My first proper introduction to veganism was watching the Game Changers documentary somewhere in 2019. I was studying back then and had a lot of free time to focus on sports, so I was curious to see what all the fuss was about those vegan athletes. The documentary focused exclusively on the health aspect of veganism, and to be honest I was impressed: athletes breaking world records, bodybuilders competing worldwide, whole NFL teams going plant-based for better results in the field. It was enough for me to try it out. So I opened one of my notebooks, sketched out a little table and there I had it: a 30-day vegan challenge. Not some 'social media' challenge bullshit; a personal experiment. I wanted to see how I felt without eating any animal products for a whole month. Would I wake up sluggish one day, prey to the infamous protein deficiency? Would I still be able to work out normally, or would my energy levels drop? I was pretty excited about this little experiment, but looking back on it, it’s also quite funny to realize: yeah, I totally tried out veganism for selfish reasons. This article is not about that, though. Today I’m vegan for the only good reason one is vegan: because, in the simplest possible terms, it is the only possible way to actually respect animals. It is the only justifiable, moral choice we can and must make.
There are several great environmental and health reasons to go vegan. I’ll mention some briefly, but this article isn’t about that either. The only true reason to go vegan is for the animals. They are the victims being slaughtered by the hundreds of millions, day in and day out, because your adult ass can’t understand animals aren’t made for eating. This article is about those victims, and about the human hypocrisy that fuels the animal industry.
The practical side of eating plant-based wasn’t that hard: I replaced chicken and eggs with legumes and tofu. I simply had to remember to soak them the day before, or to just buy the pre-cooked stuff. I kept working out as usual, ignoring the silly jokes my friends made because of course they had to. The hardest part of being vegan, against all my expectations, was (and still is) the social part. Everyone has an opinion on your veganism, and I mean everyone. Even people who don’t know what the fuck the word even means.
Which reminds me: in case you didn’t know, veganism is not a diet. Veganism is the ethical principle that humans should live without exploiting other animals. Pretty simple, I don’t think it requires further explaining, really.
But going back to opinions—yes, every single person you know will have one: your grandma who thinks fish is a vegetable. Your 'but-protein-though' friend that couldn’t tell you how much protein a human body needs. Your friend who couldn’t boil a pot of pasta without starting a kitchen fire. Your cousin, your partner and probably your dog too (fun fact: your dog can live a perfectly healthy life on a plant-based diet too). The general lack of education on nutrition, and the amount of outdated beliefs people have on it, have always shocked me. To be clear, I also didn’t get that education as a child. I educated myself, looking up things online, in part because I was a chubby kid and I didn’t like it. But also because of basic fucking curiosity: if you’re gonna be driving this meat-sack of a body for about 80 years, you better read the fucking manual, innit? If you know what fuel to give your car, you should probably know the proper fuel to give your body, too. Spoiler alert: it’s not dead animals.
To my surprise, the 30 days of my challenge were over, and my conclusion was—get ready for it because this is very exciting: I literally felt the same. Same energy levels, same workouts, same everything. Okay, maybe not exactly the same: on the first week I was farting a lot, which I learned afterwards was my body adjusting to actually getting enough fiber for once in my life.
I’d finished my experiment, and yet I didn’t see any reason to go back to eating animal products. I felt good, and I don’t mean merely on a physical level: for the first time in my life, I felt like I wasn’t a hypocrite. When I said I love animals, I meant it. My actions were actually consistent with my beliefs: I was walking the talk. And let me tell you, being honest with yourself feels really good. So I just kept eating plant-based, and slowly started educating myself on the moral aspects of veganism. I watched many other documentaries, footage of the animal industry. I saw hard men—slaughterhouse workers—cry like a baby when telling the camera what they do on their job:
Let me get one thing out of the way: there is no 'humane' way to kill an animal. You are an animal. Is there a humane way to kill you? But it’s okay if they have a good life, and their death is painless. What a moronic thing to say. Would it be okay for me to kill you painlessly then? No? Then what is the difference? Is it a question of intelligence? Animals are less intelligent, so they don’t deserve your respect? I guess that means every human idiot out there ought to be slaughtered, too. Where do you draw the line exactly? Are mentally-challenged people not worthy of living then? Or would you rather argue that non-human animals don’t have feelings?
When you put yourself in the victims’ position, it’s very easy to see that all these justifications are simply that: excuses. If you wouldn’t be okay with someone slaughtering you, then why would it be ok to do it to another individual? You either educate yourself, or keep living in ignorance.
And to ground this back into reality, the animal products you buy at the supermarket are very, very far away from the imaginary 'humane slaughter' in your head. The animal industry is the most horrific, downright disgusting thing I’ve seen. But don’t be fooled: that industry exists because of you. The only reason they do what they do is because you pay for it. Buying those products makes you personally responsible for that exploitation. Like it or not, we live in a capitalist world, where supply exists because there is a demand for it. If you’re not vegan, the blood of those animals is in your hands.
If you think being a vegetarian is enough, you’re wrong.
The milk industry is possibly the most disgusting form of animal exploitation. Cows only produce milk when pregnant, so farmers forcibly impregnate them with bull’s sperm. Let me rephrase that in a less cute way: cows are repeatedly raped by farmers so they produce milk. A pregnant cow, of course, will have a baby, but farmers don’t want the calves drinking the milk they’re selling. So as soon as a baby calf is born, the farmer will take the baby away from its mother. The baby is slaughtered after a few months: that’s 'veal' for you. The cow will keep being exploited for about 5 years, which is about 25% of their natural lifespan, and when they stop producing milk they’ll be shot, their throat slit to become burgers. Once again, let me ask you to put yourself in the victims’ position here. Is there a single parallel world in which it’s okay to rape you, steal your baby away from you and kill them? Is there a respectable way to exploit you your whole life for your body? I don’t see anything remotely resembling 'humane' in that whole process. And I don’t think it takes a genius to understand that taking a mother’s baby away from her is wrong. You don’t need to be a mother yourself to understand that, do you? It ain’t exactly rocket science.
