“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man” – George Bernard Shaw

I’ll start by making it explicitly clear that this is not an attack on science or the scientific method, far from it; this is a celebration of science and a critique of those who choose to selectively apply rational thought. Although I will focus on those embedded in academia, the arguments apply equally to all individuals who do not eschew the use of non-human animals as far as practicable. My time as a bioscience undergraduate taught me that academia has more than its fair share of unreasonable people—not unlike the general population. Experiencing the biases and ignorance of the majority of my instructors, on everything from ethics to the environment, was the primary contributing factor to my disillusionment as a student; this in turn became the catalyst for a frustration that would eventually shape my decision to forgo a formal post-graduate education. Framing this commentary from a strict bioscience perspective, I will argue that far from being a beacon of rationality regarding some of our most pressing environmental and ethical concerns, the academics have embraced the same culture of ignorance as the rest of us.

I. Environment

The far-reaching and destructive impact our species has had on this planet—from deforestation and species extinction, to ocean acidification, pollution, and climate change—ensures that environmental discourse encompasses almost all facets of bioscience, including: ecology, botany, marine biology, zoology, microbiology, and genetics. Moreover, I have yet to encounter an academic specialising in any one of these areas that does not purport to be an environmentalist. With this in mind, I would like to ask why such a large proportion of academics are ignoring the number one cause of environmental degradation: our obsession with raising and slaughtering other animals.

The human population is growing at an unfathomable rate. It had taken all of human history until approximately AD 1800 for the human population to reach one billion; the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third in 29 years (1959), the fourth in 15 years (1974), and the fifth in just 13 years (1987).1 At a conceptual level, given that our planet has a finite amount of resources, the idea that our current system of exploiting other animals for food can sustain such growth is not only ignorant, but downright insane.

In light of this expanding population, and the fact that there are over one billion people currently living in poverty,2 it shouldn’t need to be stressed how absolutely critical it is that we make the most efficient use of these dwindling resources. What does need to be stressed is that animal agriculture has been recognized as the primary driver of deforestation (responsible for up to 91% of Amazon destruction), species extinction, ocean dead zones, fresh water loss, desertification of one-third of our planet, and climate change;3,6 we are squandering all of our resources on a grossly inefficient and archaic method of food production.

As it stands, “livestock” and associated feed crops cover 45% of the earth’s total land,7,8 with 30% of all arable land being used to grow feed crops alone; this accounts for over 50% of all grain grown.9 Research has estimated that by shifting consumption of crop calories directly to humans rather than feeding them to “livestock,” the net gain in calories could theoretically feed an additional four billion people.10 Between 2004 and 2005, an estimated 1.2 million hectares of rainforest was cut down as a result of soya bean expansion; culpability does not lie with the vegan community and their thirst for cruelty-free milk, as 95% of all soya bean grown on earth is fed to “livestock.”11 Excessive nutrient pollution from human activities has caused a substantial increase in oceanic dead zones, on top of the 2.7 trillion animals that are needlessly pulled from the oceans every year.5,12 Accessible fresh water makes up just 1% of all water on Earth, and with water scarcity already a devastating reality in parts of the world, it is sobering to note that animal agriculture is responsible for up to 33% of all fresh water consumption in the world today.13 Eighty-two percent of children are starving in countries where, instead of growing crops to feed themselves, the grain is fed to animals which are then exported to western countries for consumption.14,15

The general consensus of the scientific community and the general public, including most policy makers, is that climate change is a global threat that requires immediate attention. Previously, all discussion regarding how to mitigate climate change has focused on decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). What is always absent from such discussions, and omitted from lecture halls across the country, is that although oil, natural gas, and coal are indeed major sources of human-induced GHG emissions, it is the life cycle and supply chain of domesticated animals raised for food that is the single largest contributor of human-caused GHG emissions. The 2009 Worldwatch analysis showed that livestock and their by-products account for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2e per year, or 51% of annual worldwide GHG emissions.6 If you ignore or downplay the role of animal agriculture in climate change, you are essentially a climate change denier. For the sake of brevity, I will end the examples here, since to list all the detrimental effects of animal agriculture would require a tome. For a comprehensive overview of the effect animal agriculture is having on our environment, I direct you to the work of Dr. Richard Oppenlander.

