Veganism And Racism

Jamaican curried tofu with chickpeas. From here . Will be removed on request.

I knew it’d come in handy!

I went vegan nearly three dozen years ago. Things have changed a lot in the intervening time, as might be expected, and the popularity of plant-based diets has grown considerably. Another trend which seems to be almost a universal law of human behaviour, or perhaps society, is that as movements become more popular they also tend to get watered-down and corrupted. Maybe it’s a form of entropy. It should probably also be borne in mind that as individual organisms, we also age, and there’s a tendency for us to think things were better in the old days, when we were younger, and since then it’s all gone wrong. I wouldn’t say this was entirely true. For instance, racism is less socially acceptable, people recognise sexual harassment as a bad thing, the police get involved in domestic violence cases and homosexuality is almost generally accepted nowadays. In that particular area, which might be described as identity politics, things are usually better.

Conceptually speaking, veganism is kind of on the edge of identity politics for a couple of reasons. One is that veganism can be legally seen as a protected characteristic, in that people are not supposed to be marginalised because of their veganism, although it isn’t quite the same as an immutable property such as disability or sexual orientation. It’s closer to political affiliation or religion. Another is that veganism is an attempt to support a group, actually the largest of all by far and not in any way a minority, which doesn’t have its own voice. People just do speak on behalf of other species because it’s impossible for most of them to speak for themselves. Unlike anti-racism and feminism, veganism could be said (although it isn’t entirely true) to consist entirely of allies, and as such it’s probably worth considering what people in the other movements regard as being a good ally.

The way veganism is constructed nowadays is influenced by commodification, recuperation and capitalism more generally, and we should therefore be wary of this. There’s a strong tendency to think of veganism as simply plant-based, and this can have undesirable consequences in, for example, the production of plant-based meat substitutes which are extensively tested on non-human animals during their development, and it can turn veganism into slacktivism, because you can end up feeling that all it takes to be vegan is to change your diet, use different cosmetics and toiletries and so forth, without, for example, thinking of the perhaps very distant and unsustainably grown sources of your food or other ingredients. Another consequence of this restriction on veganism’s scope is that it can lead us to ignore the treatment of the animal most of us have the most to do with socially – human beings. There is a sense in which nothing developed or produced under capitalism is vegan because it involves capitalist exploitation, and therefore exploitation of the animal known as Homo sapiens. To be fair, I can remember so-called “vegan” groups in the 1980s CE celebrating a coach crash because it meant the death of carnists. This is not veganism, although it is consequentialist because the idea is that the meat eaters dying would result in the deaths of fewer cows, chicken, sheep, pigs and others, something which could equally be achieved by persuading the same number of people do go vegan as crash victims. Hence it doesn’t even work from a consequentialist angle. This, then, is not veganism.

It’s true that mass media tends to present veganism as primarily White, and many people’s images of a vegan will be of a White person. In fact, Afro-Americans are twice as likely to be vegan as White people in the US and RastafarIan diets tend towards veganism. It also makes sense physiologically for most of the world’s human population not to eat dairy as adults due to the fact that White people are unusual in being able to digest dairy as adults, but this has no influence on carnism.

Some manifestations of so-called “veganism” have also been overtly racist. Two White people in Los Angeles started a blog originally called ‘Thug Kitchen’ in the ‘noughties which appropriated Afrikan-American Vernacular English, and there’s also the question of the word “thug”, which apparently has a controversial history due to having become associated with Black people. I can’t tell if this is a primarily American usage or not, but I would expect it to filter over if not. My understanding of the word “thug” is that it was originally an Indian word for a member of a gang of assassins who used to garrotte their victims, then became associated with people, regardless of ethnicity, in organised crime who commit acts of violence to the end of promoting and maintaining the reputation of the organisation or to extort money from victims. This meaning seems either to have changed or to have been different in American culture. It took several years for it to become clear to the general public that the people responsible for the site, and also apparently a book, were White people in California, after which they were accused of “digital blackface”. I would, however, say that all of this went on without me every becoming aware of it, and this makes me wonder if it’s symptomatic of commodification of a relatively ineffective and diluted version of “veganism” which is based on people hopping onto a trend, which perhaps also explains the use of something else which might be perceived as “cool” without thinking much about either.

PETA are, unsurprisingly, another offender, appropriating the notion of slavery without having any recent heritage of that form of oppression. In an ad said to have been banned by the NFL but which was supposèdly intended for the Superbowl, various animals were shown taking the knee in an attempt to draw comparisons between speciesism and racism. Although I don’t understand why this would be considered offensive, people took issue with the idea that Black people were being compared to members of other species. Now as I said, there’s a sense in which the vegan movement consists entirely of allies, so there’s a problem with understanding the nature of that comparison. Species are equal, but there is a history of denigrating humans in general and ethnic minorities in particular with non-human animals whose connotation is extremely negative, and this is a typically hamfisted and crass attempt by PETA to make a point regarding animal liberation which is not informed by this perception, or at least comes across in this way. Alternatively, maybe PETA’s strategy is to generate publicity in a Benneton kind of way by getting people to talk about their ads without regard to how it reflects on them, and more importantly on the animal liberation movement. However, I hope we can agree that PETA is not a good ally in the animal liberation movement due to other activities, which I won’t go into here.

Then there’s the question of the likes of quinoa, chia seeds and avocados. I first heard of chia seeds about seven or eight years ago and they have never been part of my diet. I’m not aware of ever having eaten them, although I may have inadvertantly done so chez someone or in a restaurant or café. The lauding of particular plant species in this way as superfoods reminds me strongly of the distortion of value in herbal medicine where more “exotic” remedies are perceived as more effective than local or indigenous species, which like so many other things is created by the alienation of use and exchange values in capitalism. It’s extremely harmful to any community which is not rich and relies on one or more of these species as a staple, because it can inflate the price out of their financial reach.

Chia seeds are from two species of Salvia, the genus containing sage and also the psychotropic Salvia divinorum. The Lamiaceæ (grrr, Labiatæ!), their family, probably contains the majority of culinary herbs such as mint and rosemary, and it’s unusual for a species in that taxon to be used for its seeds. I would imagine therefore that the process of harvesting chia seeds is quite labour-intensive compared to cereal harvesting, for example. They’re native to Central America and southern Mexico. The concern with cultivation of plant foods novel to the market in the developed world is that they may be grown unsustainably and raise the price of the food for the people who traditionally eat them. There’s also a kind of sense of exoticism about them which is fickle and rather like cultural appropriation, or may actually be cultural appropriation.

Quinoa I did used to eat. This is in the Amaranthaceæ, along, unsurprisingly, with amaranth itself. Unsurprisingly, its price has been forced up in Bolivia as a result of its popularity in the developed world, and is now less affordable to the poorer people of that country. In Perú the price is now higher than chicken, meaning of course that it has probably increased meat consumption in that country. But in both these cases, there is an issue of it bringing money into the countries in question as well, although economic diversification is also important because the problem with trends is that they can change rapidly. However, looking into this in more detail, quinoa is not a staple in the Andes, so it isn’t necessarily as big a problem as has been thought in the past.

I could continue to list questionable plant foods, but I’ll mention just two more. One is the avocado. These are, incidentally, remarkable in having been preserved by early agriculture and used to rely on giant ground sloths for their distribution, so they’d probably be extinct were it not for us. The same price increase as seen with the other species has affected avocados for the same reason, but in their case drug cartels are also involved, meaning that there’s a fair bit of violence in their production, although perhaps similar violence occurs with the cultivation of the other two plants. They apparently are a staple.

