Your dog has lived a long life but she’s old now, sleeping most of the day. The vet says it’s time, and it’s peaceful. Painless. Would you eat the body afterwards?

You wouldn’t. The question is gross and you don’t need a moment to know it, it’s like instinct.

You also can’t really explain why, not in terms that also apply to a cow or a pig. The cow felt pain at slaughter and you ate her anyway. They shared the same capacity to suffer. The reasons you give about not eating your dog don’t translate to the cow or pig because they only work as feelings.

You knew her, and that was enough for you to not eat her.

Billie Eilish said in an interview recently that you can’t claim to love animals and still eat them, and the internet lost its mind. What she said is only controversial to people still doing it, claiming to love animals and still eating them.

I went vegetarian ten years ago and ended up going vegan a couple of years after that. I didn’t ease in or phase it out, I just put two and two together and stopped. I stopped pretending the cow in the field was somehow different from the dog on the sofa. If I claim to love animals but I’m treating the cow and the dog differently, what does that say about my ethical relationship to the animals we share the planet with?

Your compassion isn’t gone, by the way. People who eat meat aren’t morally degraded. Almost everyone, given an afternoon at a sanctuary with a pig, would not go back home and eat a bacon sandwich. The capacity to care is intact but the packaging, the marketing, the laws, the language—all of it sits between you and the slaughterhouse so you never have to think about what’s on your plate.

The cow on the milk carton is smiling because the carton was designed by the dairy industry. Meat in the supermarket comes in cling film on a foam tray, with the head and limbs removed so you don’t see it. Several US states have laws making it illegal to film inside a slaughterhouse. If what happens inside was something you’d be fine with, they wouldn’t need that law. Children are taught songs about happy farms, but the reality couldn’t be further from that.

You’re basically conditioned into dissonance. When someone gets challenged about why they’re not vegan already, what comes back is usually deflection from what they believe deep down.

I hear these comebacks all the time… it’s a personal choice. Plant-based is ultra-processed garbage. We can’t feed 8 billion on plants. I only eat the local grass-fed ones. Lions kill animals, it’s natural. Indigenous people. Food deserts. Vegans are self-righteous.

None of these hold up under any real scrutiny, and most don’t apply to the people invoking them. I’m writing this from Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. The indigenous food practices argument is almost always used by non-indigenous people who aren’t out hunting and processing whole animals, who aren’t advocating for indigenous communities otherwise, and whose burger comes from an industry that’s one of the largest drivers of indigenous land dispossession globally. The land for that burger had to come from somewhere.

About 75-80% of the world’s farmland goes to livestock and produces 18% of calories. Per Poore and Nemecek’s 2018 meta-analysis in Science, even the lowest-impact beef has a higher carbon footprint than the highest-impact plant protein. “We can’t feed 8 billion on plants” mostly ends up meaning “we’d rather not start”. A bag of dried lentils is half the price of mince in any UK supermarket. Vegan being a bourgeois choice is a cop out.

People say they’re against factory farming, then order the steak anyway. Factory farming is, environmentally, the least damaging way to produce animal protein at scale: intensive systems use less land and water and emit less per kilo than pasture-raised. It’s also cruel as fuck, with animals living their entire lives in confinement, never seeing daylight, slaughtered young. Opposing factory farming while still eating meat is asking for the same end result of cruelty, but spread across more land less efficiently. The honest options are eating the factory-farmed animal, accepting the environmental cost of pasture-raised, or eating less meat.

People will tell you they’re against animal testing while eating meat. Animal testing kills around 192 million animals a year globally, and meat kills 80 billion in the same period, more than four hundred times as many for the same kind of suffering.

There’s a name for the pattern across all of these and it’s called the meat paradox. Loughnan, Haslam and Bastian, in 2010, had participants rate the moral status and mind of a cow. Some of them ate beef jerky first, some didn’t. The ones who’d just eaten jerky denied moral status and mental capacity to the animal they’d eaten. The dissonance is quite literally measurable and it’s not something vegans made up. The animals being conscious in the first place is also a settled scientific position: in 2012 a group of leading neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, formally stating non-human animals possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness, just like humans do.

There’s a stereotype that vegans care about cows more than people, even though animal agriculture damages humans on a substantial scale of its own. Slaughterhouse work has among the highest injury and trauma rates of any occupation. Around 73% of the world’s antibiotics go to livestock, fuelling resistance the WHO names a top global public health threat. Most recent pandemic candidates emerge from intensified animal contact, factory farming included. The climate emissions, somewhere between 15-20% of global greenhouse gases, most affect people in the global south who don’t eat anywhere near as much meat as the rest of the world. Pollution of local water systems from agriculture runoff. It’s a mess.

Veganism is about reducing harm to all sentient beings, humans very much included. It’s not to be confused with being “plant-based” which is a dietary choice. Being vegan is about where you put your money, which is why it covers things like leather, cosmetics, SeaWorld, and the rest.

The arguments against veganism all rest on the same false premise: that veganism is some impossible task.

It isn’t. If you can get to a supermarket, it’s dead easy, no pun intended. Lentils, beans, rice, tofu, oats, frozen veg, every plant-based meat alternative you can think of. It’s almost always cheaper than meat. I went vegan cold turkey. Millions of people have, none of us with any special willpower. The non-dietary stuff can be a little harder, but there’s so many good vegan alternatives to things these days, it’s basically a non-issue.

You don’t need to go vegan tomorrow. The first move is just to think about what is on your plate. Watch a single minute of slaughterhouse footage. Spend an hour with a pig at a sanctuary. Notice what your body tells you and don’t talk it down.

If reading this changes your mind about one meal, that’s enough. Next time you’re in the supermarket, pick up the bean burger instead of the beef one.

You still have the compassion. Stop telling yourself you don’t.

P.S. I want to hear what you think, so email me.