During the entirety of my undergraduate studies, not a single authoritative figure presented any of the extensive literature that explicitly links our most immediate environmental threats to our animal-based food choices. Quite the opposite was true: environmental education focused merely on mitigating the disastrous impact of our animal use while maintaining the very ideologies and behaviours that perpetuate ecological destruction. I do not believe—being based in a scientific institution and having scholarly access—that one can be completely uninformed of the facts. I do believe, however, that a large number of academics may be wilfully ignorant, as accepting the science and stark reality concerning our food choices would position oneself in direct conflict with the normative social behaviours and ideologies surrounding our use of animals for pleasure, entertainment, and convenience.

II. Ethics

“When reality is too painful to bear, a population does not seek freedom or truth; it becomes an accomplice to its own enslavement.” – Chris Hedges

Non-human animals are our property; we use them in almost innumerable ways: we eat their body parts and secretions; we wear their skin and hair; we experiment on them; and we exploit them for entertainment and companionship. Within this depraved system of sentient beings as property, there is a repressed schizophrenia concerning the moral status of other animals that is ubiquitous in society, namely, we have two very distinct populations of non-humans: the first, loved and doted upon by many humans who lavish attention and material things on them; the second, imprisoned for their entire lives, without ever experiencing a drop of human kindness or even consideration, subjected to untold physical and mental torture until the day they are murdered. The level of cognitive dissonance is staggering, and deserves reiterating: in 2015, UK residents spent approximately six billion pounds preserving the health and well-being of the animals they fetishize,16 while they ate the flesh and secretions of the animals they don’t.

Let me be clear: “pet” ownership is not morally justifiable; they are property, and the value they have is determined by their owners. Domesticated animals are utterly dependent on us: we decide if and when they eat or drink, relieve themselves, get exercise or affection, and so on; we have bred them to be docile and to inherit phenotypic traits that are in our interests but are often harmful to them. In this sense, domestication is violence and is wholly at odds with any meaningful theory of animal rights. However, it is our moral duty to try and clean up humanity’s mess by giving loving homes and the best life possible to a non-human animal of any species in need of adoption—whilst this will not change the world, it is everything for that individual. I appreciate that many will be mystified by this, but that is because our society readily accepts the killing of trillions of animals every year just because we enjoy the taste of their flesh and secretions; as long as it is acceptable to kill other animals for no good reason, the argument against breeding “pets” is very unlikely to be accepted, or even considered.

The property status of animals enables us to use them exclusively as resources, and although many of us claim to regard animals as having moral worth beyond their utility, in reality the only worth they can have while still retaining their status as property is one of economic value. This neatly illustrates the problem with viewing non-human animals through our anthropocentrism-tinted glasses: even if we do accept that non-human animals have interests beyond their utility, we continually deny that these interests carry any moral weight. The idea that we “own” non-human animals is a direct result of this anthropocentric worldview, coupled with the instrumentalist assumption that non-human animals exist to serve the interests of human animals. This antediluvian assumption has been codified in almost all legislation worldwide, and is a sign of our collective ignorance as a species on this matter.

