Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
Because deforestation is still happening at an alarming rate, most of it in the Amazon, and most of it for beef pastures and soy for livestock feed (humans consume a fraction of the soy produced, vegans an even smaller fraction (and soy is avoidable - there are soy-allergic vegans), and most of it doesn’t come from the Amazon when fed to humans). This is all going to increase as animal product consumption is currently increasing, not decreasing - though it’s decreasing in more developed countries as more humans who have already had the luxury of animal products for a long time have started to realize all the massive problems with them, and increasing in more developing countries and populations that are becoming wealthier and more able to afford it more frequently. And also, just because the human population is still increasing (and most of those will be raised as carnists), despite dropping birth rates.
And also, the effects of climate change from animal agriculture, which are manifold, but include direct GHGs, and the opportunity cost of maintaining deforestation (in addition to increasing it) instead of taking advantage of the essential carbon sequestration potential of reforestation & rewilding, contribute to climate change and environmental destruction too, which obviously kills far more plants and contributes to the 6th mass extinction event of various species of organisms on the planet in general.
Additionally, even on lands where forests have already been cleared, preventing plants from becoming overgrown there and constantly “maintaining” the land for animal farming still harms a lot more plants than using far less land and requiring far less plants to just give them to humans directly.
And of course with the much higher crop/plant use/harvesting for animal products than plant based foods & products, the number of plants harmed and killed in animal agriculture blows that of plant agriculture - when provided directly to humans - out of the water.
humans use about 93% of the global soy crop. didn’t lie.
We use it on non-human animals. It’s misleading at best to frame that as us using it. Sure, indirectly. Not directly. We consume about 4-7% directly as food, and most of that is consumed by non-vegans. Most people think of us using something like crops as consuming/using them directly because many people aren’t aware how much of global cropland (and pastureland) is used feed non-human animals that we breed to exploit and kill. So you’re drawing on this misconception to perpetuate harmful myths. The fact we use it on non-human animals is why it’s so inefficient.
we press about 85% of the global soy crop for oil. about 7% is fed directly to animals.