O.O.S - Manifest

It is not easy to explain your most fundamental perceptions and ideas. It feels so clear, so obvious and right that ironically it is hard to pass it forth. Yet this is the goal of this manifest, this website and the only one solution movement as a whole, an explanation why the only deep-rooted, fundamental, radical, comprehensive and true solution to the world’s suffering is to destroy it.

It is a rather banal and self evident idea that many activists think of at some point in their lives, but we feel that mostly it pops up in times of despair and disbelief while it should be the primal concept at all times regardless of the state of affairs within the animal rights movement or with your own activism.
Such a fundamental and basic philosophy shouldn’t be built on a temporary situation or episodic mood. That is why we wrapped the idea with arguments that seek to construct a serious and comprehensive case for the annihilation idea. We want that what is now probably no more than a feeling or an opinion, will change into a purpose and then into action.

Please don’t automatically dismiss the idea as a cliché or a slogan, or an out of reach fantasy and get back to your familiar position in your organization. You are an activist because in some point of your life you realized how much suffering exists in the world and you have decided that you must stop it. The only one solution initiative is not romantic naiveness of inexperienced activists or grown fantasists. It is a rational and realistic quest for a sufferingless world.
Even if you have doubts at least read the whole manifest. You may get new perspectives and new ideas, new arguments and new questions to confront with. The worst thing that can happen is a waste of a few hours, the best thing is that you will decide that from now on, you devote your life to end all the suffering in the world.

The suffering argument

It is so easy to hate and seek revenge, when you first realize in what kind of a world you are living. When every day you find out about more ways humans exploit nonhuman animals and each other. But we are not promoting the only one solution idea out of rage or despair. We are interested in stopping all the suffering only. We don’t seek revenge. It would be useless, senseless and not rational. The last thing we want you to think about us is that we are desperate irrational human haters. We were conventional animal rights activists who dedicated every minute of their lives to the animal liberation struggle until we realized that we were giving all we’ve got in the wrong place.
We had focused our efforts on the irrelevant attempt to change all the humans in the world as if it is possible and as if that is what will stop all the suffering in the world.
We understood that we shouldn’t have relied on human compassion and morality in the first place. Humans won't voluntarily give up on their control over the non-human animals and over the weaker layers of the human society. History and every day reality prove it again and again (many examples are presented in this manifest and many more all over the website). Humans will never voluntarily give up their predominance. Power is too addictive. The domination is too comfortable.
And even if, in spite of what happened in the world in every single day so far, you still believe it is possible, as we will further explain it is not supposed to be humans' decision in the first place. We shouldn’t ask humans whether or not they are willing to stop torturing others, we should stop them.

After years of demonstrations, rallies, parades, vegan food stands, information stands, lectures, seminars, direct actions, graffiti, posters, flyers, liberations from factory farms and from laboratories, lobbyism and laws promotion, articles, investigations, movies, blockings, street theatres and every other way we thought could help convince humans to stop taking part and financing animal exploitation, today we suggest a deep-rooted, radical, comprehensive and real solution to the world suffering. Not because we are fed up with humans. Not because we are tired and weary, but because it is the only way to stop the suffering.

We want you all to be convinced because you see yourselves as responsible for all the suffering and therefore must act to stop it all.
We want activists who are not satisfied with dealing with the suffering that they believe they are directly responsible for, the suffering in front of their eyes, in their area, their city or their country.

We don’t want you to be convinced as a last resort.
Not despair but an inspiration is what we hope you would feel when you think about the idea. Not hate or crave for revenge but moral afflatus. Our main argument is a positive one, we want the image of a world with no battery cages, no slaughterhouses, no laboratories, no rape and no hunger to be your motivation.
The world suffering is our main reason, our main motivation and our main argument.

However we feel that the picture won't be complete without dealing with the animal rights movement and the efforts to create a moral change in society based on humans' compassion.

The negative argument

Have you ever wondered why is it so hard to convince someone to go vegan?
We don’t need to tell you how morally initiatory and how nutritiously simple veganism is. So how come it is so hard, even for many people who define themselves as "animal lovers", to become vegans? It is a question we have constantly asked ourselves when we were "vegan converters". Could it be that the obstacle to veganism is the messengers? Not enough health food stores? The price of soy milk? Not enough vegan celebrities? Not enough visual evidence about what is going on in factory farms? You know it is not any of these.
The question we are asking ourselves now in the only one solution movement is how come animal rights activists don’t see that the problem is with the addressees?

It is not that humans have to do something unusual or difficult in order to become vegans, only to replace some of the ingredients in their food to some others. You know the facts. There are so many good reasons including egocentric ones to go vegan, but humans insist on systematically torturing non-human animals, spit in the faces of the world’s billion hungry people, harm their own health and "bequeath" their children a destroyed planet.
We find meat eating as the most classical characteristic of human nature. Apathetic, impulsive, careless, selfish, narrow minded, without the slightest thought about the future consequences.

How many times do you need to hear from people - that humans are a part of the food chain, that eating meat is natural, that in the bible it's written that it's o.k to eat animals, that you should focus on humans' problems first, and that if everyone become vegetarian, then what will we do with all the farm animals - before you understand? For how long will you answer the same answers and argue the same arguments that are so simple and right but unfortunately are not what people want to hear?
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? The problem can't always be with the way we deliver our message.
Years of campaigns, hundreds of organizations with dozens of methods and you don’t ask yourself how did we accomplish so little?

Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter that you are right. It doesn’t matter that meat eaters' arguments are not rational and inconsistent, if not totally stupid. It doesn’t matter that your arguments are so simple, rational and so damn right. Unfortunately being right and rational is not enough.
You are expecting humans, who are too lazy to recycle, such an easy and undemanding task, to maintain a moral life?! They hardly go through the trouble of separating paper from plastic or trying (just trying!) soy milk. They fail to cut down their weekly meat quantity when they get a direct order from their doctors. They fail when they are told that their own health is in danger, so you expect them to do it for other species?!

They eat whatever they want whenever they want, they keep on smoking even that they know it hurts them and their own children, they don’t exercise, eat tons of sugar, fat and cholesterol and you seriously think that "the equal consideration of interests" argument can change their ways? Today we don’t understand how we could have ever believed that it is possible. We guess that when you want something so bad you stop thinking rationally.

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 prefer public transportation instead of their private car so there is no way of convincing them all to become non-speciesist vegans. Even a vegetarian world is a fanciful fantasy.

Everything is economic. Things change when there is an interest, money and a market for the change. Three elements that unfortunately the animal rights movement doesn’t hold. Humans don’t have an interest to go vegan (at least they don’t feel they have), the animal rights movement doesn’t have money and the market wants steaks not tofu.

Exposing the facts doesn’t convince humans.
Humans prove again and again that their profits, taste preference, convenience, entertainment etc, are much more important than someone else's suffering.

And the tragical irony is that even when the animal rights movement gives up on the vision of a non-speciesist world, even when the movement gives up on the moral debate and focuses on the selfish arguments that exclude the animals from the equation, even then it is still hopeless.
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 using the "for your health" argument, it doesn’t help.

To continue with the efforts to convince humans to stop consuming animal products is absurd. They don’t stop even when it kills them and their families!
So do you really believe that they will stop because an animal has been tortured for them?

We are trying to convince you that a vegan world is not possible while history has already shown that even a vegan country is not possible...

The Denmark argument

Denmark was vegan for a while during the First World War because of the British blockade. Considering that the vegan diet is much more efficient, the residents ate seed and plants that before the blockade fed livestock. Instead of eating animals they ate what they usually fed animals with.
The death rate during this period dropped by 34%, and was far lower than the death rate of any similar period during the former two decades. Furthermore, a flu plague that broke in the Scandinavian area skipped Denmark.
But the moment the blockade was lifted, the Danes returned to their "normal" non-vegan diet, and the death rate increased back to its "normal" level. Denmark proved that society can easily manage with a vegan diet.
Have the Danes changed their diet permanently? No chance.

Our entire website is full of arguments, facts and evidences, proving society will never change. It has always been and still is sexist, chauvinist, fascist, so power based and most important, extremely speciesist. We see the Danish example as one of the strongest evidences of the impossibility of a vegan world and as a very representative example for the human character. The Danes have refused to stay vegans even after they realized it was a much better diet for them and for their children. As soon as they didn’t have to maintain a vegan diet, they stopped. Don’t you think it says something about humans and about the chance for a vegan world?
This test case has failed and it wasn’t even a test case, the vegan diet was forced on the Danes and even though the result was great (health-wise speaking) no country ever tried it since.

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.

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. 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.
It starts with the systematic and automatic discrimination of more than half of the human population on a gender basis.

The women argument

It is not just the obvious women rights violations such as imposed dress codes, the appalling female genital mutilation inflicted on millions of young girls, the denial of the right to vote, to maintain assents and to marry whom they desire, or being formally and officially men's properties. The discrimination and exploitation is everywhere. For every "unenlightened" society in which certain professions are formally prohibited to women, there are many societies that culturally and subliminally prohibit other or even the same professions and also social and political positions from women.
Western societies may think that they are genderly equal, but the wage gaps for the same profession are still huge, there is not even one parliament in the world with a women majority, only in 1995 it was the first time that a country had an equal number of women and men in ministerial posts (Sweden) and today again there is not even one. Only 7% of the world's total cabinet ministers are women. Some countries still do not have women suffrage.
It is really an endless dry statistics list but we feel very uncomfortable with these examples being very institutionalized and even capitalistic and also because the problems are much more basic.

Since women abilities don’t fall from men abilities in general, the only explanation to this historical cross-cultural omission is the physical difference. Males are physically stronger and in such a power based world that's all it takes. This is how males got in their dominant position in the first place and as you can see it didn’t change much since.
It is not just the obvious and the formal discrimination that supposedly happens only in unenlightened societies (and as we argue happens on enormous extent on the so called enlightened societies), it is the fact that every woman in every culture feels like a sex object during her lifetime no matter where she lives.
One of every 3 women has, at some point in her life, been the victim of sexual assault, physical or psychological.
The combination of sexual attraction and a physical predominance of men put women in a continuous worry. Women don’t feel safe. As simple and primitive as that. They don’t feel safe being alone at night in dark areas even in their own neighborhood.
What can be more basic than that?

This world is so violent and power based that many women carry with them safeguards such as tear gas spray or electrical shocker. Some take self defense lessons and we even know of women who carry condoms all the time in case someone will try to rape them!

