The Oxford Union Society Has Made History by Publicly Supporting Veganism: The Vegan Team Won the Debate, Part 3 of 3

Joey Carbstrong (vegan): Only 110 billion human beings have ever existed in our world’s history. We kill more feeling, sentient beings than that in a mere six weeks, by the most conservative of estimates. And all for trivial and needless products. Now, these numbers are unfathomable. We’re talking between one and three trillion land and marine animals every year. If an atrocity like this were taking place to humans on such a scale, it would be the new Holocaust, on steroids.

But why are their lives disregarded? Well, just like racism or any other form of discrimination, it all starts in the mind first. Speciesism. You might have heard this term before. Similar to racism, it’s essentially discrimination based on species alone. It’s the reason we love and care for dogs, but destine pigs to hell-hole factory farms and a horrifying CO2 gas chamber to suffer and die. Speciesism is a form of human supremacy – we matter the most, so we choose who lives and who dies. Where have we heard that before?

You will often hear the phrase “humane slaughter” being thrown around, as if putting the word humane in front of the word slaughter absolves us of any moral wrongdoing. Could you imagine someone using the phrase humane rape? Humane slavery? What about a humane genocide? Any decent person would scoff at the thought. Yet when it comes to the killing of animals, all of a sudden it’s no problem. In principle, humane slaughter is a myth, a fairy tale. It only serves to make the killer feel more comfortable about killing and has nothing to do with the rights of the victim. If the animal’s rights were truly being respected, then so would their right to continue living.

Put yourself in the victim’s position. Would you still consider slaughter humane if it were you walking down the kill line?

“Stop the slaughtering of animal-people, it’s murder, it’s against God’s Law.” ~Supreme Master Ching Hai (vegan)