In recent years consciousness around animal ethics has heightened and veganism has been popularised in part due to health movements in food consumption and social media figures and celebrities publicising their Veganuary adventures. It’s now common to see filtered images of appetising plant-based lunches on Instagram, or advocation of veganism as a practice in poignant soliloquies from social influencers. The UK vegan population is thought to be 3.5 million with the US at roughly 1.6 million and even more individuals outside these figures adopting a flexitarian, or more plant-based approach, to their eating habits. The diversity and availability of vegan foods is a far cry from stories of vegans in the seventies having to ‘milk’ their own soya beans to avoid a dry cereal breakfast.

Whilst it’s encouraging to see these developments from an animal ethics perspective, veganism in itself is not a final end; veganism is not the answer. As a practice it does not have to challenge despotic leaders, great wealth inequality or human slavery. Veganism is not the ultimate solution to everything and it is not even a sufficient antidote to animal exploitation. Sustained change with regards to our relationship with animals requires not simply a lifestyle shift but a transformation of values. There is a distinction between the lifestyle and habits of veganism and a coherent philosophy of animal liberation that leads to veganism.

It may be that our future provides the opportunity for ethical meat consumption. I say this tentatively because this will be contingent upon many things. For instance, how would the stems cells used in lab-grown meat be ‘harvested’ from living animals? Would animals still be bred and genetically engineered to produce the best types of cells to be used in lab meat production resulting in growth abnormalities and functional deficiencies? These processes may cause all kinds of unnecessary suffering.

In his 1909 science fiction novel, The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster imagines a dystopian future in which humans live underground and rely on a machine to fulfil their needs. Individuals live in isolation and communicate via ‘the Machine’. Forster describes the protagonist of the story, Vashti, who has become fully enculturated into the ways of the Machine: “Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears.” The institution of animal use for a plethora of products operates on a similar level. We tacitly accept it as being common sense, as necessary, to use animals in the manner in which we do — as testing apparatus, for sustenance, for entertainment — rarely questioning this system, this covert ‘noise’.

Humans and other animals

Anyone who has studied basic biology will know that a human being is a type of animal; but linguistically, we refer to ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ as two distinctly separate groups. It seems that this notion, reiterated in our language, that humans are a fundamentally distinct category of being to other animals, has made our exploitation and use of animals all the more palatable.

We ought to be mindful of how our language could reflect an underlying bias or ideology but at the same time it might not be expedient to alter all of our phrases that, on the face of it, show disdain for animals. Simply changing, for example, animal-related idioms such as ‘to let the cat out of the bag’, would not have to necessitate a shift in practices towards animals.

A 2018 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaign to encourage teachers and educators to promote ‘animal-friendly idioms’ to their students advocated changing old favourites such as ‘to kill two birds with one stone’ to ‘to feed two birds with one scone’ whereas ‘to bring home the bacon’ would become the more peaceable ‘to bring home the bagels’. Those looking for an idiom to demonstrate one who tries to make something happen that has no chance of happening would abandon the phrase ‘to beat a dead horse’ and instead utter that one is ‘feeding a fed horse’. Initiatives such as this, that aim to encourage people away from phrases that denigrate animals, are misguided. These idioms are the surface-level manifestations of an underlying ideology and suggesting alternatives that are more animal-friendly misunderstands the way languages change. People are drawn to phrases and words over time and these are adopted organically. It may be that we will abandon phrases that show an acceptance of animal suffering in the future but an ideological shift in human-animal relations would be required first. The question here is one of focus. The minutiae of colloquial phrases used to refer to animals is not radical enough to get to the crux of the issue. It is not clear that the person who calls an over-indulgent individual a ‘pig’ is more likely to have bacon for breakfast. Furthermore, I’m not going to offend a chicken by referring to a cowardly individual as such, but I probably would ‘offend’ a chicken if I killed them and their family purely because I enjoy the taste of their flesh.

The language we use in relation to animals often shows a tendency to dismiss their plight and not consider them as subjects capable of suffering. At the same time, if you were to ask people if they believe that animals suffer, most would answer yes. Over time our knowledge of the physiology and biological structures of animals has significantly changed; so much so that to assert that animals are inanimate objects, or automata (as René Descartes did back in the seventeenth century) in the present day would be unjustifiable.

Human chauvinism

It seems that what we say and what we do with regards to the interests of animals are at odds with each other. American Law professor Gary Francione refers to this as our ‘moral schizophrenia’ (2000). On the one hand, many believe it to be morally objectionable to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals; but on the other, the amount of suffering we subject animals to can in no way be thought of as necessary.

Our definitions of necessity when it comes to the use of animals are largely skewed because we have already deemed it acceptable to own and use animals and so have organised society around doing so. However, the fact that we have consumed animal products for our whole lives, or used animals in various ways just as countless generations and societies before us have done so, does not mean that these practices are essential to our lives in a modern industrialised setting, or are necessary conditions to ensure our continued existence.

John Gray talks about human beings as ‘straw dogs’ (2003) in an attempt to debunk the idea that the universe somehow favours human beings above other animals. He makes the analogy between the situation of humankind and the straw dogs used in ancient Chinese rituals and in doing so aims to provide us with an alternative way of viewing humankind’s position in the world. During these rituals, straw dogs were treated in an extremely delicate and careful manner and were the focal point of proceedings. Once the ritual was over however, they were trampled on and ‘tossed aside’; demoted to the status of waste. Gray locates the strongly-held belief found in many religions, (but also in some forms of humanism), that humankind is able, or will be able, to take control of its destiny. It seems that to an extent humanity will alter itself scientifically and remodel what it otherwise could have been without intervention. However, this will not be by way of following a meticulous, pre-meditated plan but by sporadic change where different forces battle for dominance whether these are political powers, economic models, or cultural factors. What many of the prominent thinkers in Judeo-Christian religions do (as well as some humanists), is place humanity on a pedestal above other animals of the world as a species that is capable of controlling its own destiny, or, possessing some kind of characteristic such as a soul that sets it apart from other beings. But in the end, as a species, we will be cast aside by the turning of natural processes just like any other species. The ‘tossing aside’ of humans by the tides of change may indeed come from a source that we have ourselves created. As the English novelist Samuel Butler noted in 1863 in the wake of the industrial revolution: “We are ourselves creating our own successors. Man will become to the machine what horse and dog are to man”. A similar indifference that we have held towards the plight of animals may well be what spells our end in an ‘indifference’ from artificial intelligence (albeit an ‘as-if’ indifference as opposed to an intrinsic indifference); we may become collateral in its pursuit of some wider goal.

Escaping anthropocentrism or striving towards the reverse, biocentrism, consists in recognising the moral significance of various animal species and the importance of certain natural processes and habitats to those species. In his work on the origins of species Charles Darwin, the great naturalist, rejected an anthropic approach. As Mary Midgley describes his philosophy in The Myths We Live By (2003):

“[Darwin] was an agnostic rather than an atheist. Much more deeply, it was that he had no wish at all to be a ‘humanist’, in the sense of a fighter on behalf of Man. In his view, the learned had concentrated far too much of their attention already on the self-important species called Homo sapiens. It was now time for them to turn their attention to the other species that populated the rich earth around it.”

Biocentrism is based on the notion of interdependence and holds that whilst as human beings we are a particular species who inhabit a particular space, there also exists other species that live in this space, who have experiences and are capable of suffering many of the pains we do. Thus, it is the interests of these species as well as our own, alongside the natural processes and ecosystems that affect the quality of the lives of all these species, that ought to be considered.