People become vegetarians and vegans for all sorts of reasons, from health concerns to disgust at factory farming. But the strongest argument for both practices is a moral one: human beings should not use their power over animals to kill them, eat them or take from them.

That is a serious claim. It is also one that can be tested.

Veganism as a set of beliefs and practices may be assumed to be simply a harder version of vegetarianism. The two overlap in certain respects, but veganism is something different, worse and more dangerous altogether.

The truth of that statement is demonstrable for humans. It is hard to say with a great deal of certitude, but veganism is likely bad for the whole of animals as well.

What Is Vegetarianism?

Vegetarianism is a general approach to human diet. It holds that humans ought not to kill and eat animals for a number of reasons that do not need to fit together neatly.

Animals may have some form of consciousness, for instance. Vegetarians can argue that we, as the most advanced conscious creatures on the planet, ought to do what we can to feed ourselves and our offspring without inflicting suffering on our fellow conscious creatures whenever possible.

There are different strands of vegetarianism, with different levels of permissiveness. Some vegetarians will not eat anything that could be remotely considered a creature. Other camps of vegetarians hold that it is okay to eat some lower-level things that move. Permitted foods may include bugs or, more popularly, fish and other creatures of the sea.

A few amusing options exist for what to call vegetarians who make exceptions for eating things that you can fish out of the water. Most often they are called pescatarians, but some prefer the more understandable and descriptive label vegequarians.

Matthew Scully was a speechwriter for US President George W Bush. He also authored a book called Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

The book made what has been called the religious case for vegetarianism. The case is that mankind’s warrant from God to eat animals, as laid out in the Bible, was a limited one and ultimately grounded in a necessity that we can grow out of.

Or, to put it in Augustinian terms, “Lord, make me a vegetarian, but not yet”.

From Scully’s premise, it followed that as advances in agriculture and nutrition allow, the divine warrant narrows and ultimately expires.

Technology Scrambles Moral Categories

That may sound hifalutin. However, because of various advances in genetics, mass lab-created and lab-grown meat may not be so far off. And what then? If and when lab-grown meat is widely available, several religious and secular debates are forecastable with a great deal of certainty at this point.

For instance, some religions prohibit eating delicious meats like bacon. These prohibitions are grounded in specific circumstances that would likely not be remotely true of lab-grown neopig meat.

The rabbis and the imams could double down against it, or they could say: “Well, no pigs are being slaughtered, so dig in!” The actual most likely result would be a mishmash of religious rulings that are sorted over time by the eating practices of millions of Jews and Muslims.

Another question lab-grown meat will raise is an ethical one that will almost certainly find its way into voting booths. The wording would differ from place to place, but the general sense would be: “If we can eat all the meat we want without killing animals, why is it a good idea to keep eating animals?”

Different voting publics would likely answer that question in different ways. Ethical vegetarian voices could play a useful role in making folks consider the good of animals as they cast their ballots.

How Is Veganism Different?

Vegan and vegetarian sound similar, and that is by design. Donald Watson, who helped to coin the term, explained that it was chosen because the word’s first three and final two letters derive from vegetarian, according to the Vegan Society website.

The overriding idea behind all this was the “principle of the emancipation of animals from exploitation by man”, according to the group. What qualifies as exploitation is a very long list. The society later clarified this as “to seek an end to the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection, and by all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man”.

That means vegans seek to end practices including milking cows, gathering chickens’ unfertilized eggs, shearing sheep and beekeeping, the latter of which is said to exploit bees for their honey.

Even the practice of living with pets as companion animals is exploitative in the vegan way of thinking. Granted, “It may not seem like it on the surface”, vegan anti-pet activist Ruby Guyler admits, but these animals’ natural freedom is impinged, and worse: “Whenever someone buys from a breeder, the cycle continues.”

A vegan diet is not a healthy diet for most humans. Vegans are at risk of deficiencies in vitamin B12, choline, iodine and omega-3 fats that are abundant in the sorts of foods that omnivorous humans regularly eat. Deficiencies in these things can result in inadequate brain development for young humans and a host of problems including brain fog, fatigue and a greater incidence of strokes in older vegans.

Yes, vegans can make up for some of these deficiencies through copious use of dietary supplements, but whether they do this is a different issue. A recent Australian study of the nutrition of a cross-section of 240 participants found that vegans tended to be nutritionally stunted, though the researchers used more diplomatic language. Some vegetarians, particularly pescatarians, fared a bit better.

Veganism is rejectionism, and it does not particularly care about the larger effects of that rejection.

For instance, one absolutely necessary part of modern crop farming is loading the soil with nitrogen. The major source of that fertilizer is animal waste. But the use of manure triggers the vegan exploitation tripwire.

On a smaller scale, vegans are of course free to experiment with manure-free farming. But on a larger scale, that would be a recipe for disaster and the mass starvation of humans.

To Bee or Not to Bee

Nature is not vegan. Certainly some animals are only evolved to eat plants, but then other animals tend to gobble those animals up. And other ethical demands of veganism are so far from natural as to beggar belief.

I wrote a children’s book called The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf. It stars a young wolf named Kevin who decides he does not feel comfortable eating meat. Getting that far was hard enough, but then I had to come up with a reason why he would not eat honey, as vegans will not. I finally settled on the fact that a bear chased him off from the sweet stuff and he was scared to go back.

Bees are a great example, in recent memory, of where human ingenuity has benefited another species. Honeybees were beset with what was called “colony collapse disorder” in North America. It was the management practices of beekeepers, who house and move bees to pollinate crops and extract some of their honey for sale, that kept bee populations from plunging precipitously.

Likewise, domestic chickens had an avian flu epidemic on the North American continent but have now rebounded in population. Poultry farmers bred them aggressively because, encouraged by a temporary spike in prices, they wanted more eggs. Those same farmers, from larger businesses to people who keep chickens in their own backyards, build all sorts of barriers to protect their hens and the odd rooster from the predations of nature.

So many other examples abound. Romans gave their dogs spiked collars so wolves could not tear out their throats. Sheep actually benefit from being sheared.

Axolotls are weird little amphibians that are native to a series of freshwater lakes in Mexico, where they are dying out. Yet over one million of them are currently estimated to be in people’s aquariums. This private ownership is ensuring the longevity of the species, even if vegans would denounce the practice as exploitative.

This is not to say that mankind’s interaction with other species has always been beneficial to those species. Historically, our record is mixed. But over 99% of all species that have ever walked or crawled the Earth or swam through its oceans have gone extinct.

Mankind has the tools and the interest to save some of the remaining species, if we do not get scared off by charges of exploitation.