Why not work hard to make a vegan world?

Because a vegan world is not possible and even if it was possible, unfortunately as dreamy and wonderful as it would be, a vegan world is far from a sufferingless world.

We’ll start with the impossibility.
Most humans haven’t even made much more basic ethical decisions. It is impossible to educate most humans to solve conflicts without violence, to not objectifying each other, to not discriminate each other on the basis of race, gender, ethnical orientation, class, weight, height, prettiness and etc and it is even hard to educate humans to recycle so there is no way of convincing them all to become vegans.

As you all know very well, it is not that they have to do something unusual or difficult, only to replace some of the ingredients in their food with some others. You know the facts and arguments, so many good reasons including egocentric ones to go vegan, but humans insist on systematically torturing non-human animals, spitting in the faces of a billion hungry people, harm their own health and leave their children a destroyed planet.
We find meat eating as the most classical characteristic of human nature - apathetic, impulsive, careless, selfish, narrow minded and without the slightest thought about future consequences.

We had thousands of conversations, we exposed the facts to thousands of people but only a very tiny fraction changed their habits in the end. Exposing the facts doesn’t convince most humans.
Humans prove again and again that their profits, taste preference, convenience, entertainment etc, are much more important to them than morality. Most of them are not even willing to hear the facts and listen to the arguments, not to mention stop financing animal abuse.

Have you ever thought why is it so hard to convince someone to go vegan?
The animal rights arguments are so simple and right. They are based on solid facts and evidences. Nobody can confront them rationally. So why is it so hard to convince someone to go vegan? The reason is that reason is not enough. Good arguments are not relevant. Rationality is not enough in this world. It has proved itself as an insufficient element in order to change people’s habits.
Rationality can’t beat motivation.

The fact that the arguments are so strong and so well-based but still fail again and again, is the exact thing that should wake you all. Animal rights activists shouldn’t get strengthen from their strong arguments but the other way around. When arguments that are so strong and so obvious don’t work there is something wrong with the addressees. It can’t be that the problem is always with the marketing, right? with the way we deliver our message, right? Years of campaigns, hundreds of organizations with dozens of methods and you don’t ask yourself how did we accomplish so little?
The problem is that rational arguments are not enough and most of the time they are not even relevant.

The tragical irony is that even when the animal rights movement gives up on the idea of developing caring towards nonhuman animals and turns to caring for the children’s future, using the "for the environment argument" or caring for their own kind using the "for the hungry" argument or caring for themselves - the hopelessness summit, using the "for your health" argument, it doesn’t help.
Nothing helps. Not even when the animal rights movement reaches the lowest point.

We feel ridiculous trying to convince you that there will never be a vegan world.
Wake up! Bullfights still exist and are still very popular.
For too many, the pain and the suffering of humans and non-humans, means nothing.
How dare they compare a bull's suffering to their brutal and repulsive tradition? However, they do. It is a fact. Nothing helps to stop it. Decades of campaigns ran by dozens of animal rights groups…but nothing helps.

While we are asking ourselves, when will "artificial insemination" be considered as rape and slaughter as murder, humans still seize rodeo, circuses and angling as sport and entertainment, a fox as a coat, a horse as transportation and a cow as the phase between grass and steak.

There will never be a vegan world but you can read in the Denmark Argument in the Manifest that during the First World War a whole country was vegan.

Ironically some activists use the Denmark example as a proof that a vegan world is possible. But there is no question that humans, and we mean all of them, can maintain a healthy, cheap, satiating - vegan diet. There is no doubt about that.
The question is not if they can, but if they will. And apparently they won’t.

In spite of the harsh conclusions you should infer from the Danish episode and from the fact that even the most selfish arguments are not working, we believe that the strongest case against the efforts to create a moral change in society based on humans' compassion, is the way humans treat members of their own species. Please take the time and read our articles about how humans treat half of their own species and their own posterity.
Of course it shouldn’t matter to what species someone belongs, but it does matter to them and still this is how they treat each other.

A vegan world is not possible and can be easily reversed as we saw in the Denmark example. But even if it was possible and permanent, a vegan world is not a sufferingless world.

Vegan diet is less harmful in an inexpressible way compared to animal based diet but it is not enough as it is harmful and therefore not a moral alternative.
When you are trying to convince someone to convert his diet to a vegan one, you are trying to cause him to stop taking part in horrible things and to take part in much less horrible things. You don’t change his consumption habits to moral and 100% cruelty free. Plant based diet is cruel. The fact that there are diets that are much crueler doesn’t make it moral.