The final, notorious, species is unsurprisingly soya. My own consumption of soya is not negligible because I eat tofu although I don’t drink soya milk. There is what I regard as an unsupported rumour that the phytoestrogens in soya reduce male fertility which I can’t accept as true because of its long history of traditional consumption in East Asia. Another issue with soya is that it is largely fed to farm animals, which offsets its environmental impact considerably because it means that carnists will sometimes be contributing to any problems more than vegans who eat a lot of soya are. However, it has a significant rôle in the deforestation of South America although there has been a soya moratorium in Brazil which banned export of soya grown on newly deforested land, which, again however, may simply have meant that cows are now grazing on newly deforested land instead while the soya is grown on the older land, and Bolsonaro will presumably have done a lot of damage in that area. This may sound vague and dismissive, but here’s my point: if you eat distantly-grown food, it introduces ethical complications which you may not have the energy or access to accurate information about.

You might also object that this is not to do with racism, but when you consider that most of the countries involved are subject to colonialism, there is a historical legacy of racism here, although since the European countries took many of their resources it could also be argued that this is partly returning the money to the people affected, assuming some kind of economic equity between ethnicities now exists there.

The trouble is, of course, that to me and many other people this is not “veganism as we know it”, but some kind of trendy convenience thing which may be about image. It feels like some other lifestyle which has been taken away from what I know as veganism, and is in fact very similar to the commercialisation of what’s been labelled as Yoga. That doesn’t seem at all similar to what I think of as Yoga either, and there are racist tendencies in how Yoga is presented commercially in the West too.

As I mentioned above, Afrikan-Americans are more likely to be vegan than White Americans. I think it’s twice as likely. They’re also a lot more likely that White Americans to have reduced their meat consumption recently. Plant-based diets reduce the incidence of chronic conditions that disproportionately affect Black Americans such as hypertension, obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease and certain forms of cancer. However, they may not call themselves vegan, and I’m wondering if this is because the label is often associated with a White face. It is true that they may not be motivated by animal liberation, but there are many Whites with plant-based diets who do call themselves vegan when this is not what that is. On the other hand, they’re also more likely to live in food deserts. Since I lived for most of my life in a city with a particularly good open-air market, I don’t have experience of food deserts and am not commenting from an informed position, but I’m also in the process of writing a book entitled ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using easily available and identifiable plants from, for example, corner shops, to improve and maintain well-being, and it would be interesting to know how applicable this is to the food desert problem. But food deserts are a much bigger problem for non-Whites. In the US, White majority neighbourhoods have four times as many grocery shops, and they also stock a wider variety of food. In order to make it easier for ethnic minorities to pursue veganism, this problem must be solved.

There is a claim that the word “speciesism” appropriates the term “racism” in a similar way to phrases like “the rape of the wild” do for rape. I find it difficult to accept this idea because of words like “sexism” and “ableism”. It doesn’t seem to me that the word “racism” stands out as something which can be owned as a reference to marginalised ethnicities. If a newly-recognised form of prejudice came to the fore, it would seem to make sense to add the suffix “-ism” to the end, and this also feels Quixotic in the wider context of how language change works. So, maybe I am speaking from a position of privilege, but it seems to me that not using the word “speciesism” fails to name the prejudice which dwarfs all others in our societies in its seriousness.

There is another, similar linguistic phenomenon I’ve already alluded to. Humans are of course hominids. Consequently, there is a sense in which we are apes. Cladistically we’re also monkeys, more specifically terrestrial Old World monkeys. However, the words “ape” and “monkey” have been used as racist epithets, and are therefore likely to trigger some Black people. It’s also important to erode the false distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, and this particular distinction is particularly instrumental in maintaining this false superiority. However, long before I went vegan, I used to consider great apes as human rather than the other way round, and this may go some way towards remedying that problem. However, we are then left with the problem of how to refer to our own species, and we do need to do this in the same way as we need to use the term “whiteness”. But there is a possible solution to this along the following lines. There is a plant popularly known as “Mother-In-Law’s Tongue”, which I always call Sanseviera because the Latin name comes across as more neutral. The same could be done with hominids and simians.

Another aspect of carnism in ex-patriate Afrikan communities and their descendants is that they may use meat of particular kinds and prepared in particular ways as part of their cultural identities. If a plant-based diet is perceived as substantially White, adopting it could feel like giving up part of that identity. Consequently, it’s important that we do what we can to ensure that such diets are not perceived as White. And in fact they really aren’t, for the reason stated above and also because of I-Tal, although not every Black person would want to identify with RastafarIanism. Interpretations of I-Tal diet vary. It isn’t compulsory in all mansions and it often includes fish, but the tendency is towards veganism and many people do interpret it as veganism. However, it doesn’t seem to be mentioned much in vegan circles for some reason.

There are also some areas I simply don’t know how to address, and these primarily involve indigenous people. It’s for this reason that I have in the past said that if veganism is racist, so be it. The issue is that there are some groups of hunter-gatherers whose lives intrinsically involve the killing, eating and other use of animals. It is often true that the people involved treat these animals with reverence, that they are not farmed but live in the wild for all their lives, and that their bodies are used efficiently once they’ve been killed, and also that if the communities concerned didn’t do this it would completely alter their lifestyles beyond recognition. It’s also known that these kinds of disturbances in the lives of indigenous peoples lead to major social and mental health problems including an epidemic in decisions to end their own lives. To be honest, I don’t know what to do about this. I am aware, though, that applying veganism to my own life benefits others and the biosphere, and the same applies to the lives of most or all people living in industrial societies.

To conclude, the takeaway from this is that the kind of “veganism” criticised as racist is actually heavily commodified and recuperated by capitalism. It focusses very much on the plant-based issue rather than the fact that veganism entails compassion for all and is therefore necessarily anti-racist. That is, if your version of “veganism” is racist, it isn’t pure veganism, although environmental, structural and institutional aspects of racism mean that real veganism is therefore very difficult. At the same time, even focussing entirely on other species, an attempt to look at veganism in an anti-racist way also reveals how there is not only structural racism but also structural speciesism, a word I make no apologies for using, for instance in the form of food deserts and the lie, yes, the LIE, that plant-based diets are expensive compared to carnist ones.

The Veganism Of Prehistory

By Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com) – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19459226

Every organism is a creature of its time and humans are no exception. Nor are individuals. However, people can be anachronistic and so can species. Living fossils, for example, and Lazarus taxa, such as the allocaudata, an order of salamander-like amphibians who are, however, not closely related to them and seemed to vanish at the Chicxulub Impact but then appeared again millions of years later. However, these are exceptions, and on the whole we don’t do things out of time. For instance, the issue of Jacobitism doesn’t now seem like the kind of thing anyone would take up in earnest in this country, although the Royal Stuart Society and Royalist League, and the Richard III Society, do seem to have elements of an anachronistic nature. It’s hard to see their wider relevance nowadays.