Worldwide, one out of every 4 women is raped during her lifetime. An estimated 683,000 rapes occur each year. Only 16% of rape victims report the offense to the police.
In many places in the world, rape within marriage doesn't even count. When a woman is married - "no" to sex is not an option. A woman is supposed to give in to her husband. She is his property, his belongings.

African women are occasionally blamed for the fate of their own children who are born with HIV or/and malnutrition. It is very easy for western politicians to blame their "ignorance" but the truth is that many pregnancies are the consequence of the unbearable frequency of rapes.

In our world being physically weaker is being vulnerable.
25% to 75% (depending on the country) of women are regularly beaten at home.
In the United States a woman is physically abused by her intimate partner every 9 seconds. In India, more than 5,000 women are murdered each year because their in-laws consider their dowries inadequate.

Women's vulnerability is not only derived from the threat of direct violence.
Women have been the historic victims of political and economic exclusions and have suffered the ravages of patriarchy, sexism and discriminatory practices that have kept them outside of social, political and economic power structures.

Women are still the poorest of the world's poor, representing 70% of the 1.2 billion people who live in absolute poverty (incomes of less than $1 a day).
Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10% of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's property. The association between gender inequality and poverty can’t be more obvious.

How long would women have to wait until they won't be murdered for expressing their opinions? For looking at the wrong direction?
When will men understand that women belong only to themselves? When will forced marriages stop? When will women stop having sex with men they don’t desire? When will the beating, the humiliations and the discriminations end?
When will be the last rape?

We are in the third millennium and half of the human population is systematically and automatically discriminated against. What hope then, do nonhumans have?

The children argument

Even more powerless than women are children. 4 out of 10 African children live below the poverty line on barely $1 a day.
At least 30% have no access to medical services, while more than 40% lack access to safe water.
About 1.2 million children are trafficked each year in the sex industry.
1 in 4, live in dangerous, unstable areas. More than 2 million children have died as a direct result of armed conflicts over the last decade. 6 million have been seriously injured or permanently disabled. Countless others have been forced to witness or even to take part in horrifying acts of violence.
20 million children have been forced to flee their homes because of conflicts, and more than a million have been orphaned.

The suffering does not stop when the war does. About 10 million are psychologically traumatized. The trauma of exposure to violence and brutal death, emotionally affects generations of young people for the rest of their lives.

Still, for many children the most dangerous place is where they should be the safest - their own home. Every day, many children around the world are hit, kicked, threatened, ridiculed and isolated. About 10% to 30% of children in many states are beaten severely with belts, sticks or other objects. If an adult was subjected to any of these actions it would have been a criminal assault. But children are the property of their parents, so everything is allowed.

At least third of the abused children will be abusive parents. It is an endless cycle of suffering. Not to mention all the suffering that all of them will cause to nonhumans.

Every child is bombarded with violence on a daily basis. Television, movies and advertising continue to glorify the role of the "macho man" through action movies and television, violent video games and toys, pornography and much more.
From the earliest age, boys learn how to “be a man” from their fathers, mothers, teachers, mentors, friends and other role models including the ones they find on television and in movies. Boys play with guns, planes and other violent toys, they engage in "contact sports" that glorify violence and the ability to overcome the other team. They are expected to be aggressive, physically strong, heterosexual, courageous and financial providers, ruthless and powerful business executives, destroying their competitors, or they are encouraged to join the military and serve their countries by attacking and destroying the "enemy".

Don’t expect the movies industry, the television industry, the toys industry or advertising companies to care and to change their actions because of their part in this violent world or for the image of women in society. They won't.
It is not profitable to care.

But we can’t blame it all on society. There is a reason why sex and violence sell. They are the strongest parts in human character. Violence is not only absorbed from the surrounding. It is engraved deep within the human mind "blueprints", passed on by both culture and genes. It’s no coincidence that society looks the way it does.
Many studies have long ago proved that as opposed to what you might like to believe, boys don’t really need other men to teach them how to be machos. It is in their blood.
The genetic factor and not their intended role in society, is what leads children to pick "gender toys". Again and again kindergarten children (even first timers who still don’t have favorite toys) pick their toys on a gender basis, even when all kinds of toys are given to them. Furthermore, when girls get trucks and soldiers and boys get dolls and kitchenware, they are quickly bored and anxious to substitute to their natural toys, guns, planes and other violent toys.

Children are violent creatures raised in a violent environment by violent parents, in a violent world.
All their lives they learn that power will get them what they want and that they are allowed to use it anytime they like. The next generation won’t be different.
These children are the victims of today and the abusers of tomorrow.

With such terrifying amounts of violence that humans inflict on children, their own species continuation, and in so many cases to their own children, their own flesh and blood, it just leaves no room for hope to anybody else.

The AIDS argument

Our last example for that matter is the AIDS pandemic. Not because it can be compared with the treatment towards women and children during history and until today, as far as its scope or meaning as a pandemic, but because we find the discovery and the early and current confrontation with the disease, very characteristic to the human race.

Human’s ignorance, conservatism and homophobia, during the first years of the AIDS outbreak, were some of the catalyst elements that caused it to grow to today’s measures. The omissions took place in each and every level - in the federal government, in municipalities and among local politicians, in the health institutions, research institutions, the media, and of course the public.

The history of the AIDS pandemic has brought some of the lowest lows of discrimination, hatred, ignorance and fear. It was first called "gay cancer" because in the first few months medical scientists thought that only gay men can get it. After they discovered that the syndrome included other manifestations, the name was changed to "GRID," or Gay Related Immune Deficiency. This had an effect of boosting homophobia and adding stigma to homosexuality in the general public. Gay men were frequently singled out for abuse as they were deemed to be responsible for the cause and spread of the virus. Sensational reporting in the press became progressively anti-gay and did little to help the situation.

Once AIDS became known as a "gay disease" it was difficult even for the doctors to get other doctors from different specialties to acknowledge that AIDS could be transmitted to people who were not gay, such as infants born from drug-using mothers, children and adults who had hemophilia and people who had received blood transfusions. Thus, straight people didn’t use any precautions and many got infected.

Ronald Reagan's administration ignored the epidemic due to homophobia and only in 1987, six years after the pandemic stroke, he started to seriously address the crisis. The U.S. was the last industrialized nation to create a comprehensive prevention and education program.
Politicians like Pat Buchanan, the political commentator and sometime presidential candidate, who called the disease "nature's revenge", and the Right-wing Senator Jesse Helms who was afraid to "encourage or promote homosexual activity", introduced legislation in response to the Surgeon General's recommendation on sex education.
The republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, said while he was a Senate candidate in 1992, that "we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague". He also wrote in 1992 survey: "I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk".
On December 8 2007 he gave an interview to Fox News and said "I don't run from it, I don't recant it," regarding the statements he mad 15 years ago. He also said that he still believes homosexuality is "sinful".

The Center for Disease Control (CDC), responsible for tracking down and reporting all communicable disease in the US, faced governmental apathy in the mounting crisis. Inner conflicts within the CDC researchers over how much time and attention was given to AIDS issues were very common.
The New York City Public Health Department did very little, when Public Health Director David Sencer refused to call it an emergency and stated that the Public Health Department doesn’t need to do anything at all since the gay community was handling it sufficiently.

The New York Times, the national leader in news coverage and the country's newspaper of record, published 62 stories in the two month outbreak of the so-called "Legionnaire's Disease", which would ultimately kill 29 people and make another 182 ill. Eleven of these stories were on the front page. Only three stories about AIDS were published in 1981 and three more in 1982, none on the front page.

A variety of reasons have contributed to the slow response of the American media. The most obvious was overt homophobia, or a simple hostility to the gay men who were at the core of the epidemic. Another reason may have been editorial judgments that the general readership of newspapers was simply not interested in what happened to sex-crazed gay men and drug-addled junkies in the inner city, who were seen by many as getting what they deserved.
Most newspapers would print stories about AIDS only when it affected heterosexuals. For example, AIDS wasn't reported in the Wall Street Journal until it involved heterosexuals.

The reason why AIDS drew so little attention in the beginning is that the "strongest" in society are white western straight males, who thought they are not threaten by AIDS because it was a "gay and drag addicts disease" so they didn’t care.
And it is not much different today.
AIDS is not history. Even not in the so called developed countries and definitely not in Africa. There are 40 million people living with HIV today, 2.5 million of them are children and almost 25 million of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Around 2.5 million adults and children become infected with HIV every year.

Apparently these figures don’t impress humans. It would cost each citizen of the richest countries $10 per year to fully finance the struggle against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and Malaria in developing countries.
Another $10 from each citizen of the richest countries per year would provide basic education and primary health care to twenty of the poorest countries in Africa.
Meanwhile world military spending are more than a trillion dollars per year. Europeans are spending $11 billion per year on ice cream and $105 billion per year on alcoholic drinks.
Human’s priorities among their own species are scary and leave no hope for the non-humans.

Why are you accepting this cruel, full of suffering world? It is not inevitable.
Why should all the world's suffering creatures wait till the values of the world reverse? Why should they wait until suffering becomes prior to profits?
Add the historically and logically based assumption that this desirable order of priorities will never happen and it can’t get more obvious than that.

We live in a world where even most humans, which consider themselves as morally superior over nonhuman animals, do not have basic control over what happens with their lives. If this is how they treat the perceived "weaker" individuals of their own species, what hope then, do nonhumans have?

The chances argument

One of the most common excuses humans use to avoid the moral confrontation with the animal rights idea is the "there is no chance" excuse.

The animal rights activists will probably say three things in response.
One is that a disbelief in the success of a struggle against exploitation doesn’t give anyone the right to continue exploiting. They will go on saying that veganism is the moral choice even if we can’t change all the world, even if we can’t turn everyone to vegans.
Two, they will say that the animal rights movement had a few successes since it was founded.
And three, they will argue that the slavery abolishment is an historical example of a successful liberation struggle that can inspire the animal liberation struggle.

Unfortunately these 3 arguments are fundamentally wrong and morally devastative.

The vegan argument

We totally disagree that veganism is the moral choice even if we can’t change the entire world.
First of all we disagree that veganism is a moral choice. We do agree of course that veganism is a much better choice than a vegetarian or an omnivore diet, morally speaking. But the fact that it is better doesn’t make it good.

