World Vegan Month: A Time to Rethink Animal Welfare
November is World Vegan Month, when we celebrate the animal liberation movement, remind everyone that every animal is someone, and look toward a better world for animals. But what does a better world look like? Is it bigger cages? Straighter racetracks? Fewer gas chambers?
Or is it simply remembering that animals’ lives are their own, and that they deserve to live those lives free from use, and free from humans dictating what those lives look like based on the level of comfort we deem ‘enough’ space, comfort, or freedom?
On the surface, the battle for improved animal welfare looks like a win for animals, and in some ways, it is. After all, everyone, including those who want to entirely dismantle the systems that imprison animals, can agree that the abolition of animal use won’t happen overnight, and that, until then, there is no reason to leave living, feeling individuals suffering while we work to end their exploitation altogether.
Welfare, A Pitstop, Not the Goal
The problem isn’t with giving animals better living conditions; it’s with making welfare our goal. When we make improved conditions within the paradigm of use our highest bar, that’s the bar we’ll meet, and it’s not enough. Rather, we should strive to give animals their birthright – not to be used in any way. If we fall short, or while we slowly crawl there, we may achieve meaningful welfare improvements along the way, but we must not mistake them for the destination.
Imagine for a moment you’re a chicken exploited in the egg system. Day after day, night after night, you’re stuffed into a cage with so many other hens, you can’t stretch a wing. When someone dies, their body slowly sinks to the bottom of the hen pile, their rotting corpse filling the tiny space with a putrid stench. One day, a human comes to inform you of a ‘huge win’. “Finally, freedom,” you think. But no. Your life is still not your own. You’re just being moved to a “free range” system, where as many as 10,000 hens are crowded into each hectare of space, the delicate tip of your beak can still be cut off, and your male chicks are still killed, including by being ground up alive.
The flawed system in which animal use is accepted and only their treatment is debated is bursting with such examples. As a mother pig, would a future ban on farrowing crates be enough if your babies were still taken from you and killed for their flesh? As a sheep used for wool, are you grateful for not having huge swathes of your skin sliced off as a baby, even though you’re still dragged, kicked and beaten in the shearing shed, and killed when you’re deemed “spent”?
Striking at the Root of Speciesism
When you put yourself in animals’ place, you might find yourself less inclined to argue that breeding caps are enough while hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats are homeless in Australia, or that camels are ‘treated well’ while being forced to carry humans around. That’s the challenge everyone who respects animals must rise to – recognising speciesism as the root cause of why we accept using animals in any way and fighting for abolition. Welfare wins along the way are inevitable, as is our welcoming of them, but let’s not make them our mission. Welfare reforms may reduce some suffering along the way, but liberation must remain the goal.
This World Vegan Month, we urge you to consider this: the problem isn’t how we use animals; it’s that we use animals. Only by challenging the speciesist system that treats animals as commodities can we truly transform their lives.
Raise Your Standards, Go Vegan
In a system that normalises animal use, baby steps abound. Is it better? Sure. Is it enough? Not by a long shot.
While no one, least of all animal liberation groups like PETA, would deny animals better lives, we must make choices that free animals, and don’t merely comfort humans.
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