This applies to diet in a couple of ways. There’s the kind of diet we and our ancestors would habitually eat, and there’s the kind of diet we could eat, in the past. In the West, vegetarians used to be called “Pythagoreans”, after the vegetarianism of the followers of Pythagoras, who lived (if he was a real historical figure) twenty-six centuries ago. Carol J Adams’ 1990 work ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ points the way to a gender-based understanding of attitudes towards diet which may have skewed perceptions of history and evolution in a carnist direction which are worth bearing in mind, but I have to leave this to one side because of the focus, or lack thereof, of this blog. Incidentally, I can’t really mention Adams’ book without commenting on a statement she made in it which has always struck me as peculiar. She says there must be some significance in the fact that “so many feminists are vegetarian”, when in fact it’s always seemed odd how few feminists are vegetarian.

There are really two ways in which this can be considered: the diet of our ancestors and the possibility of making that choice in the past. Human history itself is the realistic application of these two, but it’s also fun and informative to take it back further to consider how we could’ve eaten if we hopped in a time machine and went back, say, to the early days of the dinosaurs or beyond.

Adams makes the point that through much of the history of Christendom, most people, and those in religious orders in particular, would’ve spent much of their time eating a practically vegetarian diet, because of the lack of food generally and also due to holidays which required partial fasting and the avoidance of meat. Dairy production was also far less efficient and it would’ve been difficult to transport dairy into cities without it going off. It also didn’t have the later veneer of being a healthy food which it later acquired. In the modal Western diet, dairy stands out as the oddity rather than meat or vegetables. Egg consumption was also for a long time not accompanied by the consumption of chicken, who I think weren’t considered edible although I couldn’t swear to that. On the other hand, the perception of fruit and vegetables was quite negative compared to meat, because they were considered cold in humoral terms. Culpeper, for example, expresses surprise that cucumbers are not poisonous because they’re so cool. The idea was that they should be eaten only in moderation and that meat should be the staple fare, along with bread. I’m obviously talking about Europe here. There’s also the issue of scurvy, which used to be much more loosely defined than it is today. Although people were aware of the value of Citrus fruit in preventing it, as its understood now, from Mediæval times onward, they thought this was connected to the acidity of the fruit as such rather than any more subtle principle within it, which is why they went for limes. It also meant that any kind of acid food would be latched onto as a cure or preventive. The actual experiment which established the use of Citrus scientifically occurred in the early modern era and was a good example of an early scientific experiment, which incidentally also showed the value of cider as a source of vitamin C. By that time, however, scurvy was mainly a mariners’ problem because potatoes were effective in warding it off onshore. This probably marks the start of the idea that vegetables and fruit could be healthy, although Pythagoras had thought of them in these terms millennia earlier. It isn’t clear to me whether this is primarily European, but there seem to have been no recorded herbivorous cultures. The closest are probably the Jains, but they preferred dairy to root vegetables, which they forbade. More recently, RastafarIans have tendencies towards plant-based diets but it doesn’t actually seem very common among them so far as I can tell.

As I’ve said, it’s the consumption of dairy which is the oddity, not that of meat or plants. This seems to have appeared among nomadic pastoralists who followed bovines, letting their blood and squeezing milk from their udders. For Europeans, in conditions of poor sunlight, it’s difficult for the skin to synthesise vitamin D₃ and therefore we retained the ability to digest milk as adults, as have some other populations. Egg-eating makes more sense because taking eggs from birds’ nests is a form of foraging. There is a question regarding how much of a contribution meat and plants make to a hunter-gatherer diet, and if there’s a gender-based division of labour there. This is where we get into the question of whether vegetarianism is “natural”, bearing in mind that that’s a dodgy concept in the first place. My position on this is that the human body is adapted for an omnivorous diet, but that this has two consequences: it means we have great flexibility in what we eat, to the extent that we can eliminate animal products entirely, bearing in mind that we are also capable of discovering and remedying any problems with that; and, in the case of mammals, most omnivores mainly eat plants with a few animals. In fact even some herbivores eat animals and it’s quite rare for a mammal to be truly herbivorous. Deer, for example, eat chicks.

There are a couple of arguments for the idea that meat-eating was a factor in the growth of the human brain and sophistication of our culture. These come down to two factors: nicotinamide (vitamin B₃) and fat. Considering the first, nicotinamide is vital in the Krebs Cycle, which is the way oxygen-breathers release most of their energy from glucose and is therefore central to ærobic life. To me, nicotinamide is a vitamin found in seeds, nuts, pulses and grains, like many other micronutrients. The final category is the most difficult to obtain in quantity as a forager, and this is what would be missing from a hunter-gatherer diet. The growth of the human brain from infancy on is very energy-intensive, taking up three to four fifths of the energy from food, and since the Krebs cycle depends so heavily on nicotinamide, a good source of that is required, which would be offal. The standard narrative also includes the idea that hunting involves strategy and competition with other predators and therefore selects for intelligence. However, this ignores the fact that gorillas have human-like intelligence and are largely herbivorous, and the frugivorous orang utan are also. There is only a very slight difference in intelligence between us, and although a slight advantage can add up over millions of years, have we been separate from other the Afrikan apes for long enough to make that big a difference?

The other theory involves fat, taken from the bones of animal carcasses and a major component of the central nervous system. Meat consumption itself relies on cooking because the energy taken in chewing raw meat doesn’t lead to a break-even situation regarding energy extraction, but scavenging bones is easier. Bones are also easier to remove from exposed sites where potential predators might lurk or themselves be attempting to scavenge. The savannah theory sees us as changing our diet about 3.7 million years ago when large open spaces became available to us. Bones could be broken open using stones, and sharpened stones would make that easier. However, this is another area influenced by gender politics because it’s based on what the men were doing, at least as projected into the past from recent years in the West. Elaine Morgan’s aquatic theory, which takes women into account more, sees us as living on the shores of the Horn of Afrika and eating molluscs and fish, venturing into the water to escape threats on land and escaping from the harsh environment of the Sudan and Sahel, Sahara Pump Theory notwithstanding, because to an animal adapted to rainforest conditions this would still be inhospitable.

It’s difficult to discuss human evolution and diet without getting bogged down in matters of gender. This would normally be fine, but because I’m quite strict with myself separating the subject matters of my different blogs, I can’t really do that here. Therefore I’m just going to say that regardless of how we evolved and the extent to which we depended on animal products, it’s no longer necessary to do so, in the same way as it’s no longer necessary to wear animal skins, hunt for food or make stone tools.

There may be a carnist bias in how palæontologists view human evolution. For instance, I’ve seen Australopithecus boisei described as a “vegetarian dead end”. Apparently this is now known as Paranthropus boisei, or rather this is the more robust of the two, and the genus Paranthropus may be synonymous with Australopithecus. They lack tooth fractures, suggesting that they ate fairly soft food, and the levels of strontium were higher in their milk teeth, suggesting that the children ate tubers more than the adults. Strontium isotopes also indicate that the women left their birthplaces but the men stayed local. The problem with working out how they lived is that they were savannah apes, but not as specialised in that kind of niche as our own species, and there are now no other savannah apes. It is known, however, that they ate termites. They were able to eat the dried up plant food during a long dry season, unlike their contemporaries Homo habilis. Although these did eat meat, they were more threatened by climatic extremes. However, the success of Homo as opposed to the other, or other two, genera, may rely more on their generalism and versatility than their diet. Also, there are other herbivorous species on this planet with human-like intelligence, such as elephants and parrots.