Veganism is incomparably less cruel than animal based diet but as huge as the gaps are, less cruel is still cruel and is not suffering free, therefore can't be a moral alternative.
Veganism is not moral because the manufacture process of vegan food causes suffering as well. Eating a vegan meal is participating in a long and complex web of intensive food production. But animal rights activists are so dazzled by the allegedly moral option that they forget some of the basics of every industry which are not absent in the case of vegan products. They know or at least can figure out that among the main stages of plant based diet production are land clearing, plowing, irrigation, fertilization and pesticides dispersal, harvesting followed by a great deal of processing, packaging and transportation. Just as all other industries, all stages require vast amount of mechanization, energy, vivisection (products testing), pollutants and habitat destruction. All are invisible when the final product sits on the shelves.

Soy is also murder. The ground that the soy is growing on used to be the home of millions of nonhuman animals throughout time.
Deforestation occurs for decades and in a massive scale, not just for cattle grazing but for many crops that most vegans consume on a daily basis such as cotton, sugar, palm oil (which is very common in soaps and washing powders) and soy.
Vegans take part in brutal and violent methods of clearing of ecosystems to make way for cultivation such as the notorious "slash and burn" - cutting and burning of forests and woodlands, to convert them into crop fields, insuring that no vegetation, soil microorganisms or "pests" are left.

When the land was already conquered from other species and was already cleared for cultivation, all the leftovers of the former cultivation and everything else that managed to grow is pulled out, and herbicides and fungicides are constantly spread to make sure that nothing besides the specific desirable crop grows on that land. 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.
At first, herbicides that are nonselective are applied to newly-cleared land. These are violent substances that kill every plant they come into contact with. Other pesticides as Insecticides and Fungicides are also sprayed at early stages. Birds, fish and other aquatic organisms are hurt the most due to loss of resources they depend upon, mostly habitat, food and cover from predators.

Think you can avoid disinfestation by consuming organic food only?
Organic products are many vegans' false hope for the impossible sufferingless consumption, but organic agriculture also uses many chemicals as pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers which are still potent to the ones they are intended to harm and to many others.
The spread of poisons is allowed and is used often also in organic practices, as long as these are natural degradable poisons.
They are called Biopesticides and we doubt the poisoned animals are consoled by the fact that at least the poisons dismantle after they kill them.

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". The desire to have an alternative option blurs critical and clear thinking. Can it be that what is economically senseless with animal products as you try to explain non-vegans again and again, is perfectly logical with organic ones?
Do you really believe that it is possible to produce sufficient amounts of food without any disinfestation?

"No pesticides" doesn't mean no disinfestation. Pest control methods are commonly used and they include biological extermination, a violent repertory of traps, gassing, smoke bombing, fumigating and foaming burrows, which are the farmers’ main target. Even flammable gases such as propane and oxygen are injected with a hose into the burrows and then ignited.
Flooding or burning fields after harvest are also common "pest control" methods. Many animals, mostly snakes and baby rodents, are simply drowned or burned alive.
And probably the extremist variation of "pest control" happens in sugar cane fields when farmers begin to harvest the field on all sides going from the ends to the center, so many animals are packed at the last square. Then they burn the area while surrounding it with tractors, pickaxes, listers, mattocks, pitchforks and etc. The animals that were able to escape the flames and the tractors, are clubbed to death by the farmers.
Food items that their production includes these methods are marked with the label "no pesticides".
You can make efforts and buy not genetically modified, no pesticide, no fertilizers and fair traded food, and we definitely don’t underestimate it, but since there is no "no animal was clubbed to death in the making of this product" label, how can you tell that your food wasn’t responsible for badger gassing?

The organic agriculture holds such a good reputation because the suffering is less familiar.
All the activists know that avoiding pesticides use by organic producers is not for the sake of animals but for the sake of consumers. Many farmers take advantage of the "green" trend and the health trend, abandoning non-organic agriculture and substitute it with organic to increase profits. Most couldn’t care less about a few poisoned creatures. And indeed they use the "pest control" methods which are not less violent.

Furthermore organic agriculture requires more land, as it’s less productive, meaning more deforestation which means more soil degradation and more transportation since the crops are less treated and therefore more vulnerable to the climate, and so the growth is limited to smaller and fitter areas even though the demand is worldwide.
A single shopping basket of 26 imported organic products could have traveled 241,000km and released as much CO2 as an average household of 4 does through cooking meals over eight months.
The crops’ vulnerability also requires more packing meaning more of the packages production harms mostly manifested in energy consumption, pollutants and eventually more waste.

Packaging is an integral part of the food manufacture. There is no food item that wasn’t packed at least once during its production, and in most cases much more than once.
A few years ago we started waiving the shopping bag at the store to decrease unnecessary manufacture. Don’t get us wrong it was and it still is the right thing to do. But avoiding the final package and ignoring the former dozens and the amount of energy and waste, is not.
Vegans without a second thought consume vegan products totally ignoring the amount of packaging involved during all the stages of production. From the packed plant seeds, fertilizers and pesticides during cultivation, along the processing stage with all its packed material inputs (including the packing materials themselves) and some of its waste outputs, to the final packed products which are packed together while delivered to the retails, and when each is bought, it is packed again in a shopping bag.

Vegans' avoidance of so many food items creates a dependency on the variety of producers. One producer adds food coloring made out of animals that another producer doesn’t but does use albumen to stick all the ingredients together and only the third doesn’t use any animal ingredient in his version of the same product. This variety is derived from the capitalist institutes as free trade and free competition (which you all know is actually a race to the bottom), open markets and massive imports and exports. All enable vegans to consume products that might not contain animal ingredients, but hurt animals indirectly. Vegans unintentionally support these capitalist principles while consuming products that came from far places.

Today's food travels much more than ever. Only little of what is produced someplace is also being eaten there.
Everyone everywhere depends increasingly on long-distance food. Encouraged by food processing innovations, cheap oil, and subsidies, since 1961 the value of global trade in food has tripled and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold. In the United States, food typically travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to plate, as much as 25 percent farther than in 1980.
In Britain, 25% more food than 20 years ago is on the road, and due to centralized storage it is traveling 65% farther. For every 1,000 fruit products consumed in the UK only 6 are grown in the country.
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.

Food transportation has a significant and growing impact on vehicle congestion, accidents, climate change, noise and air pollution.
Conventional truck-delivered food uses 4 to 17 times more fuel and releases 5 to 17 times more carbon dioxide emissions than regional and local food distribution systems.
A weekly basket of imported food (fruit and vegetables) could add to one ton of CO2 emissions. Observe the estimated miles that your food travels:

• Apples - 1,726 miles
• Beans - 1,313 miles
• Broccoli - 1,846 miles
• Cabbage - 719 miles
• Carrots - 1,838 miles
• Corn - 1,426 miles
• Garlic - 1,811 miles
• Lettuce - 1,823 miles
• Onions - 1,759 miles
• Peppers - 1,589 miles
• Potatoes - 1,155 miles
• Spinach - 1,815 miles
• Strawberries - 1,830 miles
• Tomatoes - 1,569 miles

Those specific figures are taken from a study made in the United States, however the rest of the world is no different, since everywhere there are consumers who expect a variety of foods from halfway across the globe all year round. Australians want strawberries and British want kiwi.

Importing organic food has a tremendous impact just as much if not more, since organic crops are more depended on the natural environment of the crop and therefore more limited to specific areas. That leads to more transportation from those specific areas to the rest of the world.

Instead of long distance transportation some are trying to buy local food only, but today you can't base all your diet on local food and even if you could, buying local is not always better. For example the energy needed to heat glasshouses for growing tomatoes in Britain is significantly larger than the energy used in transporting tomatoes from Spain, where no heating is used because of the warmer climate. So in this case it is better to import tomatoes from Spain than to grow them in Britain. Glasshouses are a major cause for CO2 emissions as well.

The means of transport, as well as the distance, are an important factor to consider. A long journey by boat, for example, has less environmental impact than a shorter one by road. But it's very complicated and you can never be sure what is your food’s history.
The country of origin may be on the label, but beyond this, it’s generally impossible to tell how far the food has traveled and by what means.

Because of the way the food processing industry works, ingredients travel around from factory to factory, before they make their way to the shops.
As absurd as it might sound, a crop of potatoes can be transported many miles to be packaged at a central depot and then sent many miles back to be sold near where they were produced in the first place.

The world’s communities are not self-sufficient. Transportation is the life blood of the world economy. So even if you are a strict vegan, as long as you are part of this “driving society”, you’ll be responsible for suffering. Vegans are participating in the destructive distribution system that enabled the food to get to the market. It is inevitable. Someone “has” to drive your vegan food.

Most of the 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 production and soy milk, 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 the transportation to the stores. All are inevitable. All are comfortably invisible as the finished product lies on the shelves.
You don’t see deforestation and land degradation when you buy bread.
You don’t see the amount of energy spent on the label of a beans can.
You don’t see all the sub production processes harms on a rice milk carton.
You don’t see on the label of a cotton shirt that no less then 4,000 liters of water were used to produce it.
You don’t smell burning wood when you sniff a soap.
You don’t see the traps set on the tip of dens when you buy cornflakes.

Even raw food is far from raw. When it comes to raw fruits and vegetables, stages include cleaning, sorting, cooling, coating, drying and storage. Usually post-harvest processing is done in mechanized facilities, with conveyor belts, automated sorting, room size refrigerators and etc. The more stages involved the more transportation and packaging. The so called raw foods even receive treatment to improve their looks. Fruits with a greenish tint are placed in special storage rooms where ethylene gas is used to bring out the color. In many cases fruits and vegetables are covered with a wax coating, both to retain moisture and to make them more appealing and shiny in the grocery store. So not only that food items which are considered as the rawest, least processed foods on the shelves go through several harmful processes, they contain bee wax or other secretions of insects as shellac that makes them non-vegan!
And that is not the only connection between bees’ exploitation and allegedly vegan food products. Approximately one out of every three food items humans consume is made possible by pollinators, and honey-bees account for 90% of the pollination.
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, slaughter and of course theft of their sole source of nutrition. You can read more about it in the article Vegan suffering in the multimedia articles section.

