Re-photo

Thousands March for Animal Rights – thousands of vegans marched through London from Westminster to Hyde Park on Saturday 25th August 2018 in the Official Animal Rights March founded by animal rights organisation Surge, calling for an end to animal oppression and urging everyone to stop eating animals and using dairy products.

Vegans say that animal lives matter as much as ours and call for an end to speciesism, and the misuse of animals for food, clothing and sport. There does however seem to be rather less concern about aspects such as the breeding of dogs and other animals as pets. And while horse racing attracts some attention, the last protest that I photographed against that most cruel of all races, the Grand National, attracted only a handful of protesters compared to the thousands on this march.

Specieism – the idea that animal lives matter as much as human lives – isn’t something I can agree with. I firmly believe there is something special about the human species which has come about through evolution and in particular the development of language. While other species can communicate with each other and some develop very intricate systems of cooperation and civilisation, humanity has developed these to a very different level.

It’s that level indeed that makes veganism possible. The lion needs to hunt and eat, killing other species cruelly in order to survive. Nature truly is famously ‘red in tooth and claw’ at virtually every level, and predation is a vital aspect of all ecosystems.

Of course I’m against cruel treatment of animals, whether it is in farming practices, the transport of live animals, fur farming etc. I’ve never eaten foie gras and will never do so, but I still happily consume cows milk knowing that cows have been bred that now produce many times the amount their young offspring need and would experience considerable pain if not milked. And I’ll happily pay the extra for free range eggs while opposing the terrible treatment of chickens kept in horrifically overcrowded chicken houses. Modern farming practises have generally prioritised cutting costs over being kind to animals and while injections and vetinary treatment may have cut disease it has been in the interests of productivity rather than a more overall view of animal welfare.

There are good environmental reasons for eating less meat, though less so for grass-fed livestock and also for reducing the scale of consumption of diary products. It’s welcome that some people decide not to eat these things, but a wholesale adoption of veganism would be highly damaging to ecosystems around the world and change the nature of our countryside. Just imagine a farmyard without animals – and think seriously about the future of soil without farmyard manure.

Those fluffy animals on the posters at many vegan protests are not wild animals but domesticated animals, which only exist as they do because they have been bred to live with humans and to provide us with food. I would be sad to see them disappear, but there would be no reason for there to be any cows, sheep, geese, pigs, chickens etc in our farms and fields if we ceased to eat them (though I wouldn’t miss turkeys at all.) And certainly I’d not want to see more petting zoos. But I would like to see more truly wild animals in our countryside – including wild ponies rather than horses being kept and ridden for pleasure. And keeping animals as pets does seem to me to be abuse of a kind too – and sometimes by kindness.

There are animals that I happily kill, such as the slugs that eat my vegetable crops and the ticks that hop a ride to suck my blood. Others that I’d support the culling of – including deer and the grey squirrels that are destroying young oak trees and other young vegetation (and we are slowly finding that plants have feelings too) though I can see no justification for the killing of badgers. Then there are smaller animals that I kill accidentally by walking along paths or through forests.

I’m an insulin user, and it has kept me alive and reasonably healthy for around the last 20 years. Reasearch on insulin began in the 1880s, though it was only in the 1920s that the first human patients were injected with it. That research was only possible through experiments using animals, mainly dogs. Until 1982 when the first biosynthetic human insulin became available all commercial production of insulin depended the use of cattle and pigs. Much more recently a plant source has been found. Using animals in medical research in this and many other cases has saved millions of lives but of course it should be subject to proper controls and certainly not used for trivial and routine tests.

In the past I have marched with animal rights activists, supporting many of their protests against animal cruelty. And my diet now contains far less meat than it once did. But it would be good to see more of those who come out to march for animal rights also coming out to march for human rights. still suffering much abuse here and elsewhere around the world. We are a species too and even though we now don’t eat each other, people are being killed, tortured, sexually assaulted, imprisoned without trial, sentenced for their political views variously abused and denied their human rights and the necessities of life.

More at Thousands March for Animal Rights.