During the Miocene, the period preceding the emergence of identifiably human apes in the Pliocene, there was much more diversity and great apes other than the yet-to-evolve humans were found in Eurasia, including Europe, which by that point did exist but the North European Plain was underwater and the Mediterranean was open to the Caspian with a couple of inlets in Mitteleuropa. Diets can be reconstructed by patterns of wear on their teeth, and they seem to have begun eating hard-shelled food such as nuts and fruits and later evolved to add soft fruits. They then died out as subtropical vegetation was replaced by deciduous trees. At some point during the Miocene, between eighteen and thirteen million years ago, the Afrikan and Asian great apes diverged. Ramapithecus and Kenyapithecus are two very similar Miocene great apes, one found in Asia and the other in India, which may be the common ancestor of all surviving great apes. These had thicker enamel, meaning that they probably ate tougher food, once again vegetation with high cellulose and lignin content. A famous simian from the Oligocene, dating from before the apes and Old World monkeys diverged, is Ægyptopithecus, found in Egypt and dating to around thirty million years ago, ate fruit. There are other simians from this epoch too. They arose from tarsier-like animals found in the Northern Hemisphere referred to as omomyids, whose earliest forms are fifty-six million years old. Tarsiers are carnivorous, or more strictly speaking insectivorous, not eating much in the way of plant matter, but compared to them omomyids teeth suggest they also ate fruit because they were blunter than the more recent animals. They were all less than half a kilo in size. Accompanying the omomyids in the Northern Hemisphere, including North America like them, were the lemur-like adapids, who lacked the combs found in lemur dentition, and whose mandibular musculature suggests they ate leaves. Going further back still, there was a split between the ancestors of the colugo and the primates 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous, and about five million years before that we have ancestors in common with rabbits, rodents and tree shrews. Most of these are primarily herbivorous, but the tree shrews are omnivorous. Before that, our ancestors are shared with a much wider range of placental mammals, many of whom are now carnivorous, diverging 107 million years ago, and so forth back into the Mesozoic. But you have to go back a long way before you find even insectivorous ancestors, let alone ones usually seen as carnivores, i.e. predatory animals who hunt, bring down and eat live animals around their own size.

All this, though, is a mere appeal to nature. Just because none of our ancestors were biologically committed to eating meat evolutionarily doesn’t in itself constitute an argument for not eating it. Also, if you push back far enough into the Jurassic, things change quite drastically in terms of what our ancestors could possibly have eaten, because the slow drift of plant evolution comes into play. Changes in animal life are often provoked by changes in plant life, because ultimately that is what we all depend upon. Plant life had to exist on land in order for herbivores or carnivores to live here long-term, the alternative being fungi, which were here for longer but don’t seem to have been accompanied by animals. The first herbivorous dinosaurs could not have existed without ferns and cycads. Pollinating insects and flowering plants co-evolved, apart from the wind pollinated ones. And primates also, and their ancestors, needed soft fruit to exist and evolved to exploit the new niche of frugivore. The question then arises of what we as human beings would be able to find to eat if we travelled back in time.

In order to eat a modern Western diet, we would need gluten. Even if not, cereals are likely to form a large part of our diet, and that applies to most people not following palæo across the planet. For that to be possible, grass must exist. Grass has a somewhat peculiar history because although it evolved a long time ago, for quite a long interval, it was just one plant among many. There were grasses in varied meadows, so to speak, but no grassland. Wheat fields, rice paddies and the like are really just artificial grasslands. These didn’t become common until the Neogene, i.e. the Miocene onward. Our ancestors didn’t appear on them until the Pliocene, after the world had become dry enough for them to spread. Grass acts as a food source for us in various ways. We have rice, barley, wheat, rye, maize and millet, whose seeds we eat, but there’s also sugar cane, bamboo shoots, bamboo flowers and the simple practice of picking up a grass stalk and sucking it, and more generally but applicable to grass is the production of leafu, which is a kind of strained, compressed curd made from almost any edible leaves. I used to eat blades of grass as a child and it cut the inside of my mouth quite painfully. Any sensible person needn’t be told that grass is too fibrous to be chewed safely, and I presume the species who eat it on a regular basis either have tough mouths or eat the softer bits. A large portion of the meat humans eat is specifically from grass of course, an ecological relationship which has largely arisen in the Neogene. In a nutshell, grass is pivotal to life as we recognise it today. Nonetheless, it isn’t really feasible to avail oneself of cereal grains without farming in the quantities required to make flour and the like, and everything that leads to.

I first came across the palæo diet before it had that name, I’m guessing in the later 1980s, from the. It seems to make sense at first, in that we evolved without access to milk from other species as adults along with processed food and cereals in bulk. However, much of the palæolithic diet, and of course there wasn’t just one, is unknown, and the original idea for the palæo diet was based on a few hunter-gatherer communities in marginal environments such as the Kalahari and the Arctic. These may not be typical of what we used to eat because we weren’t living in such mean circumstances. There are reasons why hunter-gatherers who still survive today live where they do. It would also be necessary to wildcraft food from non-cultivated varieties. I don’t know if they pursue this, but most brassica, for example, is ruled out because it’s so far from its wild states. Agriculture has also existed for about ten millennia now, and this will have influenced our evolution to some extent. As mentioned before, we are also omnivores – our diets are varied and we are able to eat a wide variety of foods without harm. That said, I do believe dairy and some processed food is unhealthy, and also much farmed muscle meat. This is now edging into herbalism territory, so I’ll step back from this.

Attempting to make a moral choice regarding diet, or perhaps one based on cultural preferences, shouldn’t meet with the kind of stonewalling and excuses it often does. If there’s a deeply held principle involved, the answer is not to abandon it but to seek a way in which it can be done safely and healthily. It’s very common for people to object to a plant-based diet by saying there are people it won’t work for because of their health or perhaps that it won’t work for anyone, but if that’s true, it actually means there’s a moral imperative to pursue research or take steps so that it does become an option. If there were genuine vampires who could only survive on blood drunk from a living human subject and this was considered an unethical practice, measures would need to be taken to ensure that vampires could continue healthily without violating other people’s rights. For example, it would be worth investigating why only a living subject was suitable and trying to duplicate those conditions, or looking for donors willing to undergo the process. It wouldn’t be acceptable just to consider vampires a basket case and abandon them to their fate. Likewise with veganism. It’s always a question of how to facilitate it, never whether one should do it at all for any particular group. The same applies to halal and kashrut.

Fruitarianism would probably fare rather better, particularly considering that climates were more amenable to soft fruit back in the day, and of course it is what our ancestors were actually doing at the time. There are B vitamins missing or almost absent from soft fruit, but fruitarianism isn’t just eating what we conventionally think of as fruit but any fruiting body of a flowering plant, and with that broader scope, which includes nuts, and pulses unless it’s raw food veganism which would restrict pulses to peanuts, it’s a lot more balanced. The B₁₂ question is easily resolved, as gorillas also get deficient when captured and only given washed food – it’s simply in the environment in bacteria, though perhaps not in sufficient amounts. In plants today, although there are similar compounds to cyanocobalamin, there are no exact equivalents. That, however, doesn’t mean there aren’t extinct plants which did have that exact compound, although this is clearly speculation. Vitamin D, though it can be synthesised in the skin, is also present in an Afrikan plant in sufficient quantities for ungulates to overdose on it. It’s also found in fungi when they’re exposed to sunlight, and perhaps the key in general here is to look to fungi as a source of nutrition.