So far we only dealt with the processing part as if it is obvious that recycling deals with the "after the use" part. But the reality is more complex.
Recycling is an industrial process made out of many sub-stages with huge environmental impacts, it consumes energy, water and other resources while emits by-products that cause air and water pollution. Recycling centers are just like any other factory plant.
On the whole, the benefits of recycling are not always obvious. Sometimes it uses more energy than it saves. Even the simple process of melting down one plastic container just to make another, burns a lot of fuel and releases toxins into the air.
Chemical recycling (break down back to monomer) is tremendously enviro-negative and paper recycling creates a toxic sludge which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, is more harmful for the environment than the by-product from the process of producing paper directly from trees.
Also, the new items that are made from used materials are very limited, mostly when it comes to plastics, which lose their quality when recycled (that is why plastic “recycle” is also called downcycle as it is impossible to produce products of the same plastic quality, only low quality products). It’s sometimes hard to find a use for those products and that’s how recycled junk that there is no need for as picnic tables, doormats, pallets, frames and liners, funnels, flower pots, garden furniture and more decorative artifacts come to be. Finding a use for all the recyclable material, means creating a market for products of no necessity. So even the single benefit of recycling - environmental education, goes to waste since it reinforces consumption - the environment greatest enemy.
Transportation should also be taken into account- recycling trucks that transport the waste to the factory are in some cases undoing the recycling job, and that’s without the whole recycling process’ outcomes we mentioned in this text.
Since the recycling stages are so expansive, many recycling factories reopen in central Asia to reduce expenses, requiring shipping half way around the world. Ironic, absurd, but so typical for this race.

In the long run, recycling is a longer route to the landfill. There is no way to make the garbage disappear.
What is considered to be a magic solution and a major conscience reliever regarding consumption and waste producing, turns out to be no more than just another form of industrial processing with some very good public relations. But recycling relative popularity is eliminative. There is no chance people will significantly reduce their consumption or their babies making, so they ease their consumption and waste production guilt by the "noble" gesture of separating plastic and paper from the general garbage.

It seems that animal rights activists should be reminded all the time that veganism is not the goal but the mean. The goal is a sufferingless world.
The veganism fixation is diverting activists from suffering fighters to vegan converters, but a vegan world is not achievable and it won't achieve a sufferingless world even if it was.

Everything in life is on the expense of someone else. There is no way to avoid causing suffering. No matter how little we consume, we will cause suffering. There is no sufferingless consumption. By participating in this cruel system, we are simply letting someone else cause the suffering for us.
This is not an excuse not to become vegans there is no doubt that it is better than anything else but the fact that veganism is better than the other options doesn’t make it a good option. It is still bad even though it is much better. Animal rights activists must internalize it. Veganism is not enough. It is still a violent and oppressive diet.
Don’t compromise on mediocrity. If there is no consumption without suffering, there shall be no consumption at all.

Mistakenly believe they can exist without hurting, vegans adherently preach for the delusional cruelty free diet. The conventional lie that a vegan diet is moral, significantly hurts the chances for a sufferingless world. Activists convince non-vegans and themselves that there is a cruelty free option and that it is accomplishable. This false belief prevents them from searching for real solutions. The more activists who acknowledge that vegan diet is cruel the greater the chance they would stop preaching for sufferingfull diet and acknowledge that the only true vegan world is sentientless world.

The fact that vegans object some if not all of the processes is meaningless because as they tell meat eaters, when they justify their consumption habits saying they are against animals’ torture and think that it should be made differently but actually financially support and practically encourage the exact things they are against, it is resisting with words but supporting with actions.
Don’t get us wrong, we don’t call vegans hypocrite, we know vegans have no other option and as mentioned many times along the website we are vegans too.
We know vegans don’t have a choice and that is exactly the problem. In this world there are no moral options. There is no alternative to home racking, poisoning, polluting, fencing, deforestation, drilling habitats and etc. This is the world and we refuse to let it continue.

The animal rights movement argument

With the second response, that the animal rights movement had a few successes since it was founded, even the founder doesn’t agree.
Peter Singer said that the agreement by McDonald's to give battery hens a few more inches of cage space was the most significant development for farm animals since he wrote Animal Liberation.
Of course peter singer is criticized for several fundamental issues by many animal rights activists for many years and even before his relatively recent statement in the debate with Tipu Aziz at Oxford University, he wasn’t considered the movement’s guru anymore. But it still is a very important statement by a very important figure in the animal rights movement.
Anyway we don’t base our argument on singer’s statement. The fur industry is a much stronger evidence.

The campaign against fur was once considered to be the most successful campaign ever by the animal rights movement. But after almost a decade of being branded politically incorrect, fur is back in fashion, coming in all colors, shapes and sizes.
The Fur Council claims that in 1985 only 42 fashion designers included fur in their collections. 20 years later the number has risen to more than 500.
The fur industry resurgence in the last 5 years is an irrefutable evidence of the sole significance of trends in human behavior and public political views.
It is not empathy, rationality, concern and ethics that dictate humans’ behavior, it is fashion, in this case ambiguously speaking. It is trends, not rational and practical compassion.

In a "trendy" world, the shift back to fur was predictable. Every action has its reaction. Just a decade ago supermodels said that they rather go naked than wear fur. Not wearing fur was the trendy position, and that is precisely the problem, when a trend becomes too popular, the backlash is only a matter of time.
The animal rights movement used celebrities (which are the air that trends breathe) to oppose the fur industry and now its celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, Madonna and Beyonce Knowles who promote fur by wearing it frequently.
The most ridiculous example is of course Cindy Crawford who was the face of PETA's anti fur campaign and today models fur. It’s the perfect example for the unreliability of trends.

Another aspect is the fact that the success of the fur campaign in the 90’s was part of a wider change in public attitude. As opposed to the 80's, when it was perfectly acceptable to flaunt one's wealth through one's outfit (and fur is the most ostentatious way to do it), in the 90’s, the trend was anti-ostentation and minimalism (grunge for example), a very good ground for an anti fur campaign. The last decade on the other hand, is dominated by the bling-bling look, with rappers singing about their love for champagne, grandiose cars and diamonds. A horrible ground obviously.
And the most horrible thing is that moral arguments need a ground at all!

The fur industry has not only recovered from the decade of slow business during the 90’s, when the animal rights movement thought that the industry was history, it got strengthen and it is stronger than ever now. Today, fur is regarded as another fabric, it has become a standard part of fashion. Fur garments are not only coats, jackets and wraps, designers treat fur as a trim - around the necklines or hemlines of dresses, or on the collars and cuffs of sweaters and jackets, on skirts, belts, pockets, bags and even wedding dresses and on the hem of a trench coat. What was once a very expensive luxury is affordable today to the average fashionable brands consumer.

Terribly and ironically the movement has worsened the situation. The fur industry response to the campaigns over the years conducted a situation that now there are more fur items on "regular" clothes and they are worn by "regular" people. The campaigns have trivialized the use of fur. The struggle against fur was a class struggle as well as animal rights struggle. Today it is a moral struggle against the current trend. And moral has no chance.

The moment the global demand for seal fur climbed, Canada adjusted its kill quota in according, and no amount of pressure that expended far beyond animal rights groups and even welfare organizations from within the country or from abroad managed to change that, and that should be an important lesson.

Even when most of the public is against an exploitive industry, like in the case of seal fur or rodeos, cockfighting, dog fighting, ivory, and etc, it doesn’t matter. It is not enough. The world is changing because of economic and political reasons. Not because of moral reasons. Bullfights still exist, in spite of the campaigns that the animal rights organizations run against them for decades, and in spite that most humans are against them. And if this is not enough for little and publicly unaccepted industries such as bullfighting, cockfighting and dog fighting, when will the chicken meat industry, which is more than 50 billion suffering animals per year industry, ever stop?

It doesn’t matter if an industry was legally closed because at the same time the others thrive. And industries don’t really get closed anyway. In the best case they are outlawed in a specific country, so they just relocate.
Industries that are no longer legal in some countries have simply transferred to different countries. The animal rights movement can’t beat globalization. We can’t beat capitalism. When battery cages won’t be legal in the European Union, eggs would be imported into Europe nations from Asia. Corporations already started making the adjustments, they will seize the moment as they always do, move their business to a different location and sell eggs from battery cages to Europe for a cheaper price. Then morality will have a fight with an unbeatable opponent - lower prices. The movement is fighting a very powerful motivation of the exploiters to become more efficient in order to increase profits. For every "win" by the animal rights movement, new practices of exploitation rise and old ones intensify.

The struggle is social and political, moral and philosophical, not constitutional.
If bullfights are finally outlawed then more people will go to rodeos, circuses, marine parks and zoos.
Outlawing hunting for example is not a real social change. Hunters still want to hunt. Outlawing hunting didn’t convince hunters that it is wrong to hunt and it didn’t subdue their "thrill to kill".
Humans will always find new ways to express their violent character on the expense of the weaker ones.
A real change would be one that will take the domination and the violence urges out of humans and unfortunately it’s impossible.

The animal rights movement gains little changes in little industries, but fails to understand the mechanism.
The exploitation systems are getting bigger and bigger. There is no limit to the ingenuity when it comes to exploitation.
Let's take rodeos as an example. There are rodeos for children, high school and college rodeos, and events for the police, armed forces and prison inmates. There are even black, gay, and all-women rodeos.

Even though the violence in rodeo shows is very evident, humans see rodeos as family entertainment.
The violence is much more evident than in circuses, which even there, in spite of the efforts circuses make to hide the violence it is not so hard to understand that when animals are doing unnatural actions, some virtually against their own physical structure, it could only be done by violence and intimidation.
Totally visible to the entire family, children might not see the electric prods, sharp sticks, caustic ointments and the flank strap that is pulled tightly around the animals’ groins, but they do see a bunch of people slamming a little calf to the ground after they have chased him while he was in panic, running for his life. Everybody can understand that the calf suffers extreme pain when he is being roped while he runs as fast as he can and suddenly being aggressively slammed to the ground. Not so hard to understand.

Humans don’t see rodeos as a torture, not because of a good disguise, but because it is a part of the human race. Humans are entertained by this violence, by this domination and superiority exhibition.

Humans seek power and dominance over other species and they enjoy it.
There is no other way to explain the amusement children get from brutally torturing a bull or aggressively roping a calf.
Bullfights, circuses and rodeos are some sort of a celebration of humans' victory over other species, a symbolic display of their tyranny.

We have to comprehend this. Enjoying such brutal and violent shows, like rodeos, bullfights and circuses are a part of the human race’s nature.
You can try to convince people not to participate, you can try to promote legislation against those cruel acts, you can demonstrate, you can liberate a few animals, but you can’t change the fact that this is a part of the human race.

They prove again and again and again and again and again that profits, taste preferences, convenience, amusement etc, are much more important to them than anything else. Most of them are not even willing to hear the facts and listen to the arguments, not to mention to stop financing animal abuse.

