“Because animal exploitation harms animals unnecessarily, it is inherently unjust. It is therefore essential to work for its disappearance” believe the three vegan authors who sent here, a few weeks ago, their Montreal Declaration on animal exploitation (with the support of more than 450 signatories), perhaps be as a prelude to World Veganism Day celebrated today. Despite the fact that animal abuse is still far too common and must be denounced wherever it is encountered, it seems to me that this abolitionist declaration is less about reason than about well-thinking, “this rust of the mind which , slowly but surely, destroys all discernment” to use the formula of Michel Maffesoli and Hélène Strohl in The new do-gooders (Editions of the moment).
Under the pretext that science has established that certain animals are sentient, that is to say “capable of feeling pleasure, pain and emotions”, it would be necessary to put an end to most of the relations that we have with them. ? Prohibit, for example, any enhancement of their work force, their coat or their protein intake? At first, the proposal may seem attractive, even logical, but when moving from principled abolitionist animal ethics to applied abolitionist animal ethics, it becomes clear that the vegan doctrine does not hold water.
First, although vegans condemn, in principle, any form of exploitation of presumed sentient beings, in practice, when they obtain an object or a food, the mere sight, on its packaging, of the word “vegan” — or a list of ingredients that does not include the name of any animal familiar to them — is enough to reassure them. And yet! How can they not care that behind all the steps in the creation of this garment or this food hides a prodigious collection of sentient beings?
Seek to reduce suffering
Not only animals, like this robust draft buffalo whose labor is hidden behind this sack of rice, or this round pig whose manure was used to feed this ear, but also a number of men and women, well aware of them. also, whose operation has made it possible to offer these bananas, chickpeas and all-dressed vegan pizzas in grocery stores. In fact, it is standing upright on the shoulders of a maddening number of sentient beings that vegans chant their abolitionist slogans and demand the end of the omnicultural peasantry.
Then, this choice of the term “exploitation”, to describe the relationships we have with animals, is far from trivial. If it is true that industrial agriculture is in great need of reform, inscribed as it is in this outrageous consumerism which has led us to maintain all sorts of deleterious relationships with the living, that does not mean that any form of animal exploitation constitutes abuse. Taken literally, to exploit means to “enhance”. But it is to its pejorative meaning, which means “to abuse”, that vegans mainly refer when they use it.
Is it therefore unthinkable that a sheep should be happy with an exchange where its wool is bartered for a generous pittance and a comfortable shelter? Or that these hens or these bees see a good eye the fact that their eggs and their honey are equally rewarded? Even if perfect reciprocity does not exist, it is better to amend, rather than abolish, the ties that unite us to animals.
To propose that our relations with the animals cease, under the pretext that they can understand a part of suffering, isn’t it as delusional as wanting to eliminate human relations, since they can also include some? It seems to me much more realistic to seek to reduce this suffering than to dream of eliminating it. Now, to reduce it, it is not enough to know that the sentient being is capable of feeling it, it is also necessary to know to what extent it is, that is to say of what order this suffering is. If we want to show moral discernment while seeking to improve our relations with other living beings, considering this order seems to me necessary.
A dangerous authoritarianism
Finally, when the authors of the vegan manifesto summon us to exclude all animal protein from our diet simply because it seems unnecessary to them, claiming that “most of us can already do without foods of animal origin while remaining healthy”, do they not betray not only their belonging to a society of plenty, but to a caste of well-to-do who consume what they want rather than what they can ?
It seems obvious to me that the technological solutions that vegans are fueled by – with their fortified foods, their dietary supplements and their hyper-transformed products – are the antithesis of what we need today to cure the evil of infinity.
To eat intelligently is, in my opinion, to try to eat first of all what we can produce with rudimentary means, therefore sustainable, therefore ecological. It is not by freeing ourselves from nature that we will ensure our sustainability, but by trying to be one with it.
Beneath the guise of a charity movement — innocently, and supposedly rationally pleading for better treatment of our animal friends — lies a movement that cultivates, on closer inspection, dogmatism and authoritarianism. extremely dangerous for the health of our society. With his certainty of possessing the truth and his conviction of thus having the right to impose his abolitionism, the ethical vegan defends, on a background that turns out to be massively more affective than rational, a candy asceticism to which only a person can want to adhere. society drunk on growth.
Let’s take our minds and come back to earth!