Although there seems to be a great deal of confusion over the concept of rights—which Gary Francione clarifies time and time again17—it is clear that all sentient beings have at least one basic right: the right to not to be used as chattel property; we accord all human animals this fundamental right, and recognise that it ought to be protected irrespective of consequences.18 Many people in the “animal rights” community subscribe to the unsettling notion that the act of using and then murdering a non-human animal does not constitute a harm per se. This utilitarian notion, popularized by Peter Singer among others,19 rests on the assumption that non-human animals do not have future wants and desires comparable to those of human animals, owing to them not possessing the “superior” cognitive abilities that we exhibit ourselves. Singer concludes that extinguishing their life constitutes a negligible harm to them compared to ending the life of other sentient beings who harbour many future wants and desires—beings which, conveniently for us, seem to be almost exclusively human animals. This naïve and erroneous concept only serves to shift ethical debate away from animal use, and instead towards how humanely we treat them in life and in their premature death. Regarding the humane (“happy”) exploitation movement that Singer and many “animal advocates” support, I refer you again to the excellent work of Francione, who has shown repeatedly that the feigned promise of animal welfare touted by all mainstream animal organisations is a thoroughly hollow one. It is not necessary for a sentient being to have humanlike cognitive characteristics in order to be included in the moral community and accorded the right not to be used as property; indeed, many of us already believe this to be true: we do not use severely cognitively impaired humans as means to our ends—we protect their basic right and moral status regardless of cognitive ability. Logically, if non-human animals lack rationality, and thus their suffering cannot be softened by intellectual comprehension of their circumstances, the raw terror of confinement or injury without knowing why or for what purpose they are suffering should lead us to greater moral solicitude;20 however, instead of extending moral solicitude to all sentient beings, we discount or otherwise devalue the interests of non-human animals based solely on species.21 The point is unassailable: one cannot logically justify the inferior moral treatment of a sentient individual based on the fact that the individual is a member of another species; to do so is speciesist. This is in direct analogy to exclusion from the moral community within a human context; that is, racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and so on, in which we devalue otherized groups based upon morally-irrelevant criteria.

The exploitative practices we subject sentient beings to means that they experience nothing but suffering, distress, and eventual violent death, and thus it requires the most robust of moral justifications. On the contrary, with the overwhelming body of scientific literature giving credence to the health-benefits and inexpensiveness of whole-food, plant-based nutrition,22 and the abundance of animal product alternatives available in our food and fashion stores, the most common justifications we have for their exploitation, namely, palate pleasure, convenience, and entertainment, are shown to be morally untenable. Even the last bastion of the anti-abolitionists—the purported success of animal use in the medical research industry—is starting to display its fragility; moreover, it may even be the case that animal-based research has hindered medical progress in a number of ways. Remarkably, over 90% of investigational compounds that sail through non-human animal testing fail in clinical trials, with many potential treatments being wrongly rejected in light of poor pre-clinical findings.20 It is important to add that regardless of efficacy, animal use in scientific inquiry has always been morally reprehensible.

The fact that academics are not applying these basic ethical principles to their personal lives, or paying any kind of lip-service to them professionally, reveals a stagnant confirmation of inherited thinking that is devoid of any rationality. I have listened to charismatic lecturers give impassioned monologues to hundreds of students on all manner of ethical and environmental concerns, and then watched as they suspend their moral reasoning and consume the products of the non-human animals they don’t happen to fetishize. I have witnessed a lecturer praising a student for giving an exhausted bee a spoonful of sugar-water, while remaining indifferent to the fact that the student recounting this good deed was doing so in between mouthfuls of animal flesh. These examples show that reason really plays no role in our moral evaluations, and in the words of Gary Steiner: it seems that we are guided not by reason, but by intractable sentiments such as “some non-human animals are things to eat and some are not.” In his book, Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism, Steiner illustrates the importance of applying reason to our “tenacious moral intuitions”:

“Here the legitimacy of the analogy between rights for women and slaves, on the one hand, and rights for animals, on the other, becomes clear. As Epstein recognizes, a set of tenacious moral intuitions once led people to accept a fundamental moral and legal difference between masters and slaves, and one between men and women. But rational reflection led to the recognition that we were being inconsistent in our application of the moral intuition that people born naturally free ought to be accorded legal and moral personhood; reason led us to recognize that women and slaves deserved legal and moral personhood for the same reasons that free men had been accorded such personhood. The origin of human rights was a sentiment, a deeply held moral intuition, that certain sorts of living beings ought to be treated in certain ways; the intercession of reason enabled us to recognize that we had acted on this intuition in highly selective ways, and this recognition led to a change not only in our laws but in the way we feel about abrogating the rights of certain human beings.”