But I just love cheese so much, I couldn’t live without dairy. Honestly, fuck off.
What about eggs, you say—what’s wrong with eggs? Just about everything. A wild hen should lay about 10 to 15 eggs a year, on average. The egg-laying hens selected for breeding are a genetic abomination, truly the freaking pug of the animal industry. Creating an egg shell requires a lot of calcium, which explains why every single farm chicken is sick with osteoporosis. Their growth is so abnormal, and their legs so weak, that their bones just shatter under their own weight. And if those hens living by the dozens in a single shit-filled square meter wasn’t enough, let me tell you about the chicks. All eggs in the industry are sorted after hatching. Female chicks are kept to become laying hens. Male chicks, however, are useless to their exploiters: they grow too slowly and won’t lay eggs. So the industry-wide solution is to put all the male chicks in a conveyor belt, merely minutes after they’re born, and throw them in a blade grinder. You read that right, the 100% legal, standard practice in the industry is to grind baby male chicks into pulp as soon as they’re born. They call it 'chick maceration’, very cute name for mass murder.
For every 12-pack carton of eggs you buy at the supermarket, you are personally responsible for grinding up 12 male chicks. Like it or not, the only reason that shit is happening is because you buy that shit. But please, tell me again how you just love eggs so much. If you don’t think that’s wrong, something is seriously fucking wrong with you.
The standard practice to kill pigs in the most 'advanced' countries in the world (Australia, U.K., France, Canada, U.S.) is to put them in a gas chamber. Yes, that is the legal standard practice. Take a look for yourself:
Let’s talk briefly about nutrition. There is no single vitamin, nutrient or amino acid that cannot be found in a normal plant-based diet. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics concluded that a vegan diet is perfectly adequate for all stages of life, including children, teenagers, adults, and pregnant women[1]. Your baby can be vegan too. The millions of decades-long vegans out there and professional plant-based athletes are, quite literally, living proof of that. You can have celiac disease and be vegan. You can have IBS and be vegan. You can have Crohn’s disease and be vegan. You’re probably better off being vegan on Crohn’s, actually. The WHO concluded that processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen (= definitely gives you cancer), and red meat is a Group 2A carcinogen (= probably gives you cancer)[2].
And sure, let’s mention the environment. Veganism is indeed hundreds of times better for the environment than any alternative. Feeding crops to animals, to then eat the animals, is the most ridiculously inefficient way to feed humanity. Yes, 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases come from humans encroaching on animal habitats[3].
But even if none of that were true, that wouldn’t make killing animals okay. Veganism isn’t about your health, nor the environment. It’s about respecting other animals. It’s about just being a fucking decent human being.
The truth is, there is not a single good excuse to not be vegan. If you believe that liking the taste of meat is a good enough reason, you’re just an asshole. If you think eating meat is a requirement to being a man, you are a coward. The same goes for abusing others just because they’re weaker than you. If this article upset you—good! You should be extremely upset about what’s happening. More than that, you should be actively defending the animals; being vegan is the bare fucking minimum you can, and must, do.
Not next year, not tomorrow. If you recognize an injustice and you’re against it, you stop supporting it immediately. And you cannot claim ignorance on this matter anymore. So how many more animals will have to die because of you? Everyone wishes for the world to change, but very few enact change by themselves. It’s cliché because it’s true: change starts within yourself. So stop blaming the world, your upbringing, the industry or capitalism, and start taking responsibility for your actions.
I’ve done a fair amount of vegan outreach over the years. Some people get the message very quickly: they see that what they’re paying for is unjustifiable, and they understand that going vegan is the only moral choice. Many others go to great lengths to try to explain (mostly to themselves, really) why them not being vegan is okay. To be honest, the amount of mental gymnastics I see some people go through is embarrassing. Grown-ass, educated adults will zig-zag their way around any question, refusing to answer and citing the 'circle of life' and 'plant feelings' as their arguments. Just plain fucking embarrassing. People of faith will use their religion as an excuse for being animal abusers: God put the animals there for us to eat. Well, God also gave you the free will to choose compassion over violence. Your God also probably told you to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. So when you’re at the supermarket, just make the right choice, yeah?
I’ve also been lucky to meet, these last few years, some amazing people: activists, strong individuals who refuse to be silent vegans. People who give me hope, when the fight seems pointless, that change is real and that it is happening right now.
To these beautiful humans: I admire you, and I could never thank you enough ❤︎.
If I had a penny for every time someone told me veganism is just too extreme... well, let’s just say I’d have a lot of pennies. The only extreme thing about veganism is extreme compassion. The crazy-bonkers idea that, instead of exploiting and murdering animals, we should let them live peacefully. So extreme!
There is a hundred percent chance that future humans will look back on us and be horrified at the way we exploit animals today. Children will ask their teacher how could we ever do that, and the teacher will try to explain that it was normalized in our time, that society was different back then. The same way we try to explain to children how people carried out the genocide of millions of humans in World War II. If you don’t like me using the word genocide, grow up and take off your blinders. The slaughter of hundreds of millions of individuals every year is the very definition of genocide.
Exploiting and killing other individuals is not okay. Eating animals is not normal. You’re not a fucking baby cow. It’s not rocket science; even a child understands it.
So just start respecting yourself and start respecting other animals.
Go vegan.