The question of scurvy arises here, but pine needles are high in vitamin C and conifers have been around a lot longer than flowering plants, dating back to the Carboniferous. What I don’t know is whether conifers generally are high in vitamin C. Before the evolution of flowering plants, a possible source of carbohydrates would be cycads, which are however also high in toxins which are irritant and damage the liver, and would therefore need to be leached out. It seems that the relatioships which now exist between animals and flowering plants weren’t present between gymnosperms and their contemporaries before their appearance. This has the consequence that the further back in time you go, the harder it gets to acquire the foods humans would need to survive, and whereas this is partly because the plants in question had yet to evolve, it also underlines the significance of the web of life within which we live. We can’t be separated from our environment. The very fact that we’re susceptible to scurvy is only because our ancestors spent so long eating fruit that we lost the ability to make our own. There is a pseudo-gene still there which is found elsewhere in mammals as a functional gene, but it doesn’t work in humans.

Carnists would to some extent find it easier than vegans, because meat would be available aplenty, as would insects, and this goes back a long way. However, there is still hope for a time-travelling vegan in the Palæozoic. Seaweed is a good source of minerals in particular, but also other nutrients, although it’s also notable that if you go back far enough there seems to be less energy-rich food, which may be linked to the absence of “warm-blooded” animals. What is available, apart from seaweed, is single-celled algæ and there are also fungi. Algæ contain carotenoids which can be converted to vitamin A, lipids which include essential fatty acids, and some blue-green algæ even contain B₁₂. What I’m not sure about is the evolution of yeast. Although there are commensal yeasts on animal bodies and also pathogenic yeasts, I think probably the yeasts we’re familiar with depend on flowering plants just like many animals today do. As far as fungi more generally are concerned, the fossil record is unsurprisingly very poor, and the question of toxicity arises. Would toxins in fungi be absent before animal land life due to the lack of pressure to avoid their fruiting bodies being eaten, or is it more that the compounds in fungi which happen to be toxic satisfy other functions in the organisms and they’d just be poisonous anyway?

Once one considers a world where the only land life is fungal, the planet is almost alien in its conditions. There wasn’t enough oxygen to support human respiration in the atmosphere and ultraviolet radiation wouldn’t have been filtered out of sunlight due to the absence of an ozone layer. Whereas it would be possible to survive in dietary terms as a vegan in the early Palæozoic, it involves quite a lot of research only really possible on living organisms and also a high-tech approach to food production.

To conclude, this is not just an abstract exercise. Not only does it reveal the close connections between us and the plants with which we have co-evolved, but it may also become more relevant when one considers that one of the influences we have on the biosphere is to push it back into prehistory. Jellyfish, one of the first animals, are much more common than they used to be due to our influence on the oceans, and “algal” blooms are also more common. Perhaps we will end up having to survive on a planet once again devoid of complex land life, flowering plants and the like, and in such circumstances a plant- and fungus-based diet may turn out to be the only option.

The Prehistory Of My Veganism

Photo by Ella Olsson on Pexels.com

Hindsight is not always 20/20 because of Whig history. Whig history, or Whig historiography strictly speaking, tells the story as one of progress from a terrible past to a wonderful present, heading in the direction of current affairs. It isn’t true. For instance, just to pluck a random example out of the air, before the imperial period, the republic of Rome was more democratic and only achieved its expansion by dispensing with the “fairer” characteristics of its polity, and it almost goes without saying that after 1979 CE everything went to shit and has been doing so fairly steadily ever since. Therefore, I’m telling this story from the position of how my diet is now and how it changed in October 1987. Although it seems unlikely that I’ll ever deliberately eat meat again, you never know, and if I do I may be able to tell another story about how I got there which, nonetheless, I manage to make look like steady progress. Also, you could probably look into the past of a lot of people who are still carnist and could tell of the same kinds of things in their childhood and early adulthood as I would, and also people who temporarily went plant-based or vegetarian before returning to eating meat. Maybe, then, these are not the real causes of my veganism, but have nothing to do with them and I’ve just rationalised them into a narrative.

I want to say one more thing before I launch into this. Although I consider veganism to be both a good thing and inevitable if the species is going to survive, or rather a plant-based diet is, I absolutely don’t judge others for not being vegan. If you think of veganism as not intentionally causing suffering or death to members of other species, the vast majority of individual organisms’ injury or death, when caused by other organisms, dwarfs the number inflicted on behalf of humans, and therefore from a utilitarian perspective it makes no sense to judge anyone for the proportionately minute part they play in contributing to this. It’s about my will and not being part of causing that pain. Other people have their own perspectives and stories to tell. I absolutely do not judge them. This is my own story. Also, although I’m talking about veganism here, for the purposes of this post I’m defining it more narrowly than I usually do because I’m only really thinking about being a party to the avoidable intentional killing and inevitable causation of suffering in non-human animals, which is not what veganism really is. I do think the wider definition of veganism is relevant, but I don’t want to define it out of existence.

In fact I will start with something wider. Going back to quite early childhood, I was very concerned about conservation, endangered species and environmental damage. One story which stuck in my mind was the treatment of American Buffalo by White settlers, officially but confusingly known as American bison. There are also Eurasian bison of course, and they interested me but I didn’t know much about them. My understanding, and I’m doing this from memory, was that in the nineteenth century CE, White people used to travel out to the Plains by train, shoot them, take their hides and tongues and leave the rest to rot. In the books I read about this, this was contrasted with the Native American attitudes towards them, where all of the carcasse was used for something and they were treated with great reverence. This issue of treating prey animals with reverence – I also remember Inuit with seals – made a lasting impression on me.

Another notable aspect of my childhood was my choice of reading matter. I used to read a lot of books on the subject of such animals as skunks, dogs and cats. For instance, I devoured ‘A Skunk In The Family’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘The Travels of Oggy’, ‘Charlotte’s Web’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’ and its sequels, and ‘Watership Down’. A couple of these are probably less well-known than the others. ‘A Skunk In The Family’ by Constance Taber Colby is an entertaining non-fiction book about a skunk whose scent glands were removed kept as a pet by a New York family, published in 1973 and sufficiently obscure that it has no reviews on Goodreads. ‘The Travels Of Oggy’, a 1976 book by Ann Lawrence, is surely better-known but again I can find no reviews there. It’s about a hedgehog and is fictional. I haven’t read ‘Plague Dogs’, ‘Shardik’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ or ‘Vet In A State’, which I suspect is just an attempt to cash in on James Herriot’s success. I don’t know if I’m unusual in focussing on “animal” books as a child, but basically my reading matter apart from the likes of popular science books before I got into science fiction consisted very substantially of stories about animals aimed at older children, so far as I can tell. There was never a point at which I was into fantasy or mainstream fiction, and I find it a huge struggle to read most of that. If this is unusual, it might indicate a kind of proto-vegan approach.

Another couple of incidents I remember as a child included watching a show where someone attempted to drown puppies – you probably know this, but as far as I’m aware it used to be normal to drown kittens and puppies, and in the former case just keep one, because they were surplus to requirements. Another phenomenon which seems to have disappeared is that nobody would dream of actually buying a cat because there were just so many kittens around that they couldn’t be given away. I presume this didn’t apply to purebred cats or any dogs. Anyway, I found it extremely distressing that anyone would simply drown puppies and kittens. Another companion animal related incident which stuck with me was of a man who took a dog to be put down because it’d be cheaper to buy another one than put him in kennels while he was on holiday in Spain. This probably would appal most people though.