It is evident that the majority of academics are placing their moral intuitions above rational scrutiny, which enables them to continue to engage in exploitative practices without ever having to confront the potential immorality of their intuitions. The exigencies our current intuitions are placing on non-human animals—and our environment—demand that we “ought to perform the same kind of rational reflection on our intuitions about animals that our culture has performed on our intuitions about women and slaves.”23

III. Institutionalised thinking and Moving Forward

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler

Having academic qualifications and being as unbiased and rational as possible are not one and the same. One can complete an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, and a post-honours doctorate, and leave without ever having their entrenched biases challenged; a state of affairs that seems very much at odds with the principles that underpin scientific institutions. In this regard, universities are undoubtedly failing, and although academic responsibilities and professional ethics ultimately fall on the academics themselves, the phenomenon of institutionalisation plays a role too large and far-reaching to overlook.

Institutionalisation refers to the process of embedding conceptions—be it beliefs, values, behaviours, societal roles, or norms—within an organisation, social system, or society as a whole. We find ourselves a part of many institutions by default, with a great number of them providing positive benefits that enable employment, psychological and emotional support, individual fulfilment, and social cohesion. Despite these positive features, institutions have a negative aspect that serves as a profound obstacle for anyone wanting to inspire societal change: they are deeply resistant to reform. To quote: “once institutionalised, a practice is seen as the norm of the organisation, and only considerable upheaval or radical challenge will lead to fundamental change.”20 Through the likes of mass media and state education, dominant discourses and ideologies can over time become common, uncontested “truths,” which, in the words of French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, produce the “recognition of legitimacy through the misrecognition of arbitrariness.”24 Regarding our instrumentalist view and treatment of non-human animals, the majority of our institutions emerged at a time when the prevailing view of the moral status of other sentient beings was itself incredibly benighted. Thus, institutions today serve to facilitate conditions that result in moral stagnation and moral disengagement,25 as acting in ways that contradict one’s own moral beliefs is relentlessly promoted and reinforced as normative behaviour.

Academic institutions have a vested interest in preserving the status quo and, therefore, routinely present normative options that preserve and facilitate the exploitation of non-human animals. Between 2010 and 2013, figures released under freedom of information reveal an 83% increase in the number of non-human animals used in experiments in Welsh universities alone,26 a form of exploitation that is bolstered in the UK by Section 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986—known as the “secrecy clause”—that prevents public and scientific scrutiny of animal tests.27 In addition to on-site experimentation, the cadavers and secretions of non-human animals are sold and marketed as the normative option in every cafeteria, entertainment venue, convenience store, and vending machine on campus; that such a scenario inspires nothing but silence from the more “ethically conscious” academic is a crushing testament to the power of institutionalised thinking.

At present, academic institutions are simply ignoring our moral obligations toward non-human animals. It is vital that academics—the providers of knowledge and guidance to the next generation of environmental scientists and ethicists—fulfil their professional responsibility to stay abreast of the scientific and ethical literature themselves, and to ensure that their students are informed of the fundamental moral and environmental problems inherent with our use of sentient beings. Of course, to become an effective advocate for moral and scientific reason, academics must first critically examine their own presuppositions regarding the moral status of non-human animals, as the overwhelming majority of those I have met still regularly support violent and exploitative practices by consuming animal products.

