Should Animal Advocates Advocate Veganism?
Assuming that sentient animals’ lives matter and they have moral status, ought we to adopt a vegan diet? Further, ought we recommend that others follow a vegan diet? It is usually assumed that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. However it seems we might not need to give up animal products. What’s more, we might even do more for sentient animals if we don’t recommend a vegan diet to others.
Not all animals are sentient. Some animals are insentient: they lack a subjective awareness of the world and an ability to experience feelings of pleasure, pain, excitement, disappointment, etc. We don’t often think of these organisms as ‘animals’ as they are small and relatively simple compared to those animals we routine raise for food, however if one has a moral objection to the harming and killing of sentient animals, it seems that these insentient animals is, at least at first sight, a morally acceptable alternative to eating sentient animal products.
Mussels are an example of a species of animal that is likely insentient. Mussels lack a complex and centralised nervous system. They lack a brain (or anything really like a brain) and their nervous system consists of merely a few nerve cords with some ganglia. Further they lack any complex sense organs like our own. Now this doesn’t prove that they don’t have any subjective experience. However that this kind of nervous system/sense organ setup is much simpler than that of other animals which we currently recognise as sentient. As such, at the very least their anatomy doesn’t tell us that they are sentient. More telling however, is their behaviour.
Behaviourally mussels are very simple, the only behaviour they can engage in is opening and closing their shells and very slowly pulling themselves along threads which they use to attach themselves to surfaces. This tells us that it is unlikely that they are sentient. Sentience is useful to an animal because it encourages one to avoid some negative stimulus or pursue some positive stimulus. This is because pain and pleasure motivate us. So being sentient motivates one to engage in action that helps one to remain alive and/or promote the continuation of one’s species. This being the case, beings capable of sentience are also usually capable of action, or are ‘agents’.
Moreover beings that lack agency are highly unlikely to possess sentience. Complex capacities (such as sentience) don’t usually evolve where they are not conductive to the survival of the individual or their species. Other than a capacity like sentience merely not being useful to non-agential animals, there is an opportunity cost to developing such a complex mental capacity. For instance, developing sentience requires one to develop sense organs which in turn requires one to take in more energy to keep functioning. This requires moving to a more high energy food source and this requires a change in the way in which one takes in food, etc. Since, there is no obvious benefit to mussels possessing sentience, it seems unlikely that they would develop such a complex mental capacity. It seems more likely that mussels are insentient animals and that the limited amount of behaviour they exhibit is brought about through some automatic response mechanism.
If mussels are insentient, should animal advocates stop following a vegan diet and instead adopt one that includes eating them and other insentient animals then? Firstly they are a readily available supply of that elusive B12 and they are a complete protein. Furthermore, the farming of mussels avoids the main environmental problems associated with most animal agriculture. As is well documented, farming land animals requires a significant amount of resources including land, crops and water. If we were to use these resources directly, to provide food and water for ourselves instead of using them to raise animals for meat, eggs and milk, we would be able to feed several times the amount of people with the same amount of resources. However this is not a concern in the case of growing mussels. Mussels require very little land to feed to grow. In fact once they are seeded onto a rope line, these lines can be dropped in suitable areas of water and left. After a year or two farmers can return, pull up the ropes and harvest the mussels.
More than merely a benign alternative to plant-based products though, it seems that eating mussels might be morally encouraged. As such, those concerned for the welfare of sentient animals should actually recommend a diet that includes mussels and other insentient animals. Currently, in the west, veganism is perceived by the mass media and the general public to be ‘extreme’ and ascetic; the kind of thing out of grasp of the average person. By becoming a vegan one is doing some great sacrificial act, cutting out all that is pleasant about eating. Having such a reputation puts some people off even attempting veganism because they perceive it as simply too difficult to manage, unpleasant or simply because it is so different from their current diet. Perhaps if animal advocates encouraged others not to become vegan but to adopt the practice of not harming sentient beings through their eating practices, they would be more successful in convincing meat-eaters to change their eating practices for the better.