Successful campaigns by the animal rights movement are in the best case, short term trends, but ultimately they are delusional.

It’s very difficult to make someone acknowledge that the movement he is part of, all the effort that was put in, the life work of so many, is failing.
It’s painful to admit that activists rely on small achievements missing the bigger picture and fail to recognize the mechanism. So many honestly believe the state of animals improved since the movement was formed.
It is frightening to think how much animal suffering was 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.
Since 1975 new industries have been formed joining the ones that already exist and constantly expand. New species became subjected to commercial exploitation, that intensify further all the time. The prices got cheaper and cheaper and a greater verity of available products was introduced to the market consecutively in the 44 years of the "animal liberation age".

It’s the market forces and technology that dictate the reality for each and every creature in this world and especially for the hundreds of billions of animals raised in intensive factory farms. Every year tens of millions more are born into a life of suffering, and the numbers will keep rising until you realize that conventional activism can only gently nibble the edges of the mainstream but it can’t stop the main stream of suffering.

The slavery argument

The third argument, that the slavery abolishment is an historical example of a successful liberation struggle that can inspire the animal liberation struggle, is false from 3 different aspects.

First of all the slavery abolishment struggle can’t inspire the animal liberation struggle because there are some fundamental differences between the two.
First and most important, the animals cannot fight against human’s tyranny by themselves, they need other humans to help them.
Second, the exploitation is unproportionately larger. Thousands of people may die for a cause, for liberty or self-determination but billions of animals are systematically, thoughtlessly and brutally exploited every year, which translates into millions each day!
Third, all humans are the oppressors, even us vegans, as we showed earlier.
And finally, the value of the victims is much lower. The level of carnage suffered by the animals is infinitely greater than anything experienced by humans.
Violent oppression, imprisonment, forced labor, slavery and even ethnic purification are all human phenomenon as well, but an artificial selection to enlarge specific profitable organs on the expense of other vital organs is not recorded yet among humans. Slaves were picked in auctions by their size but it cannot be compared with the genetic manipulations on an entire species and definitely not with creating a species for specific functions like was done with cows, sheep and chickens in the food industry and with transgenic "lab animals", manipulations which are still intensified all the time. A hereditary distortion was never caused among humans.
Humans have absolute control over the reproduction of entire population and entire species. They mass-produce creatures to mass-murder them. And that is a huge difference.
Throughout history hundreds of millions of humans were and still are exploited in several ways, mostly as a work source and as sex objects, but as opposed to nonhumans, they were never the raw material itself. Animals are bred for slaughter, fed for slaughter and led to slaughter. The level of oppression experienced by animals is greater, more pervasive and longer in existence than any human oppression against other humans.

Another aspect is that although there was a movement that called to abolish slavery, it was marginal and almost meaningless. It was the American Civil War that supposedly ended slavery. However as opposed to the famous myth, the war didn’t break to end slavery. That is extremely naive. The election of Abraham Lincoln, which signaled the end of Southern control over the federation, led to the 11 southern states secession. United States federal government ("The Union") rejected the secession because of the northern states financial dependency on the south during the winter due to closed sea ports. Cynically but not surprisingly "The Union" used the slavery abolition idea to recruit salves as soldiers of the "anti slavery" north.
It is all about money and power. Wars don’t break over moral issues.

So the animal liberation can’t draw inspiration from the slavery abolishment because it wasn’t the struggle that freed the salves. All it was is a cynical use of the abolition idea by the north who wanted a larger army against the south.

And finally, the slavery abolishment can’t set an example of a successful liberation struggle because slavery was never ended! There are more slaves today than ever before in history.
Modern-day slavery does not fit our familiar images of shackles, whips and auctions. The contemporary forms of slavery include: forced labor, servile marriage, debt bondage, child labor and forced prostitution. This is slavery in every aspect.

Nothing has changed. Most things got worse. Slavery does not only exist but it is much more widespread than ever.
Slavery is everywhere and in everything. It flows into our lives through the products we buy. Slaves harvest cocoa in the Ivory Coast, make coal for steel production in Brazil, and weave carpets in India. In many cases, their lives are more brutal and hazardous than their more familiar predecessors.
These products reach our stores and our homes at a very low price, but their real price is suffering. The real price of a chocolate snack is the freedom of someone else.

Low coasts and trends always prevail. Nike for example has long been identified with sweatshops and slave labor, and yet only few consumers measure this against owning a pair of the world’s "best trainers".

Throughout history everything that has been done in order to stop slavery, didn’t work. There is no reason to believe something will work in the future. Actions against slavery and any other exploitation system for that matter, have failed.

Slavery exists since the beginning of civilization. Other species enslave each other too. It is such a natural and basic strategy. There is no wonder that slavery was never ended even though it is not legal in most of the countries in the world. It is too efficient for humans not to do it. It is so logical if you are thinking about it from a selfish, egocentric point of view of a creature that is trying to promote himself, his family and his race first. Well that’s what we are. It’s time for you to face that.

So as you can see, comparing African slaves to the state of nonhuman animals is false and it is also very dangerous because activists cling on to this example, building their philosophy, moral standards, tactics, hopes and motivations from this illusion.
It prevents ideas that could come from a true examination of the state of affairs, to be implemented. The illusion causes activists to believe that a revolution is possible. The effect of that false belief is devastating. More animals, humans and nonhumans, suffer today than ever before in history.
Things are not changing in the world because of moral positions. As soon as people from the animal rights movement and other revolutionary movements, understand that, the faster the suffering will end.

The speciesist argument

As strange as it sounds to activists, explanations are not moral.
Choosing to explain is accepting and reinforcing the concept that it is humans' decision whether or not to change the way they treat nonhuman animals. It is accepting their superiority, their tyranny.
As long as you choose to explain to someone that it is wrong to exploit, you accept the fact that it is the exploiter’s choice.

You can give them all the information you have and show them all the photos and videos you can get, use every argument you know and deconstruct every excuse they argue, but it is still their call. Why are you giving the abusers the choice?

Letting them decide is supporting a power based world, because it is humans ability to control the rest of the species that had put them in the place that it is seemingly their decision if to exploit the weaker or not.

When you are explaining instead of stopping the suffering you are an accomplice.
When one is human and the other is not…you are a speciesist.

The automatic chance to decide won't be given in case of a human victim.
This is speciesism and as hard as it is for us to say and for you to accept, most of the activists are speciesists. They devote their time constituting the torture, practically accepting humans' dominance.
The conventional way refers to humans’ power and control as obvious.
Activists in the conventional movement are not trying to "dethrone" humans, they are trying to convince “the masters” to change their treatment toward their slaves. That is unacceptable. Human superiority should not be considered inevitable. Unfortunately it is. The fact that the animal rights activists’ natural tendency and the first and last plan of action, is to explain to humans that their daily torturing of the weaker for their own minor benefits, habits and pleasures is wrong, is pure speciesism. Giving humans the right to decide is speciesism. The natural tendency should be to stop the suffering in the most deep rooted and fastest way. And the most efficient way is definitely not by asking the oppressors to be more considerate.

Every time that someone leaves your information stand not convinced to become vegan, you "release" him to hurt.
Every animal rights discussion that doesn’t end with a new non-speciesist vegan, means letting another human continue with his systematic abuse. Letting him go means more suffering.
If your reflexive response to this rough accusation is that all you can do is show people the truth and let them decide, our question to you is why the lives of billions of sentient creatures are put in the hands of humans in the first place?
Why the quantity of water and quality of the food that animals will get depends on whether or not humans care to hear your arguments?
Why do humans get to decide how much space one billion pigs will get during their lifetime?
Do you really think that humans should decide whether the testicles of sheep in the wool industry should be cut off using a knife or using a tight rubber band?
Why are you letting humans invade animals’ bodies again and again?
Why is it so obvious that humans should decide whether to go vegan or not?
It is not their decision whether to keep abusing or not.
It is yours.

The conventional method seems so obvious, that despite decades of experience and so many depressing encounters by each activist the method remained so unquestionable.

Letting the abusers decide is similar to a trial that after all the evidences, investigations and convictions, it would still be the defendant decision whether to accept the accusation and the recommendation of the verdict and the recommended punishment, or not.
The judge, the prosecutor and the jury will show the defendant that what he was doing is wrong and he will decide whether to stop or not. What about the victims...? Well they have no say. It is the defendant's decision.
Think how absurd it is to let a child rapist decide whether to keep raping or not.
Such a legal system makes the judge, the prosecutor and the jury part of the crime. If they accept this procedure they are part of the crime.
You are no different. Showing the abusers their crimes and letting them decide what to do about it is being part of the crime.

From the moment you become aware of the fact that most of the creatures suffer from birth to death it is your responsibility to stop it. Your responsibility is not to show others the truth and not to make the lives of the sufferers less horrible, your responsibility is to stop the suffering.

For some reason animal rights organizations "decided" that no matter what humans do, they must stay. They are trying to educate humans and change their violent habits, but that only means, automatically accepting the general existence of suffering and compromising on the efforts to reduce it.

A non-speciesist perspective, a point of view that doesn’t count the interests of one species over another, necessarily leads to the conclusion that this world has to be stopped.

We don’t think that you picked the conventional way after a true examination of all the options. The conventional way is speciesist.
It accepts humans’ tyranny, as if it is humans’ decision whether to hurt or not. It is their decision only because activists are asking them if they are willing to try soy milk instead of raping cows and if they care to try soy burgers instead of corps of genetic freaks, but it shouldn’t be their choice. You don’t ask the tortures if they would like to stop torturing. You just stop them.
We know it is not easy as "just" stopping them, but it is what we’ve got to do. It begins with you realizing the absurdity. With you stop asking the oppressors to stop oppressing and start to find a way to stop it all.

And that of course brings us to the nonviolent approach which is both speciesist and ironically extremely violent.