It is evident that most academics limit their concern for non-human animals to considerations that do not push them outside of their comfort zone—to “feel-good ethics”—and thus ultimately, do not impose any obligations on themselves that could somehow inconvenience their daily lives. To paraphrase Steiner: most people who express concern for non-human animals stop conspicuously short of eschewing their use, and instead “express concern for animals, eat a little less meat, perhaps purchase free-range meat, make a donation to the Humane Society, and express some more concern for animals. Life goes on essentially as before.”23 To live a life according to feel-good ethics disregards any notion that non-human animals have moral worth, is fundamentally incompatible with any real-world concern for their suffering, and trivialises the concept of justice.

Moving forward, if we are to one day see a paradigm shift regarding our abhorrent use of non-human animals and destruction of this planet, we must first educate ourselves and change as individuals. If you care about the plight of the oppressed; if you regard sentient beings other than ourselves as having any moral worth; if you want to see the abolition—and not merely regulation—of non-human exploitation; if you care about mitigating the ecological degradation caused by our insidious obsession with subjugating those that are arbitrarily different from us, then we are obligated to be vegan.

For those reading this, the only legitimate obstacles preventing the acceptance of veganism as a true anti-oppression politic are the dogmata we hold regarding our presumed position in the imagined hierarchy based upon morally-irrelevant criteria. Once we have shattered the institutionalised ideologies and inherited thinking that clouds our individual moral judgment, it is easy to go, and remain, vegan. This should cause the academician to be particularly reflective. To borrow some words from Francione: “ethical veganism represents a profound revolution within the individual; a rejection of the systematic oppression of other animals that has been taught from birth as the natural order,” and the epitome of intellectual honesty.

LR & RT

1. United Nations Population Division and US Census Bureau

2. The State of the Poor (http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/State_of_the_poor_paper_April11.pdf)

3. Causes of Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/15060/277150PAPER0wbwp0no1022.pdf?sequence=1)

4. Predictors of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon (https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/7036/DEFOREST_PREDICTORS.pdf?sequence=1)

5. Food Choice and sustainability (2013) – Richard Oppenlander

6. Livestock and Climate Change (https://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf)

7. Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter11.pdf)

8. Livestock and Climate Change (https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/10601/IssueBrief3.pdf)

9. Livestock – a driving force for food security and sustainable development (http://www.fao.org/docrep/v8180t/v8180t07.htm)

10. Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015/meta;jsessionid=1D4DBEFAD666E623FF2423829648B5C0.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org)

11. Livestock’s role in deforestation (http://www.fao.org/agriculture/lead/themes0/deforestation/en/)

12. Estimating the Number of Fish Caught in Global Fishing Each Year (http://www.fishcount.org.uk/published/std/fishcountstudy.pdf)

13. Biomass use, production, feed efficiencies, and greenhouse gas emissions from global livestock systems (http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/20888.full)

14. Improving Child Nutrition (http://www.unicef.org/gambia/Improving_Child_Nutrition_-_the_achievable_imperative_for_global_progress.pdf)

15. Comfortably Unaware (2011) – Richard Oppenlander

16. Onepoll UK Pet Owners 2015

17. Clarifying the Meaning of Right (http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/clarifying-the-meaning-of-right/#.VwVDBPkrLIU)

18. Animals, Property, and the Law (1995) – Gary Francione

19. Animal Liberation (1975) – Peter Singer

20. Normalising the Unthinkable (http://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/Normalising-the-Unthinkable-Report.pdf)

21. Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (2000) – Gary Francione

22. How Not To Die (2016) – Michael Greger, Nutritionfacts.org

23. Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (2013) – Gary Steiner

24. Language and Power (2001) – Fairclough

25. Moral Disengagement In The Perpetration Of Inhumanities (http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1999PSPR.pdf)

26. Number of animals used in Welsh university experiments rises 83% over three years (http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/animal-experiments-welsh-universities-increase-3872228)

27. The Vegan Society’s response to the Repeal of Section 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 Consultation (https://www.vegansociety.com/sites/default/files/TVS_ASPA_Response_2014.pdf)

Photo credit: Calvin and Hobbes 🙂