As for members of other vertebrate species who passed through our house, these would include four cats, a rabbit, two mice and three hamsters who were regular residents, a canary after I left home, and a number of others of whom we took care while people were away, including a parakeet, two gerbils and a dog. I remember getting very upset when the first cat developed a kidney problem and had to be put down, and missing that cat terribly until my parents relented and acquired another one plus a hamster. Most of the time there were two cats. And yes, my mother did indeed tell me the cat who was put down had “gone to live on a farm in Wales”. I think children remember these things and find it hard to trust their parents later. I also took some flatworms and leeches from the river and kept them for about six months, which distressed my mother because she thought they needed feeding. Flatworms actually benefit from fasting as it causes them to rejuvenate, but I used to feed them on scraps of meat. There was also a series of fish from the river, including minnows and a bullhead. There’s a possibly quite formative incident connected to the last. With some friends, I took the bullhead from a faster-flowing part of the Great Stour along with some loaches and took care of the former in a washing up bowl. This was also, incidentally, the last time I saw my elder brother, who happened to visit on that day. I still remember his Afro and attempt to bond with me over the fish, which that last time was rather successful. The next day, my “friends” poured the bowl containing the loaches off a high bridge into the river, which would’ve killed them, and threw the bullhead as far as they could up the river off the same bridge. They seemed completely oblivious of the animals’ suffering, and this along with several other incidents is the reason I don’t believe that cruelty to “animals” during childhood is a reliable marker of a psychopath or sociopath because it was just so very widespread. I lost my temper with them and tried to ‘phone the RSPCA, although my adult self realises that the RSPCA wouldn’t have cared one jot about it as they were, at least at that time, excessively focussed on mammals and to a lesser extent birds. I gained some notoriety at my school for losing my temper at their cruelty. I had another friend who used to take fish out of the water and leave them to suffocate, and on one occasion I put them all back when he wasn’t looking. He became a keen angler and proceeded to kill fish humanely after he’d caught them. It always mystified me, even back then, that people just seemed to accept angling as if it was a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

I wasn’t above capturing animals myself. I did this with water boatmen and backswimmers, and also freshwater shrimp. On two occasions I kept frogspawn and waited for it to mature. The newly-hatched tadpoles reminded me of human embryos. Most of them died but it isn’t clear to me even now whether this was due to a high mortality rate or the conditions I kept them in. They tended to fall prey to leeches, not the kind I was keeping, since they were very separate, but ones which had already been present in the water. Looking back on this now, I wonder if they were in fact nematodes. I also used to look at stream and river water through a microscope, in which there were protists such as Vorticella and Amœba. I don’t know what to tell you about this phase of my life. It shows a burgeoning interest in wildlife, biassed against mammals and birds which persisted for quite a while, but there’s also a sense of entitlement there, that I simply assumed I could take animals from their habitats and keep them captive. I also did this with a number of privet hawk moth caterpillars and one other species of butterfly whose name escapes me, and also earthworms and snails. Come to think of it, there was a long sequence of animals I caught out of interest and simply observed. The only tetrapod I remember doing this with was a slow worm. On another occasion, my mother rescued an injured house martin who died after a few hours, possibly an RTC or a victim of a cat.

This is a rather ambivalent set of activities from my now-vegan perspective, and I think it also opens up a wider issue about the ethics of childhood and parenting. Thinking about the natures of the various nervous systems involved, and the nature of the environments they’re accustomed to living in, some of these seem entirely acceptable and others don’t. For instance, the flatworms and leeches would have been accustomed to living in stagnant, low-oxygen water and that’s how they lived when they were in my jam jars. I don’t have an ethical problem there. The water boatmen and backswimmers simply flew away, which is fine. I captured them and they escaped. The shrimp died, and that’s not good. So did all of the fish, and I think this may have been because the water wasn’t suitable for them and hadn’t been left to stand to reduce dissolved air, which may have formed into bubbles in their gills and suffocated them. This is not good. The slow worm also escaped. The hawk moth flew away but I was planning to release her into the wild near some privet, which didn’t come together because she escaped into the house and ended up mating and laying eggs on the double glazing, which hatched out and then I was unable to care for the caterpillars of the next generation because they were nowhere near any vegetation and too fragile to move without killing them. My mother found the lives of the hawk moths depressing since they seemed to consist simply of reproducing and eating, and at the time I thought the adults didn’t eat, which for her made it worse. I sometimes wonder if this reflects on her perception of her own life.

I was of course also surrounded by cattle (nameless beasts) and sheep, whom I saw shorn and giving birth. My secondary school had its own sheep on which we were supposed to practice various things like inspecting for parasites. I never actually did this. I would also say that there’s a link between gender rôles and cruelty to animals or indifference to their suffering, so the fact that I wasn’t may be significant. There also seemed to be a markèd change at secondary school age in a number of ways which I would characterise as a layer of bigotry and intolerance which is maintained among boys of that age. Broadly, this issue belongs on another blog of mine, but with respect to cruelty this was also encouraged by my peers and I had the mickey taken out of me for not wanting to cause them suffering. There was also quite a lot of attachment to gore, with many boys looking forward to dissections.

At some point during my childhood, and I really cannot place this, I asked my mother if I could become vegetarian. I may have been motivated by my interest in Yoga, which would probably date it to about 1980, when I was twelve to thirteen. I remember thinking that the problem would be difficulty giving up bacon and bizarrely my mother assured me that I wouldn’t have to give up bacon to be vegetarian, an assertion I really don’t understand to this day. However, nothing came of this while I was still a child. Apart from bacon, I actually didn’t like meat and only ate it out of a sense of moral obligation, because I believed that it was better for the animals concerned to exist than not to do so. You can probably see that I was very oriented towards the idea of the interests of entire species rather than individual organisms.

As was normal for someone of my generation who did O- and A-level Biology, I dissected various animals including mice and frogs. I didn’t feel even slightly squeamish about this and didn’t consider it problematic that the animals had been killed. I may, however, have been less involved than average in doing this kind of thing because many years after I’d left school I learned that one of my Biology teachers was vegetarian for ethical reasons, and tried to minimise the use of animals in his lessons. I also became aware that there was an opt-out available for pupils who had ethical objections to dissection on some syllabi, but had no interest in pursuing this. Generally then, in my late childhood my interest in vegetarianism could have been just a phase.

At a point which is difficult to date, I read an article in, of all places, the ‘Reader’s Digest’ which discussed how to reduce one’s risk of cancer, and pointed out that vegetarianism would make a major difference. In fact I no longer think this is strictly true but only if one gets one’s meat from wild animals and eats the offal, which few people do. At the time, the idea of going veggie seemed a massive and undesirable step I was unwilling to take. I think I was twelve at the time, so the period between this and taking up Yoga more seriously must have been quite brief.

I became aware of veganism when I was twelve but believed it to be largely fatal because that’s how it had been presented to me. Therefore I ruled it out for many years to come. I was probably about ten when I learned of the Draize Test, which led to a long-term hostility to cosmetics and a sense of outrage that this was done. I’m not sure when I became aware of LD₅₀, although I knew about drug testing on other species in general. The fact that I didn’t use cosmetics at a time when they were quite popular, for instance among punks, goths and New Romantics, is probably connected to my opposition to the way they were tested and not due to gender stereotyping pressures, although I also disapproved of women wearing makeup because I considered it to be an excessive focus on personal appearance rather than character. Remember, these are the views of an adolescent and there is an element of envy in them too.