No matter how little we will consume, we will cause suffering. Suffering is an inherent part of life. Soy is also murder. The ground that the soy is growing on used to be the home of millions of nonhuman animals throughout time. Everything that once grew there was pulled out, and herbicides and fungicides are constantly spread to make sure that nothing besides the specific desirable crop will grow on that land. Pesticides are also being used. Apples for example can be sprayed up to 16 times with 36 different pesticides, and they are not exceptional. Hundreds of different chemicals are regularly being used in agriculture. Those chemicals are stable and keep on contaminating ecological systems far after and far away from when and where they were first used.
Think you can avoid them by consuming organic food only? Unfortunately you can't.
Organic agriculture also uses many chemicals as pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, which are still potent to the ones they are intended to harm and many others. The only difference is that those compounds (which all cause harms in the manufacture process and by being transported exactly like in the non-organic agriculture chemicals) are more "natural" and better decompose, as if it matters to the poisoned animal.

It suits meat eaters, not animal rights activists to be satisfied with the label "no pesticides", concluding that no actions were made to remove whom who gets near humans' "property".
"No pesticides" doesn’t mean no "pest" control methods such as biological extermination, leg traps, snare tarps, above den trap, smoke bombs, burrows fumigation, burrows foaming, flooding and everything that comes to the farmers mind. No inhibitions what so ever, not by the law and not by the conscience.

Being less productive, organic agriculture requires much more land to be "cleared", meaning more deforestation and more habitat destruction.
Furthermore, since the crops are less treated they are more vulnerable to the climate and are more depended on the soil type so the growth is limited to smaller and fitter areas even though the demand is worldwide, meaning much more transportation.
Another harmful consequence of the organic crops’ vulnerability is more packing, meaning more nylon, paper, plastic and etc and more of the packages manufacture harms mostly manifested in energy consumption, pollutants and eventually more waste.

Transportation plays a vital role all over the food production chain, not only when the product is finished and ready to be consumed. From transportation of the minerals that compose the fertilizers, later to be sent to the farmer, to the many raw materials, including the oil used at the processing stages, to the transportation of waste after consumption. On an international scale, the import and export of food has tripled in the past 20 years. Food is now the largest component of air freight, and air transport is the most polluting and least efficient form of transportation. A weekly basket of imported food (fruit and vegetables) could add to one ton of CO2 emissions.
When you buy a soyogurt made in belgium the strawberries can originate in russia, the soy from brazil, sugar from guatemala and the packaging plastics from china.

Today it is impossible to base all your diet on local food and even if you could, do you really believe you should spend your time on debating with your fellow vegans about what is less worse: buying a product from a local company that use animals tests for other products they sell or a product from a company that doesn’t use animals tests at all but their products are flown 150,000km to reach your local grocery store?
The suffering inflicted in animals test is more direct and perceptible so we guess you will pick the far distance non-tested products. We do too. But it is choosing between two evils and compromising on someone else’s suffering.

Most vegans don’t strictly stick to a purely raw diet and also consume processed foods. The manufacture of products that are considered basic such as: soy milk, sugar, tofu, bread, oil, tea and etc can include dozens of sub-processes like:
Cleaning and removing unwanted parts such as the outer layers, for example the skinning of peaches, separating the beans from the pod, extracting the interior such as seeds, mixing and macerating as in preserved fruits and vegetables, liquefaction and pressing as in fruit juices and soy milk production, fermentation like in soy sauces and tempeh, baking, boiling, broiling, frying, steaming, shipping of a number of ingredients from different distances, wrapping, labeling, transportation of waste and as mentioned earlier the transportation to the stores. All are inevitable. All are comfortably invisible as the finished product lies on the shelf.
Even if you are willing and sure that you are able to give up processed food as a whole, remember that everyone else must do it as well. Everyone, people who eat whatever they want whenever they want, people who don’t consider any ethical issues in their consumption choices, people who drive their SUVs on the way to the gourmet restaurant must adopt this diet as well. Do you see foie gras consumers eat only local, seasonal, non-wrapped, wind pollinated apples?