The violent argument

Besides asking the right questions ("the question is not can they reason nor can they speak? The question is can they suffer?") Jeremy Bentham also said that "Each to count for one and none for more than one".
It is no wonder that this quote is much less famous, as animal rights activists disagree with Jeremy on this one. They think that every human counts for at least 1,000 nonhuman animals. The exact value is varied from a few hundreds to a few thousands depending on the geographic location, socioeconomic status, taste preferences, ethnic orientation and etc. The average American meat eater for example is worth the abuse and killing of nearly 3,400 animals within his lifetime, including 2,460 chickens, 800 fish, 96 turkeys, 32 pigs and sheep, and 12 calves. The average British meat eater on the other hand is worth 760 chickens, 46 turkeys, 29 sheep, 20 pigs, 15 ducks, 7 rabbits, 5 cows, 1 goose and more than 1,000 fish.
Refusing to kill humans actually means that they are worth the pain and the suffering of all these animals. It is putting their interests before the interests of their victims and it is pure speciesism to prefer the interests of one member of one species, over all the others.
It seems that animal rights activists agree with Jeremy Bentham with an exception of the human population. Nonviolent activists are actually saying that one human counts for much more than one non-human if they morally object killing a human in order to save a non-human.
Don’t fool yourselves. It’s simple math. If you refuse to kill humans, you doom all the animals they will consume during their lifetimes to a life of suffering.
Are they worth all this pain and suffering?
The question why 6.7 billion humans are worth 100 billion non-human animals’ – birth to death suffering - year after year after year, is apparently not being asked.

Hypothetically, if someday you incidentally see a well known serial killer trying to kill a little child (no one is innocent, but children are closer than most grownups) and you carry a weapon (it is hypothetical remember), if you decide not to kill the serial killer – you are actually killing the child. And an average meat eater kills more animals during his lifetime, than any serial killer in history.

In this world violence is a way of life. Humans financially support violence every time they sit down to eat. Violence begins at breakfast.
The fact that some of you are trying to change the state of affairs in conventional ways doesn’t change your status, because as hard as you try to convince as many humans as possible that animals should have rights, you can't speak with all of them and you definitely can't convince all of them. You are not alone of course but all the animal rights activists together can't do it too. No activist in his right mind believes that currently everyone can become vegan. That means that the nonviolent approach does accept violence in this world at least to some extent.
The reflexive response by most of the activists would probably be that maybe currently there are not enough activists in the world that can reach all the speciesist non-vegans out there, but the movement is growing all the time and at some point in the future there will be enough activists that can reach all who are not yet familiar with the animal rights notion and all of them could be convinced.
We have already referred to how unrealistic this option is earlier and here we want to focus on how violent and speciesist this approach actually is.
The nonviolent approach is speciesist because it is nonviolent towards humans but at the same time and as a consequence it is violent towards nonhuman animals.
It gives humans an automatic and evident power to decide whether or not they are willing to stop torturing. It is not supposed to be the abusers' decision and the animal rights activists let the abusers make this decision, a decision that regards other creatures' suffering.
The nonviolent approach is violent because refusing to use violence to stop much more violence is actually supporting violence. From the moment you are aware of the possibility to stop someone’s suffering using violence and you refuse to use it, you choose suffering.
The speciesist and violent approach is in the concept that the one and only duty of activists is to convince the abusers to stop abusing and not to stop the abuse.
As far as most activists think, their variety of options is expressed in persuasion methods only. The basic approach is hardly ever questioned. Convincing people to divert their diet is the only option, the differences are in the ways to do it.
If something didn’t work they will try another but all the options have the same in common, they all are different tactics with the same strategy, to convince the abusers to stop abusing, but not to stop the abusers. When you maintain a nonviolent approach, if you fail to convince a non-vegan speciesist, he is free to go and continue the abuse.

Another meaningful reason why this approach is speciesist and violent is that as far as the activists go, it is a timeless effort, meaning until everybody is convinced no matter how much suffering and violence occur in the meantime. This pseudo tolerant advocacy that the activists adopted is that their job is to give humans the information and they will decide what to do with it. Letting the violence continue until the "nonviolent" activists figure out how to stop the exploitation is a very cruel and speciesist approach.
What is the moral base for the animal rights movement decision to let the violence continue until humans agree to stop? Could it be based on a species pertinence?

And it is not just that activists accept some violence to some extant, in fact their ideal world is full of violence since the vegan diet is full of violence as we showed earlier in this text. It is not just that activists for some totally unjustified reason accept violence occurring until they figure out how to change all humans’ diet, they support a lifestyle that justifies systematic violence.
So even if it was possible to change the entire humanity diet into a vegan one and the entire humanity wardrobe into a vegan one and cancel all experiments and all animal exploitation in entertainment businesses, as dreamy as it would be, it’s still very far from being a nonviolent world.

The presumption that life should be no matter what and that humans have a substantial, self-explanatory right to exist is oppressive, violent and speciesist because it’s necessarily on someone else’s expense.
It is impossible to justify the existence of whom who will necessarily hurt someone else.
The mechanism of life is so power based that it can’t possibly be justified. And yet all of the opposers of the only one solution, justify it. They all justify hurting systematically and arbitrarily everyone in the way. In the way of the field growing their vegan food, in the way of the building of a new road, in the way of the truck that delivers their vegan food driving the new road, in the way of the stretched pipeline transporting oil soon to become fuel for the truck delivering their vegan food to the nearby store, in the way of the ship that brought the oil to the pipe which every once in a while collides with an iceberg and pollute dozens of miles of ocean and everyone who lives nearby, and the list never really ends.
Of course there is a huge difference between someone who hurts everyone in his way to the next gourmet meal and someone who hurts everyone in the way to the fresh, organic, local and seasonal salad. Principally and practically there is a huge difference but still both hurt. On the personal level there is no room for comparison as the first one will hurt because he doesn’t care and the second because he doesn’t have a choice but it doesn’t make it painless, it is doesn’t make it nonviolent. It doesn’t comfort the victims.
It is almost unbelievable that these two types of persons, one who tries to improve the world, hurts as little as he can and cares about creatures he has never met, and the other totally self centered only cares about satisfying his carnal desires, pick by himself the lobster he wants to be boiled alive especially for him, are of the same world from more or less the same cultural background. Minimizing the suffering causing is personally impressive but is morally unallowable. Suffering is bad and it’s got to stop even if it is caused only for the causer to survive. Why must the sufferer suffer for the suffering causer? Why must he be sacrificed? What is the moral basis for this systematic forcible immolation? How can it be justified? What permits such dynamics? The answers are respectively, that the sufferer mustn’t suffer, he mustn’t be sacrificed, there is no moral basis, it is not justified and power is what permits this dynamics.

As hard as it is to imagine the world without speciesism it is even harder to imagine it without violence. It is too basic and inherent. If it is not speciesism it will be powerism - discrimination on the basis of weakness. Humans for example are of the same species and are supposedly equal but are still systematically discriminated against on the basis of power - social power, economic power, sexual power and muscle power. Equality is not an option even theoretically because all the creatures are in a constant fight over the same resources. The stronger will always prevail. This is how humans got their current total dominancy in the first place. Unfortunately they prevailed the rest of the species in the fight over the world’s resources and over time got to the current position. And since humans have gained a lot of knowledge and skills it’s clear that even if the imaginary scenario of a non-speciesist world would become realized, very soon the world will return to look exactly as it is now.
Fight over resources will always be relevant no matter what is politically correct. And if equal distribution of the resources was such a failure when it was examined in relatively small scale human societies for a relatively very short time and regarding one species only, how can it be implemented on the whole world with all its inhabitants? The distribution will be on the basis of power. Whom who is weak enough to be in the position of exploitation will be exploited.
It sounds far and detached from the movement’s reality because the big issues (factory farms of food and clothing, experiments and entertainment industries) are not caused from the fight over resources for many many years now, and because the possibility of a vegan non-speciesist world seems far and detached from our reality, not to mention fair share of the whole world resources between all the world’s creatures.

Getting back to the even theoretically impossible nonviolent lifestyle, activists can justify their personal footprint and the harms they are personally or partly responsible for, claiming that they consume only what they need to survive in order to continue with their activism. Many do and they are right. The problem is that they justify life as long as the diet is vegan, as if the vegan diet is sufferingless and nonviolent and as if there are no thousands of other factors causing enormous suffering. In the Vegan Suffering article which is the classic example of this dissonance, we don’t criticize activists for the suffering they cause (obviously we cause suffering too), we criticize their justification of vegansim as a magic solution for existence without hurting while as we showed in the article it is far from reality. Our problem is with the breaking the laws of physics, suggesting material can form out of nothing, cultivate itself on the thin air with no water and without any means of "rejecting" other interesteds, process itself, breaking the laws of physics again creating package materials out of nothing, and distribute itself without any use of energy what so ever, using a magical pathway that has no footprint what so ever, straight to your plate not taking the chance that you will use a car/bus/train. If a vegan world would be based on these magical crops maybe we could support it, but as long as it is not, life cannot be justified even for vegans. Our problem is with activists’ total disregard of humans’ total control of the earth, manifested in vegetative agriculture among many other things vegans take part in. The problem is not only with ignorant activists who don’t internalize the importance of decreasing consumption in general, the problem is that no matter how hard the aware ones will try to least affect the surroundings, as estimable as the efforts to minimize the effects are, there is no way to avoid it and that makes existence immoral. There is no way to avoid suffering causing. Nonviolent approach doesn’t exist. If you keep that dogma, you do it for yourself, not for the animals.

And it doesn’t sum up with humans' extremely massive and inevitable footprint.
In a world of constant tension between creatures drive to multiply as much as possible and the very limited available resources, a condition which was always relevant and since humans gained such control is extremely and constantly intensified, nonviolent approach is technically impossible.
As soon as sensibility developed among the living creatures life became a living hell. You can’t nullify sensibility and since no creature can live without inflicting pain and suffering on other creatures directly or indirectly, life is not moral. Causing suffering is inevitable, the only way to deal with it morally is to stop life.
But to not reverse the proper order of things, this point will be broadly referred in the next argument and for now we want to complete the nonviolent argument with an interesting example.
When we established the Only One Solution movement we asked animal rights organizations for the email address of their most serious, open-minded, radical and committed activists in order to send them our manifest and website address. Even though we didn’t give any information about ourselves, some organizations replied - "if it involves hurting humans leave us out". We only wrote that our manifest is about the only one solution. We didn’t write what the solution is. Of course it is obvious and of course some organizations figured that out. But don’t you think it says something?
What exactly did those organizations say? That they know it is the only way to stop the suffering (otherwise how did they guess) but they are not interested in helping?!
"We are sorry, we know how we can stop all the suffering in the world but we rather keep our nonviolent, nice and clean philosophy".

Every day you choose not to destroy this world you choose to approve it. There is no nonviolent approach in this world, it is a purist illusion.
When you know violence is an integral part of life, when you know it is inevitable, the only way to be nonviolent is to stop life.
Our belief whether it is possible or not is not relevant because we haven’t tried yet. We realize it seems impossible but life without violence don’t seem impossible, they are impossible.

