The Vegan Thread

Well, it's always worth making this point about homonymy (giving different things the same name) again and again: The vast majority of people don't eat animals except for the insects they (almost) inevitably swallow. Meat isn't 'animal', it's cut-up corpse--when it's dead, it's no longer an animal. Animals are living things. When Kevin Kline ate a live fish for 'A Fish Called Wanda', that was 'eating an animal'. When it's dead, it's just eating corpse/cadaver (the former mostly used for humans, the latter for non-human animals).

I do think this point isn't just nit-picking, but important, as when we say 'eating animals', many people think that this is something good. Why? Well, people say it tastes good/they couldn't live without it/they need the protein, etc. I think it's also because there is a sense in which we think of animals as good. Not good in the sense of morally benign, but lovely to have around (which we obviously mainly associate with mammals, and especially those who are most similar to us).

Also, in the famous phrase, animals can be conceived of as 'ends in themselves' rather than just 'means to an end', i.e. we can genuinely want good things for animals for their own sakes as opposed to killing them and eating bits of their corpses, or torturing them for dairy products, etc. If we don't consider animals ends in themselves, just as we (not always) consider other humans ends in themselves, then you arrive at the perversions cited.

By contrast, few people would consider corpses or cadavers good things in the same way as living animals, and it's always worth pointing out that that's what they consume (and what most vegans alive consumed once upon a time). (Obviously, a similar argument is made by fruitarians about eating other parts of plants, but as plants are clearly alive in a different way to the way in which non-human animals are alive, that's not the same case.)