Refuse to support systems that profit off the commodification of animals

When you purchase animal flesh from the supermarket shelf, you are supporting a global industry that profits off the exploitation of sentient creatures – all for a 10 minute meal. You are becoming a willing consumer, part of the larger supply chain – thus your purchase will fuel further demand for animal flesh, enabling the cycle of exploitation and abuse to continue.

Some non-vegans still think that there is nothing with wrong with eating eggs for example, because they think the animal didn’t have to die. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The males of course, are seen as disposable waste products of the industry, therefore deemed useless- shortly after hatching they are ground up by maceration. Then you have the hens who are laying eggs at an unnaturally high rate so they become ‘spent’ after just a few months. This is shocking in itself when you think in the wild, these hens would have a life expectancy of 15 years, according to Four Paws. But it doesn’t end there – chickens are confined to tiny cages, some no bigger than a A4 sheet of paper. They are forced to stand on wire flooring which leads to bone weakness and a number of foot deformities. They can’t spread their wings, let alone engage in a number of natural behaviours, such as nesting and foraging.

Chickens are naturally very social animals – if you’ve ever had chickens or pet-sat chickens (I have had the privilege), you would have observed their unique personalities and the relationships they develop between each other within the group. They have their own flock hierarchy (pecking order). I have seen this when I was pet sitting and watched the chickens put themselves to bed in the chicken coop at dusk. They all had their designated roosting bars/positions based on their rank in the flock. But caged chickens of course, are simply fighting for basic survival; they have no space at all. Many laying hens will have their beaks trimmed to eliminate fighting and feather pecking.

Choose to view animals as individuals with inherent value

It is quite bizarre when you think about the way we are taught from a young age to place animals into different categories: pets, food, entertainment, wildlife… and I definitely think that fish need a special mention; they should be in a category all on their own simply because fish are definitely placed way down the ‘hierarchy of sentience’ by the majority of humans – there is no animal in my opinion, that is more objectified.

I recall on one of my beach walks, seeing a lone fisherman at dusk, and thinking ‘here we go again’ – in his bucket were a couple of (what looked to be dead fish), and I had a momentary romantic notion to steal his fish and return them to the ocean, but then told myself ‘what good would it do, he’s one lone fisherman out of a billion others’. Yes, you say, ‘but the fish could have lived.’ On my return, the fisherman had taken the fish and discarded the fish heads on the sand, without a second thought. Their dead eyes looking up at me, it seemed so sad; they weren’t even recognised as living creatures who had just had their lives taken away from them, let alone individual beings. There was no respect at all for individual life or nature itself, by the way their body parts were discarded on the sand without a second thought, likely left for the seagulls to feast on.