Let’s take for example the vegans’ ‘unofficial’ main food - tofu, and see how it is made:
After being cultivated, harvested and dried in the farm, the soybeans are then stocked in sacks and transported to the plant where the tofu is manufactured.
First the beans are soaked in water for about 13 hours. Then they are mashed using pureeing machines, and mixed with water into a slurry while heated to boiling temperature. The soy juice is extracted with a press, separating it from the pulp, which consists of the hull and fiber. This solid waste will be sold as cheap feed for livestock. The next stage of tofu production takes place after the juice from the soybean is pumped into curding vats, and a coagulating agent such as calcium sulfate, magnesium chloride, or nigari is mixed in. Then the curds are pressed, mostly by centrifuges or hydraulic presses. The whey drains off, leaving soft blocks of pressed curds. Cutters slice the big block of tofu into smaller ones, and those tofu blocks are washed in vats of cool water where they firm up and then stored. The tofu may be packaged into shrink-wrapped blocks or continuous thermo-form packages, then each is sealed, weighed, and dated. The packaged tofu is pasteurized at about 180°F (82°C) and then chilled again in water. Finally, the tofu is placed into boxes and shipped in refrigerated trucks (it must be kept refrigerated at below 45°F (7°C), or it would spoil) to distributors.

The list of harms in the plant based diet is endless. For a more complete picture please read vegan suffering. And for now we’ll finish with the inseparable connection between the honey industry and dozens of vegan food items taken from the article:
"75% of all food crops, including many fruits, vegetables and beans are made possible by pollinators, mostly insects. Honeybees are by far the most common pollinators, accounting for 90% of the pollination so that crops like almonds and apples are completely dependent on.

Farmers, who rely on factory-farmed honeybees for pollination, rent more than two million honeybee colonies every year in the US alone. The hives are transported by trucks mostly and sometimes by airplanes, from field to field according to blossom timings.

Honey production is valued at $157 million a year in the US while the value of the food crops pollinated by honey-bees reaches $15 billion every year.
In economic terms it means that honey is strictly a sideline activity. Beekeepers earn much more from renting "their" bees for pollination than they do from honey production.
In other words the two industries heavily rely on one another in a mutual dependence. And so ironically vegan food is what keeps the beekeeping business the profitable industry it is.
Vegan food is grown on the expense of billions upon billions of bees, that go through routine examination and handling, artificial feeding regimes, drug and pesticide treatment, genetic manipulation, artificial insemination, smoking, air blasting, transportation (by air, rail and road), starvation and slaughter."

In your ideal world everybody grow their own food and so don’t use any means of disinfestation, no packing, no further processing and no transportation but that can only be technically relevant for a relatively tiny group of people. The global course is exactly the opposite. More urbanization, more huge supermarkets and less small retails, more industrial food, more corporate rule over every existing plant, more chemicals inside the food and inside the land it grew on, more packages, much more transportation and etc.

Not only that less and less people in Asia, the most populated continent in the world with more than 60% of all humans, grow their on food, the fast urbanization process the Asians undergo highly increases their per capita animal consumption.
Animal consumption is growing rapidly and persistently all over the world. The world per capita consumption has more than doubled over the last 40 years and in the developing countries it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.
The per capita meat and milk consumption is rising fastest in regions where urbanization and rapid income growth take place. Asia’s economic growth has resulted in quick wage increases, which have created a growing middle class in several of the large transitional economies. Income increase quickly spurs demand for more expensive food, such as meat and dairy products.
As populations move from rural to urban areas, structural shifts in food demand patterns occur because a wider choice of foods is available in urban markets, because people are exposed to a variety of dietary patterns from foreign cultures, because urban lifestyles prioritize on foods that require less time to prepare and because urban residents do not grow their own food.

The population growth, urbanization and income growth that fueled the increase in meat and milk consumption are expected to intensively continue in the next decades, creating a veritable Livestock Revolution. As these events unfold, many people's diets will change and many more animals will suffer.
People in developing countries currently consume on average one-third the meat and one-quarter of the milk products per capita compared to the richer North, but this is changing rapidly. More people everywhere are eating more animal products as soon as their incomes rise above poverty level. The animal rights movement can’t deal with the current enormous amounts of exploited animals and it will only get worse. In the future many more animals will suffer much more.

China plays the most dominant role in the animal consumption increase with its meteoric meat consumption increase which began in the early 1980s. In 1983 the meat consumption was 16 kilograms per person per year, 25 kilograms per person by 1995, 31 kilograms by 1999, 50 kilograms by 2000, and now is 53 kilograms per person. That’s a 12% increase per year on a per capita basis, a threefold increase in less than 25 years and double in ten years.

The global consumption of milk drinks has risen by 13% from 214 billion liters in 2002 to 242 billion liters in 2007. Asia has seen the most consistent growth, mainly due to the booming demand in China. Cheese is making inroads as well, as many chinese take on westernized eating habits, and so the global milk drinks volumes is forecast to rise by 20% until 2012.
India, the second most populated country in the world, has fourfold its milk consumption since 1970 jumping from 21 million to 87 million tons. In 1997, India overtook the United States in dairy production, making it the world’s leading producer of milk and other dairy products.
As well as in Asia, milk growth consumption is also expected to expand in many South American countries such as in Argentina – 8%, Brazil – 3%, Uruguay 4%, Venezuela 6% and Chile 4%.

