Are Vegans Violent?

In France, a country of meat eaters, there has recently been a spate of attacks on butcher shops by militant vegans. They have smashed the windows of butcher shops or sprayed them with blood-colored paint. In the areas in which these attacks have taken place, butchers are said to live in a low-grade state of fear. There has been at least one assassination.

In an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro, a scholar of the relations between man and animals, Jean-Pierre Digard, suggested that there is a comprehensible and meaningful relation between veganism and violence. At first sight this might seem rather surprising, even contradictory, since vegans are obviously against killing sentient creatures in anything less than self-defense, and therefore might be assumed to be gentle types. But men are rarely entirely consistent where their emotions are engaged; the more extreme antiabortionists, for example, have on occasion not hesitated to murder practicing abortionists.

In his book Animalism Is an Anti-Humanism (a reference to Sartre’s book Existentialism Is a Humanism), Digard tries to explain the rise, until now inexorable, of the movement for animal rights. A major reason, he says, is the absence of any contact between the great majority of mankind and animals, except for those animals that are kept for pets and that are increasingly anthropomorphized by their owners. The movement for animal rights is a purely urban phenomenon, mainly of people who have no daily contact with or knowledge of cows or pigs or sheep, as those concerned with animal husbandry do, and who might not much care for them if they did. The only model most people now have of relations with animals is that which they have with their cat or dog, and they use it as a model or template for what they think all relations with animals should be.

Another cause is the consistent attempt by biologists, ethologists, and the like to reduce the difference between man and the animals. Man shares 98 percent of his DNA with chimpanzees, therefore he is 98 percent chimpanzee (by the same token he is 66 percent oyster). Respected, indeed world-famous, authors can get away with the following:

…the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense the organism [and man is an organism] does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier.

Poor Professor Wilson, one of the greatest observers of ants in history, we cannot blame or even criticize him; he is only the envelope for his DNA.

Thus, if there is no essential difference between man and the animals, eating fish or rabbits is a form of cannibalism. And since cannibalism is wrong, eating fish or rabbits is wrong.

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