By challenging others not to give up eating animals, but merely to change which animals they eat, they may convince more people to move away from factory-farmed products. By refraining from asking individuals to stop eating animal products instead asking them to change which animal products they eat, it seems that we are asking something much more manageable, much more achievable and something much less unpleasant. This is the case, even if the actual difference in terms of achievability between becoming vegan and switching from sentient animal products to insentient animal products is in fact inconsiderably small. By asking something to stop eating animal products you are asking them to give something up and, because of the central role animal products likely play in their diet, completely overhaul of their eating practices. However by asking someone to change the animal products they eat, it may seem that a much smaller, manageable kind of change is being asked of them.
Further, by encouraging others to change the animal products they consume it seems that the request is much less sacrificial that asking some to go vegan. They are not being asked to give animal products up but merely change which ones they are eating. However by encouraging someone to go vegan you are asking someone to give up a whole category of food without replacing for anything. Instead of eating animal products and vegetables as they previous did, they are being asked to just eat more vegetables, as such they may feel that they are missing out on something, or going without.
However there are also problems surrounding the consumption insentient animals. Firstly is the sceptical challenge. Even if the best evidence points to the fact that say, mussels are sentient, we may be wrong. Mussels aren’t so unlike sentient animals that we can be certain that they lack sentience. Mussels are significantly more likely to be sentient than say, carrots. As such we should perhaps err on the side of caution and avoid consuming them. Since a vegan diet is easily attainable for most in the west, eating mussels, and supposedly insentient animal products, should be avoided one might think. However even if we could determine which animals are sentient with certainty, there still appear to be problems with advocating the eating of insentient animal products over advocating veganism.
A simple and clear message is important. We are all busy people, who can be bothered to work out what someone is trying to say if they can’t summarise it in a sentence or two? Most of us it seems. In order for an idea to gain widespread appeal it needs to be easily communicable. The more complicated the idea, the more parts there are for me to potentially forget or misunderstand when I am explaining it to my friend down the pub. And if people forget parts of it or misunderstand it, it is unlikely to gain popular appeal. The message of veganism is simple: don’t eat animals or things made from their produce. Whilst veganism may not be popular (although it has been gaining considerable momentum in the last 5 years) the core idea is generally understood. By arguing for a more nuanced position one is in danger of confusing one’s audience which at best results in people failing to take an interest in the cause. So instead of being inspired by the idea (or outraged) they simply forget about it and move on with their lives.
Worse than this though, a lack of a clear message may lead to having one’s view misrepresented. Not only does this hamper progress towards the goal of reducing and eradicating human-inflicted harm on sentient animals, through failing to generate interest in one’s audience, but it may turn people against the idea all together. For instance, vegans are sometimes ridiculed as hypocrites because they eat plants but not animals. In doing so, the argument goes, they show no respect for the lives of plants. Since plants matter and animals matter, we might aswell eat animals. This is obviously a terrible argument that fundamentally misunderstands the motivating factors behind veganism, nonetheless, it has some popular appeal. It is all too easy to imagine that a very similar argument would be routinely launched against those who advocated for the consumption of only insentient animal products. ‘If you eat some animals’, opponents might say, ‘then why don’t you eat all animals? You’re a hypocrite!’ Since the dividing line between sentient animal products and insentient animal products is not as clear as the line between animals and plants, this an argument is likely to have more support against the non-sentient animal product advocates that it had against veganism. In turn a failure to see the relevant difference between the products of sentient animals and insentient animals may well lead to people not taking this view seriously and so dismissing as ridiculous without even considering it.
Should animal advocates advocate veganism then, or ought we instead recommend that others refrain merely from eating sentient animal products? It’s tricky but considering the risks of advocating for the more nuanced position I think that animal advocates should advocate veganism, at least at the moment. With veganism on the increase it seems that switching to arguing for the more nuanced claim would be a bad idea. However, if things change, and veganism starts dropping in popularity, perhaps a re-brand will be worth the risks.
