How to Argue With a Meat Eater (And Win Every Time) by Ed Winters

Author:Ed Winters [Winters, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

This argument is often tied in with the idea that vegans are city-dwellers who have lost touch with the natural world and don’t get their hands dirty, instead choosing to cast judgement on the humble country folk who are stewards and caretakers of the land. I have had this argument levelled at me often, even though I’ve visited many farms and I’m a co-founder of an animal sanctuary.

And even if it is true that many vegans have never visited a farm, what exactly does this prove? You don’t need to have physically been to a location to intellectually understand what that place is like, and, similarly, you don’t have to have personally endured something to be able to empathise with someone who has. I’ve never been kidnapped, but I can surmise that being kidnapped is an awful experience. I’ve also never been to the Sahara Desert, but I know that I would find it very hot.

The same is true of farming. You don’t need to have artificially impregnated a cow yourself to be able to work out that forcing your arm inside the rectum of an animal, holding their uterus in place through the lining of the anus and then syringing semen into it is weird, disturbing and immoral.

On the one hand, farmers use this argument as a way to undermine veganism by accusing people who have chosen this lifestyle of being ignorant, while on the other using the fact that most people in society haven’t visited a farm to their advantage by showing idealised versions of farming that focus on aspects they want the public to think of when they imagine farm life. For example, clips and imagery of fields being grazed by dairy cows are exceptionally common. Less common are depictions of a cow being forcibly penetrated and impregnated, or of a newborn baby being taken away from their mother and forced into a solitary confinement pen, and I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath for a photograph of a dairy cow hung upside down inside a slaughterhouse being proudly displayed in the milk aisle of a supermarket.

I’m all for people seeing what farming looks like – it’s the farmers who aren’t.

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