs. A better world awaits humans, not just non-humans, if we can turn aside from eating and using others for our own purposes.
Whether we look into the eyes of a dog, a cow, or a child, we see something of ourselves mirrored back to us, eyes that are windows into a fellow mind that wonders. Many animals share with us deep parts of the magic that is consciousness; to justify diminishing or extinguishing that spark because they do not share our exact identity or capabilities is an injustice. We are all evolved earthlings, fellow strands in a web of life and consciousness who are sharing this experience of existence, together. The great power we hold collectively over the lives of other beings means that our moral choices require deep consideration.
Trying to live an ethical life can be difficult in a society that profits more from us living as consumerist automatons. Ethics asks much of us: to question the society around us, to change our habits and learn new ways of thinking, even though it might be more convenient for us to ignore them. The separation from our conformist selves can even cause friction in our lives among friends and family who would prefer that we validate their ethical position by perpetuating our conformity. There is a higher realm of being, though, one that calls to us beyond the small world of consumerism, human society and selfish desire. It is a life in which our goal is to continually widen our circles of thought and compassion and help others to do so. Our collective intellectual and moral progression is bound up in the liberation of those whom we oppress. The first ethical duty we owe to the world is to look at those whose oppression we contribute to. We do not need to make a choice between being ethical towards humans or animals; indeed, the highest ethics are achieved when we choose them both.
Thinkers throughout the ages have understood this, and I will leave you with some of their thoughts.
Whilst there are slaughterhouses, there will still be battlefields - Tolstoy
Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages - Thomas Edison
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals - Immanuel Kant
If you have men who will exclude any of god's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men - St Francis of Assisi
By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself - Tolstoy
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth? - George Bernard Shaw
For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other - Pythagoras
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated - Mahatma Gandhi
Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace - Albert Schweitzer