The responsibility argument

You are not a nonviolent person if you choose to eat beans instead of meat. You are definitely less violent but as long as you’re alive you will hurt someone else. There is not really an efficient way to live an activist life and still maintain a nonviolent approach. Even fruitarian primitivists who managed to separate themselves from society are not nonviolent because they are practically isolated and not doing anything to stop the rest of the suffering. It is self-involved moral cleansing, not efficiency. Someone like that maybe responsible for less suffering through consumption but the decision to live separately from society and not trying to change it, makes them responsible for everything that is going on in this world, because they know what is going on and they don't do anything to stop it. They are reducing their direct responsibility of suffering through consumption but also seriously reducing the ability to affect the rest of the suffering.
It might ease the conscious but it won't end the suffering.
Don’t deceive yourself, knowing it's there and not doing anything about it is the same as approving it.

You can’t be morally passive. There is no such state. You can be - not aware of suffering taking place and therefore not responsible for it, but from the moment you become aware of it, you have responsibility towards it. And according to this logic we are not only responsible for the suffering humans inflict on nonhumans or on other humans but for all the suffering that exists in the world, including the suffering nonhumans inflict on other nonhumans. We know it is there, so we can't ignore it. We can’t be passive because it is another species involved.
We mustn’t accept suffering just because it happens in what we call nature, and to nonhuman animals by other nonhuman animals. Suffering is bad when it is considered natural just as much as when it is considered artificial. All suffering should be stopped and it doesn’t matter how we define it, where it happens and by whom.

How many times have you heard that charity begins at home? And you got irritated each and every time, didn’t you?
What is the difference between the suffering in the deep ocean and the suffering in your neighborhood?
Saying that you can affect the suffering in your area and therefore should concentrate on it, is actually saying that the suffering in deep ocean will never end.

The suffering in a forest or a savanna doesn’t hurt less than suffering in "artificial" environment. Savanna, forest, desert, battery cage or dairy farm, for the sufferers the location is meaningless. Taxonomy and Geography are not relevant when it comes to suffering. Suffering is wrong and should be stopped even if it occurs in "nature".

Violence, rape and exploitation are routine in what humans call nature. Are they o.k because they are done to nonhuman animals by nonhuman animals?
Do you think that a female sea lion feels relieved that the human narrator of the National Geographic program says that rape among sea lions is common? Does she care who rapes her? Does she care why she is being raped? Does she care that humans call it natural? She doesn’t. And if she doesn’t you shouldn’t either. She just wants it to stop.
And you should help her.

Please read the article "non-speciesist suffering" in our multimedia article section, even and especially if you disagree with us. You will seize "nature" in a completely different way after this. Unfortunately this is the true meaning of life. The true nature of nature.

For many animal rights activists nature represents perfection, an ideal we should aspire to, or something spiritual that we should worship, something that ought to be preserved and never criticize. But the truth is that every other form of life is just as selfish, self-centered, self-justified and gratuitously self-pleasing as ourselves.

As dreamy as a world without humans would be it won't be a sufferingless world and therefore it would be a partial solution.
Trillions of creatures would still suffer from rape, hunger, thirst, dehydration, infanticide, violent dominancy fights, constant fear of being hunted, diseases, torture, slavery and caducity.
In a humanless world, hyena cubs would still viscously fight each other, tearing slices off other cubs’ faces including ears and lips, to get more food.
In a humanless world wasps would still inject their eggs into a live caterpillar’s body to ensure that when their descendants hatch they will have breakfast (the wasp larva will eat the caterpillar from the inside out).
A humanless world is definitely not a masculinityless world. Brutal fights for territory and for the "right" to mate would still occur in immense numbers. Walrus would still fight each other over territory like sumo fighters with giant teeth that can reach up to one meter long and more than 5 kg weight. And the biggest males with the biggest tusks would still push their way to the center of the iceberg pushing the females and pups to the edges where it is most dangerous.
In a humanless world billions of insects would still get chemically liquefied before they are eaten by spiders. And snakes would still swallow whole animals and slowly digest them until red tailed hawk would hunt them, digging in with their talons into the snakes’ body until they give up fighting back and then start to cut pieces of their body and eat them.
Eels would still electrify other fish to hunt them using up to 600V in a single discharge - this is 5 times the shock one would get from sticking a finger into an electrical socket.
Young offspring would still get murdered by opportunist males who want their own genes to be spread.
And duck, dolphin, sea lion females would still be gang raped.

Every single second somewhere in the world, a giant hornet fights a mantis, a shark fights an octopus, a white belly sea eagle fights a banded sea snake, a giant weta fights a bat and if the bat prevail the other bats will fight him over the weta, thunder lizards fight each other, a crown eagle fights a chevrotain, a blue crab fights ameloctopus, a giant centipedes fights an iguana, a galapagos snake fights a marine iguana, a polar bear fights a ringed seal, an arctic tern fights a polar bear (beating their noses when they come for their eggs), bat falcon fights other bats, a hawk fights a viper, a numbat devour termites, a crocodile an egret, a shoebill a lungfish, the mexican long tailed bat an insect, a coyote hunts a rabbit and an anaconda crushes a capybara to death or griping so tight that the blood can’t even circulate and so the poor capybara slowly suffocate to death.

And the tiny fraction of animals that will escape their enemies will suffer from droughts, floods, diseases, hunger, thirst and the pain and misery of growing old.

It is very cruel and cynical to think that it’s part of life so there is nothing we can do about it. The fact that all these atrocities, all this suffering is part of life, is exactly the problem.
After humans are gone, nonhuman animals would still murder, rape, and exploit each other for their own profit, just as they do now. Suffering is an inherent part of life. Someone will always suffer for someone else. As long as life exists, pain will too. As you know, the reason pain exists is that it is beneficial from an evolutionary point of view. Every single nerve signal communicating an animals' agony to their brain is beneficial to the being, from an evolutionary standpoint, as it increases the chances that the animal will live long enough to breed.
The history of the evolution of life on this planet has been written with pain and suffering. Survival and reproduction have been the only imperatives guiding the gradual changes in morphology which have given the various species their present forms and behavior. All the organisms are selfish. They all have been, they all are and they all will act in order to promote their own genes. That is what life is all about and consequently that is what all the living creatures are about. No criticism just mechanism.
And the mechanism is rotten from the roots.
We have to change that.

Like in any other situation, only when we acknowledge the roots of the problem, will we be able to solve it, and the roots of the problem, the origin of the suffering, is in the mechanism of life itself. Moral people do not stand idly while helpless creatures suffer.

The playing god argument

It is an illusion to think that you don’t decide for the animals. Of course you do!
You decide for them to suffer from hunger, thirst and diseases. You decide for them to constantly fear predators. You decide they will be murdered by predators. You condemn billions to brutally fight each other over group dominancy. You decide they will suffer from the torments of infirmity.
You decide that they will continue to suffer instead of not feeling any pain ever again.

You choose for the animals and for everybody in this world just by being alive and by being aware of what is going on. You can't choose not to choose, because you know.
You know that whales play volleyball with seals and you can't decide not to choose for them. When you are choosing not to take part in the only one solution movement, you are choosing for the seals to keep suffering.
You don’t have a choice but to choose for them. Not choosing is an illusion and the reality is that you choose the current state of affairs if you are not doing anything to change it.

It’s easy and convenient to pretend otherwise, since the suffering is millions of miles away, far from our eyes. But isn’t this meat-eaters terminology?

It is meaningless to say that "it is deciding for someone else" because we do it all the time. We live in the same world, we compete for the same resources it is inevitable to affect each other. And because we are aware of that notion at least till some point, it is not affecting it is deciding.
Meat eaters don’t affect "farm animals" they choose these lives for them. They know how they live or at least they know that they were slaughtered for the meat they buy, so they are consciously doing it. This is not affecting, this is choosing. It is a decision.

You don’t eat meat and not any other animal products, but you do eat, and eating is deciding for someone else, even eating vegan food. By eating vegan food (even organic) as we explained, you decide that rodents, insects and other animals will be poisoned and will be torn away from their habitats. The food is packed with nylon, paper and plastic (trees and petroleum products). And it's being delivered on roads that used to be someone's habitat, by trucks, made out of metal, plastic, leather and rubber and if you are not pedantic about local food, checking that each and every one of the ingredients, including the package and all the machinery and components that were used during the making process of the food, are all local, than your food is delivered by airplanes and ships too, the sky and ocean invaders. We have already explained that it is not the matter of occasional accidents only- planes crashing into birds and oil spills. It is a systematic colossal damage.

If you are not aware of all that, then you should know that you are profoundly affecting the lives of others even if you don’t want to, and if you are aware of all that, then you choose to hurt others if you choose to stay alive.
Why are you deciding for others? Do you have a right? No you don’t. You don’t have a right but you don’t have a choice either. It's not a matter of rights it's a matter of plain facts. You can choose to die or choose to hurt. But you can't choose not to choose. You will hurt even if you don’t want to. This is life. And this is the problem.
Again, suffering and violence are inherent parts of life and no one can avoid them.
If you wish to stop the suffering, you have to stop life.

The spay and neuter argument

We let ourselves guess that most of you are in favor of spay and neuter. Isn’t that choosing for someone else? Of course it is, but you still in favor because you know it will prevent suffering from the future offspring.

You know that 50% of a typical cat litter die shortly after birth from diseases, infections, birth complications, weather and because the death rate is very high among adult cats too, many kittens are orphaned still in their suckling period, totally helpless and needy, they die very shortly after.
Half of the surviving kittens will die before they reach 6 months and the rest will live for about 2-5 years of struggling to find food, constantly fighting each other and repeatedly breeding - dooming more kittens to the same fate which is torn ears, scratched eyes, abscesses, internal injuries, diseases and sometimes death result from the constant fight with dogs, other cats and wild animals, like raccoons, coyotes and foxes.
Each year millions of cats are run over by cars while trying to cross the road.
In the winter the cats seek warmth, so they crawl into car engines and are killed or maimed when the car is restarted.
They are exposed to fatal diseases, including rabies, feline leukemia, distemper and feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV).
They suffer from contracting debilitating parasites, such as worms, ticks, mites and fleas.
They are exposed to pesticides, rodenticides and deliberately scattered poisons.
And to end this partial list, cats are systematically abused by several causers, from devil worshippers to bored kids, because cats are available and vulnerable victims. Animal shelters and veterinarians treat cats who have been beaten, shot, stabbed, maimed or set on fire, all the time.
Cats may also be captured and sold to research laboratories or used as “bait” to train fighting dogs.
So, the ones who live a few years and "only" suffer from the constant hunger, the regular cat fights and from the street life-garbage fed integrated illnesses, are considered the "lucky" ones.