It wasn’t until I left home and went to university that I began to think seriously about becoming vegetarian. This went through two phases. In my first term, a school friend at another university decided to go veggie because of tropic levels, i.e. that it’s inefficient to produce food in this manner. Oddly, although I’d been aware of tropic levels since the age of seven, I hadn’t made the connection with animal farming before. He exhorted me to do the same but I persisted in eating meat, and crucially made the point that it isn’t in the animals’ interests that they exist given the nature of their farming. I accepted the tropic levels argument on an intellectual level but it didn’t change my diet. In the second term, I began to study animal liberation in philosophy, particularly the works of Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Mary Midgley, and was persuaded that there were pressing ethical reasons for giving up meat, and also that veganism was a necessary step in the long run. I was just about pescetarian after that, in that i ate fish on one occasion and scampi on another, my justification being the phosphorus bottleneck as popularised by Isaac Asimov, but this only persisted for a few months. I actually went veggie on 9th March 1986, when I was eighteen, and regarded it as a transitional phase into veganism. Personally, I never saw lacto-ovo-vegetarianism as a justifiable permanent state. My actual precipitating event was to annoy a friend when we were about to eat out. I went vegan in October of the next year, when I accidentally ate some chilli con carne and wanted to get something positive out of my mistake.

I suppose I would describe myself as an animal lover as a child. I don’t know think of myself in that way because I simply see it as morally incumbent upon me not to be involved in their suffering and death, and I can watch a film like ‘The Animals Film’ or ‘Earthlings’ and it completely leaves me cold. This probably makes me unusual among vegans and animal rights activists, as nowadays I completely lack passion about it. I simply see it as wrong and therefore something I need to avoid doing. But the purpose of today’s post is not to examine the rights and wrongs of the position, but to look at my past and try to work out whether the events of my childhood have any link with later becoming vegetarian and vegan. It’s hard to say really. I certainly think my rage at discovering animal cosmetic testing and the behaviour of my friends towards fish are quite unusual and didn’t seem to be anticipated by others. It was enough to get me ridiculed, which strongly suggests it was abnormal, and there may also have been some gender politics involved there.

So, in yet another attempt to get some kind of reponse from my readers, I have a question to ask you, bearing in mind that this isn’t really a post about the ethics of veganism so much as the relationship between childhood and adulthood. If you eat meat, and I’m not judging here, can you recall events in your childhood which were particularly similar or unlike mine? If you chose to become vegan or veggie at some point, can you see aspects of your life as a child which pushed you in that direction or prefigured it? Are there other aspects to your value-based decisions whose seeds you can see in your childhood?

Monkey Hate

Major trigger warning for cruelty to members of other closely-related species and possible connections to human child sexual abuse.

I wanted to get that in first, before even the picture credit, but to give her her due, the above image is credited thus: Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

This is about something which currently manifests as an internet phenomenon but may have existed in human nature for longer than we’ve even been human. Before I get going, I’m going to become a bit “sciency”, but the bulk of this post isn’t about that. There is a point to this outline, relevant to the subject of this post.

Cladism is the classification of organisms into groups of genetically related populations with common ancestry. This has led to some confusing descriptions of animals in particular. For instance, there’s a sense in which all mammals, reptiles and amphibia are fish, because our common ancestor is a Eusthenopteron-like species of fish, so we form a clade with bony fish, and in which birds are reptiles because they’re dinosaurs and dinosaurs are descended from reptiles. Likewise, there is a sense in which all humans and other apes are monkeys, in particular Old World monkeys. It’s like matroshka dolls. There’s a large doll called “simians” containing two smaller dolls called platyrrhines and Catarrhines. The platyrrhines are native to South and Central American only. The catarrhines originated in Afro-Eurasia and include hominoids and cercopithecids. Hominids include gibbons and their relatives, and great apes including humans. Everything is inside the big doll called simians. In other words, we’re all monkeys. This doesn’t sound right because there’s a lot of insistence on distinguishing apes from other monkeys, for instance emphasising our larger bodies, less arboreal nature, lack of long external tails and dorsoventrally compressed trunks, but we are still monkeys, and there was a time when we were all competing on a level playing field, as it were. It’s enlightening to bear this in mind in what follows.

This is where it starts to get exceedingly distasteful.

There are a very large number of channels on YouTube dedicated to torture, accidental death and serious injury to various species of simian other than ourselves, and apparently also excluding other apes and New World monkeys. I’m having to do this by hearsay because if I seek out these channels or videos myself I will be rewarding them with views and advertising revenue and thereby boosting their profile. This, in fact, is in itself a major issue because it means that if one wishes to hear from a contrary viewpoint to one’s own, one risks boosting that for the general public without foreknowledge as to the nature of the content, which encourages one to stay in one’s own reality tunnel. Nonetheless I do have secondary sources for this and so far as I can tell it is uncontroversially extremely cruel.

It’s in the YouTube creator content guidelines that causing suffering or death to animals deliberately for purposes other than food preparation or hunting (because our society perversely considers that acceptable) is not admissible content and will lead to the channel uploading it to be closed and demonetised. Closure and demonetisation of channels by regular users happens very often for apparently minor infractions, in the latter case often without informing the user. These monkey hate channels are often old and still monetised. YouTube is also aware of them, since they receive numerous complaints about them, but they simply persist, in a similar manner to how they do with Elsagate videos. This is rather baffling, since the videos don’t seem to be submitted by any of the big players, so one would expect them to be held to the same standards. This, though, is not the focus of this post.

As far as online manifestations of monkey hate are concerned, this might be traceable to a site set up in 1996 CE called http://www.ifihаdаmоnkеу.соm (obviously not that but again, I’m trying to avoid page impressions – that’s kind of a phishing link). This was just a bad-taste humour website set up in response to PETA, and although I’m vegan I’m no fan of PETA because they are no friends of animals other than humans, have an anthropocentric view of animal liberation and aren’t above rather appallingly sexist campaigns, not to mention their startlingly crass approach to publicity. For whatever motives, the person who started the site was at first rewarded by various bad-taste jokes, which however rapidly got out of hand and were hard not to believe were actually serious. The search engine result brings up the description “the Best Source for Metaphorical Violence Against The Monkey You Don’t Even Have in the Whole Wide World!”, and I’m not sure whether that description has been there since the start or not, but it was there in 2001, which is as far back as the Wayback Machine goes with it. Even back then it was hard to tell whether or not to take the submissions as jokes or not, which is of course a common online problem. It’s also hard to discern the motivation for annoying PETA, since it could be similar to mine or it could just be carnism.

You needn’t be vegan not to be disturbed by these videos though. There’s a focus on adult monkey sadness and baby monkey suffering and death, all the victims seem to be Old World monkeys, and there’s a wider context of cruelty, as with fake animal rescue channels, where YouTubers endanger or injure dogs and cats in order to film themselves “rescuing” them.

I think at this point I owe it to Cambodia to post something more general, and I hope more positive, about the country because of what I’m about to say: a large number of monkey hate videos originate from that country. Some of the channels posting them from Cambodia also post dramatised videos about underage girls being raped, which suggests a possible link between child sexual abuse and monkey hate. However, the commenters on these videos are usually either bots or apparently White Anglophone males, whose profile pictures are unique to the channels. Hence there is a hypothesis that monkey hate is a proxy for child abuse and sadistic pædophilia. There’s a further hypothesis which I don’t accept that the videos use steganography, which I shall now explain.