In late 2007 the chinese government came out with a new set of nutritional guidelines that encourage citizens to consume 300 grams of dairy per day - nearly a five-fold increase over current consumption in the urban areas. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jinbao visited a dairy farm in the Sichuan Province and proclaimed that he has a dream to provide all Chinese, especially children, with a half a kilogram of milk per day.
As you can see in the following graph regarding the 2006 consumption data (before his statement), the per capita consumption has more than tripled in the last decade. If Jinbao’s dream comes true it will boost the current consumption amount by seven and a half times.

This is the horrible world we live in, activists campaigning against the dairy industry for decades as hard as they can, and one person in one statement triples the expected milk production in the most populated country in the world in just a few years.
One politician’s dream is millions of cows’ nightmare.

Egg production has increased in the United States, Japan, India, and Mexico over the past four decades, most of the growth has been due to a 10-fold increase in eggs consumption in developing countries as a result of rising incomes and growing populations.
Between 1990 and 2005, China accounted for 64% of the growth in world egg production. By 2005 this one country produced nearly 44% of the world’s eggs - 28.7 million tons - more than five times as many as the next largest producer. And this trend is expected to continue, with output predicted to rise by 23% by 2015.
Most egg production in China has transitioned from traditional, scattered, backyard farms to large-scale integrated operations. While small farmers once produced most of the eggs for markets for local consumers, huge, intensive warehouse-like battery cage facilities have become the norm and are encouraged by chinese egg industry leaders and the government who subsidies the industrial large-scale farms.
In addition china particularly and Asia in general is where western large-scale egg producers are looking, where they can conduct business with little "interference" such as welfare regulations and environmental restrictions.

It is frightening to think how much animal suffering increased since Animal Liberation was first published. The global pigs meat production increased almost 3 times, egg production 4 times and chickens meat production by more than 5 times.
The meat consumption per capita has increased in all countries in the world with no exceptions. The per capita demand in Asia has almost quadrupled since 1975.
The Middle Income Countries have triple their meat consumption since 1975 and it's now standing on about 50kg on average. China’s meat per capita consumption was quintupled since Animal Liberation was first published. And maybe the most freighting figure is that what is called developing countries are already catching up with the average global consumption and they were standing on third of today’s amount just in 1975. These countries also hold the highest population growth rate.

The future is not auspicious. The proportion between the number of humans who are potential animal rights supporters and potential vegans, and the number of humans who are not, will be even worse in the future.
In many cases the ones with the potential are against breeding or at least procreate "only" once or twice, as opposed to humans who are not animal rights potentials, which are the vast majority of the world anyway, that usually procreate at least 4 times in their life time. In a lot of cases even more.
In rough generalization, as far as humans are distant from animal rights, human rights and environmental "issues", the more they procreate and vice versa. Therefore even the opposition to relatively small scale industries like veal calves, will be harder in the future.

The human population is growing rapidly. Every second, 5 more humans are born. The suffering in the world is growing nominatively to the human population growth. Reducing the number of humans will necessarily reduce the amounts of suffering.

The total animal products consumption has almost tripled since animal liberation was written. It’s the human population, urbanization, increase in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the price of grain and diseases like Avian Influenza and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) that determine the number of exploited animals, not the animal rights movement. No point in dreaming of a vegan world when the global course is the exact opposite.

Time is our greatest enemy. Every second that life continues is extreme suffering for billions of creatures.

It is very hard for us to refer to factory farms which are the vastest exploitation systems ever created in the world, as symptoms but that is what they are, symptoms. And the only way to stop the symptoms of the problem is to identify the main root cause and directly work to abolish it.

Veganism is not the goal. Apparently it needs to be reminded to animal rights activists all the time. The problem is not what people eat, it is what people think. You haven’t started your activism in the animal rights movement in order to change people’s diet. It wasn’t people’s diet that bothered you it was the suffering, right? The oil industry, the logging industry, steel, wood, plastic, nylon, cars, roads, concrete, cosmetics, electricity and as we showed here, every vegan food industry causes suffering too. If a vegan world was possible it would have been great compared to our current world, but it is not possible and even if it was possible it wouldn’t be a sufferingless world. And that is what moral people should wish for.

Our question to you is why working on a vegan world when you can work on a sufferingless world?
If you only wish for a better world, you can leave our website and continue with your current activity. If you wish to stop the suffering, leave your current activity and establish your own stopping all the suffering team.