A female cat and all of her offspring and her offspring's offspring and etc, producing 3 litters per year, with 5 surviving kittens per year, can total about 10 million cats in only 10 years (5 power 10). Refusing to spay is choosing that about 75% of them will die before the age of 6 months and that 100% will suffer.

The spaying opposers will say that it's the society that should be changed, the human relation towards animals. But cats, dogs and any other species humans consider their pets, are throwaway items to be cuddled when cute and abandoned when inconvenient.
Every year, commercial breeders deliberately bring millions of animals into an already overpopulated world to sell them for profit. Driven by marketplace demand, they provide "purebred" cats and dogs to people who want them as status symbols. Approximately one-quarter of the dogs in shelters are purebreds who were originally purchased and then abandoned.
Humans don’t care that every year over 20 million animals end up caged in shelters.
These shelters are dogs' hell. Most of you probably experienced one of the saddest moments of your life, if you have ever been in a shelter while someone came in looking for a dog to adopt, seeing the dogs fight for the chance to get out of the shelter.
Dogs and cats are objects that can be discarded at the "owner’s" whim. They are totally depended on humans' will to take care of them. Very unreliable hands.

It is even ridiculous to say that it is unrealistic to change humans' relation towards animals. We have broadly referred to the chances of a social change based on compassion and moral earlier, so we’ll stick to one relevant example - car accidents.

People don’t cease driving their cars and actually build more and more roads and buy more and more cars every year, even though car accidents kill 1.2 million people a year and injure 50 million people every year.
Car accidents are ranked as the 11th leading cause of death and account for 2.1% of all human deaths globally. The Red Cross predicts that if the current trend continues, road accidents will be the third largest cause of death and disability by the year 2020.

Although road accidents are a very serious human problem, to stop driving is not even an option. Despite these figures, many drivers treat speed limits as nothing more than a suggestion, they cross traffic lights that are red, corner at speed without using indicators beforehand, drive over pedestrian crossings while pedestrians are still on the road and ignore clear signs that forbid, for example, U turns.

Alcohol involvement accounts for about third of the fatal car accidents and about two thirds of the passengers killed in traffic crashes are not wearing seat belts. So humans kill themselves, their families and friends and they don’t change.
3,242 humans die from car accidents every day and they don’t care, so do you really think they will stop because of a few million cats?

We personally, got into fights a few times, with humans who refused to wait until we managed to release cats who were stuck inside their cars, looking for warmth.
They didn’t care that the cats will crash to death inside their engines. We had to physically block their car.

And all this is when referring to the car as a direct assassin tool only, while the average car emits a cocktail of more than 1,000 pollutants. Road building involves the loss or irreparable degradation of delicate ecosystems all over the world, cut through and trample on animals' habitats. And of course cars use one third of the world's oil production which involves: oil spills, air and water pollution, large emissions of carbon dioxide and wars.

So of course we agree that things should be changed from the roots, but you can't convince humans to stop driving even for totally egoistic reasons so you most definitely can't convince them to stop because they might hurt cats. And even if you could it is only part of cats' problems and cats are only part of the world problems.
The roots of the problem are much more profound. Choosing not to choose for them might make you feel very righteous and virtuous but besides that nice and clean "moral" theory, there is suffering on the line, and by not choosing for the current living adults, you choose life of suffering for all the cats that will ever live.

The spay supporters do understand that they must choose for the cats and that there is no point or a way to avoid the decision, so they take to themselves the right to spay but they argue about the right to kill.

The right to kill argument

First of all it is meaningless to say that you don’t have a right to do something that you can't avoid anyway. You don’t have a right but you don’t have a choice either. It's not a matter of right it's a matter of fact. You hurt just by being alive and you can't avoid killing even if you really want to. Your vegan food is not growing on Mars and you don’t drink water from Venus. They are from earth and they are on the expense of someone else. So you may think that you don’t have a right to kill or hurt but you do it anyway.

Arguing that we don’t have a right to kill while all life is based on that, while all the creatures are killing each other all the time, is not relevant. Refusing to kill someone means killing someone else. Not killing a human or a lion or a snake is killing all the animals that they will kill.
It is not just predators and meat eaters, all the creatures are competing for the same limited resources so they indirectly kill each other by eating "their" food or drinking "their" water, huge mammals like elephants physically destroy habitats unintentionally while they roam and intentionally while knocking down trees to reach the highest branches, beavers don’t eat birds but they cut down "their" houses and consequently kill them, some whales don’t eat fish but they severely hurt them and many other aquatic creatures with every blow they pound on the water with their over 100 tonnes body during the mating period, adult female marmots severely beat their daughters if they got pregnant to cause them a miscarriage if the provisions are not sufficient, million animals constantly fight for a good tree hole in a forest, a pothole in the savannah and a safe rock covered cave in the seabed, it is a matter of life and death even though they don’t eat each other. Conch crabs are not born with a shell, therefore they tear good shells from each other's bodies if their shells have grown too little or if they can't find one. The crabs don't necessarily die from the tearing of the shell but a shell-less crab will get killed very fast.
What is food for some vegetarian animals, is other species' hiding-places, sunshades and the only water source, as plants act as dew collectors.
It doesn't matter that it is not done intentionally, because the point is that death is so common and integral part of life.
The ferocious and notorious male fights over "the right to mate", among many herbivore species, end up in the agonizing death of one or both creatures as a result of severe injuries. The males are armed with relentless battle organs from moose's jagged horns, hippos' mighty teeth, ibexes' huge incurved horns, rhinos' massive horn, sheep's involute antlers and the Madagascar tortoise lifting rods.
In every square meter of rainforest there are 5 different species of insects, not 5 creatures but 5 species and that's only insects in only one square meter. Animals in rainforests kill each other just by walking. And we remind you that all of the above is relevant for totally vegetarian species. Most of the species are not vegetarians so the killing in their lives is much more direct and conventional. Death is everywhere. Intentionally or not, everybody kills.
This is life, to live is to kill, if you don’t like it you can try to stop it. That's what we are trying to do.

We see things through binoculars and tend to think in terms of purposes and goals, even when there are none. In life there is no such thing as a purpose. Things simply occur. Just as there is no purpose behind a chemical reaction, burning of sugar for instance, there is no purpose behind birthing, metabolism and DNA duplication. It started out as basic organic chemistry, and along billions of years acquired more and more complexity. One of those "upgrades" was the ability to suffer, feel pain and fear. That’s life. Technical chemical mechanism. Animals are the victims of chemistry.
It is too inherent, too obvious for you to ignore. Suffering, violence and death are inherent parts of life and no one can really avoid them. When you refuse to kill the current living you doom all the future generations to die and much more important and cruel, is that you doom all the future generations to suffer. Choosing not to do something about it is the same as approving it and we can’t think of anything crueler than approving this world. This is where our moral justification to kill is drawn from. The only way to stop the suffering, is to stop life.

And things are only getting worse…

The future argument

Animal consumption is growing rapidly and persistently. The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was 285 million tons.
Increase in meat consumption is seen everywhere. The industry is gaining more and more power and turn to new markets.
Globally the per capita consumption has more than doubled over the last 40 years.
In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.
Due to increased incomes, population growth, and global rising of per capita consumption of meat - the meat production is projected to double again by 2020.

In Asia the most populated continent in the world (about 60% of all humans), the consumption of grains as a staple food has declined over the past three decades, especially in the rapidly growing economies of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and china, while consumption of meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products has increased dramatically.
In china, dairy consumption increased fourfold since the year 2,000 and by 2020 the Chinese are expected to consume 80 billion liters more than U.S.A, Canada and Mexico altogether.
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%.

Many more Asian countries are expected to undergo transformations in their economies and rapid urbanization over the next 25 years. 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.

How will the animal rights movement deal with this massive increase in the demand for animal products over the other side of the world when it’s loosing the battle right at home?

Between 1990 and 2005, China accounted for 64% of the growth in world egg production. Today about half of the eggs in the world are produced in china, where egg production has transitioned and is still in transition from traditional, scattered, backyard farms to large-scale integrated operations. While small farmers once produced most of the eggs for markets of 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. And this course will only get intensified.

In the future, many more animals will suffer much more. The animal rights movement can’t beat globalization and capitalism. Capitalism accurately reflects the egoistic human nature. It fits humans' character too perfectly. It’s a lost war.

Every year more animals are being exploited. And it is not only a quantitative matter, every year the industry manages to make the exploitation more efficient on the expense of the animals’ broken bodies. The genetic invasion is getting more harmful and more violent every year. Farm animals are already deformed freaks - born to be cripples.

The next generation will suffer more than the present and less than the one after it. If you are thinking that it is wrong to "sacrifice" a generation for the sake of all the creatures that will ever suffer on this planet, we ask you, don’t you think it is wrong to "sacrifice" all the creatures that will ever live for the sake of one generation?

One generation, and then the suffering will be stopped forever. You will be saving all the current living and all the future sufferers.
Otherwise the suffering will never end. Generation after generation will be born to this decayed world as the new sufferers, only to become a steak, omelet, shoes, coat, hat, shampoo, pizza or an amusement tool.

It is a manipulation to say that it is wrong to decide for all the living creatures and that we don’t have a right, because you are deciding for all the future generations, for all the creatures that will ever live, do you have the right to decide for them?!
Do you have the right to decide that battery cages, gestation devices, live exports, laboratories, rape, hunger, thirst, density, tuberculosis, leg deformities, cancer, hypocalcaemia, dropsy, AIDS, leg traps, slaughterhouses, lassos, spurs, shockers, whips, knives, guns, bombs, pesticides, hooks, fishing nets and "40 kilograms per meter" farming regulations - will continue to exist?

When you decide not to "sacrifice" one generation, you condemn trillions of sentient creatures to a life of suffering from birth to death.

It won’t stop in any other way.
What are you waiting for? The sun to run out? Asteroid-hit?
Will you let trillions of sentient creatures suffer until then?

The button argument

If there was a button that can eliminate all the suffering in the world, wouldn't you push it?

Unfortunately there is no button yet.
Will you stand aside or will you create it?