Steganography is a method of hiding something in plain sight. One of the rookie mistakes in using ciphers is that they are not concealed and stand out as obvious codes. Guvf, sbe rknzcyr, vf na boivbhf pvcure. It makes a lot more sense to hide the message imperceptibly in something which looks routine and ordinary, such as a jpeg or online video. This is done by altering a small portion of the data slightly, resulting in a video which is indistinguishable from the original but contains encoded data. However, I don’t think this can be done on YouTube because I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work. This was a few years ago now and things may have changed, but the videos are considerably altered by the time they’ve been uploaded, or at least they used to be, and I don’t think they could be relied upon to preserve the data. In fact I doubt they ever would. Therefore I’d reject this out of hand, and in any case it doesn’t make sense to submit videos which violate the terms of service to do this. It’d make more sense to submit innocuous videos with steganographic content, and for all I know it can be done now due to improvements in video quality. I might try it again soon on YT.

There could have been incidents of monkey hate before the internet became popular, but most people wouldn’t know about them and there wouldn’t usually have been much of an audience. As such, the phenomenon may have things in common with the Targeted Individual community, where people with a sensitive cognitive style and feelings of persecution find each other online and reinforce each other’s beliefs.

A number of hypotheses have been suggested regarding this. They include:

• People who live in areas where monkeys are common regard them as pests and celebrate their suffering.
• Germphobia.
• Addiction.
• Sadism.
• Sublimated or encoded child sexual abuse.
• Phobia.
• Disgust.

The first hypothesis might explain how the videos appeared in the first place but doesn’t explain the fact that their audience largely consists of English-speaking White males. They also tend to use the kind of language employed by the American Right, such as calling people “snowflakes”. This suggests a further thought, which is that it’s sublimated or encoded racism.

Germphobia is similar to the first, and in this case one must be careful not to accuse people who are germphobic of being into this too. However, the species involved are not particularly unhygienic compared to others, such as bats for example, and although there is phobia of bats it doesn’t lend itself to sadistic videos of bats being tortured, although that might be difficult to achieve.

Regarding addiction, clearly the videos are likely to be addictive whatever the appeal is, because that’s a common happening on the internet, as with pornography for example.

Sadism is very likely to be involved in one way or another. It may also reflect a lack of legislation against cruelty of this kind in Cambodia and other countries from which these videos originate, or difficulty in enforcement if they do exist. Cultural relativism may also make the subject matter seem worse to Westerners than it does to people in Southeast Asia. Also, the chances are that the financial “reward” for getting views on such videos is a motivation for the people posting them, so they may themselves not be specifically sadist although they are likely to be sociopathic or psychopathic, and the former condition may have arisen due to their upbringing. The videos appear to divide into three categories: voyeuristic, home made and what I think of as “found footage”. Voyeuristic videos involve chance recordings of monkeys suffering from events not instigated deliberately by humans, such as predation or accidents. Home made is deliberate cruelty to captive animals, actually acquired for that purpose. This can involve attempts to instigate hostility between monkeys. Finally, found footage involves recordings made surreptitiously of humans being cruel to monkeys of other species, something which is obviously a lot easier nowadays than it used to be.

The question of encoded child sexual abuse is another matter, blending into sadism. It could be that the unacceptability of child abuse videos on the internet, not to mention the personal risk in viewing them, leads people to watch or make videos which don’t attract that kind of unwanted attention from the authorities. This is of course speciesist, and there could be popular support for clamping down on them to the same extent, but the situation may not be as black and white as it appears.

I’m going to deal with the last two together, as I think they may be the most significant. Monkey haters have been interviewed and for the ones who have come forward, these two seem to be the explanation. For some people, individuals of closely related species may occupy an uncanny valley between the utterly non-human such as cats on the one hand and humans on the other. This similarity seems to be interpreted by most people as cuteness, but for some it seems to evoke disgust and horror like the undead might do for many.

This is what was revealed, or at least reported, by monkey haters who have been interviewed. One of them recounts a visit to a zoo when he was eight. Up until that point, he’d considered monkeys to be cute and cuddly, but he found the actual experience of seeing them – he mentions mating in public as an example of what triggered him – disgusting and shocking, and this stayed with him into adulthood, eventually manifesting as monkey hate. Significantly, he not only has no urges to be cruel or watch cruelty to other animals, just monkeys. He admits he became obsessed and that it was an addiction, and he feels very guilty and disgusted with himself about it. He also specifically hates baby monkeys, the reason given being that they have tantrums, although this sounds like a rationalisation. His own theory is that it’s instinctive, and surfaces sporadically in some people, but used to be widespread, and also that it’s more common than it seems. It might, in his opinion, also be an outlet for people who have underlying violent tendencies towards humans.

I have to admit this makes a lot of sense. Back in the Miocene, our ancestors were one species of many apes, to the extent that palæontologists can’t identify who they were, but sometime between 24 million years ago in the Oligocene when the first monkeys came into existence from the tarsier-like omomyids and the emergence of Proconsul, the first known ape, 21 million years ago, we would have been monkeys surrounded by possibly competing other monkeys. Since Proconsul is close to the ancestor of all apes, not just us, this raises the question of whether other great apes, and also the various gibbons, also engage in cruelty to tailed monkeys in particular. The Gombe chimpanzee community in particular is known for its violence and this is sometimes manifested in the killing of tailed monkeys such as the red-tailed monkey, although they do eat them. Bonobos and orangutan would, at least prima facie, be considered less likely candidates but this is not scientific of course.

To most people living in European societies, the tailed monkeys are unfamiliar, unlike in the places where they’re likely to live. This unfamiliarity means there is no obvious “bridge” between them and the rest of nature, and this may lead to a sense of the uncanny to a greater extent than it would for humans who live alongside them. As such, the introduction of monkeys as a novelty may come across as an affront to their distinctive identity and might also constitute a threat if they are used to the idea of human dominion over the rest of the animal kingdom. I don’t think it can be mere coincidence that the main audience for these videos is White and English-speaking, and I wonder also if it’s a manifestation of xenophobia which extends to overt and active racism, hence the use of alt-right language. The people who live with wild monkeys from day to day might see them as an economic resource such as for food, tourists or these videos, but they don’t seem to bear them animosity. They’re just doing White people’s dirty work for them. On the other hand, I’m guessing here, but I would expect some of them to regard them as “tree rats”, as the term has it, similarly to how many people in cities see rock doves.

The interviewee thinks there are probably a few dozen hard core monkey haters, which makes it sound like a trivial matter, but there are also thousands upon thousands of casual monkey haters, who watch the videos for entertainment regularly without commenting or engaging. Some of them clearly do get sexual gratification from it, and interestingly despite their apparently homophobic attitudes are very zealous in their defence of their right to do so. There are also two kinds of target. Babies are one, and tend to mention the kind of characteristics often attributed to human babies, such as clinginess, dependence and spoiltness. The other target is the grief of the mothers who witness the death and injury of their children. The former is particularly reminiscent of child abuse and the latter, I think, gives a clue as to the possibility of it being to do with opposition to feelings of tenderness and love. Some fans go so far as to say they’d like to kill all humans who feel positively towards monkeys in any way, and a link is also made between monkey behaviour and neurodiversity as a “justification”.

I want to close by making two observations. Most of the videos are made in Cambodia in spite of the fact that non-human primates are found all across Asia and Afrika, and also in South America. Old World monkeys are more closely related to us than New World monkeys are. In fact, cladistically we are Old World monkeys. These would’ve been the monkeys, or similar ones, with whom we would’ve been in conflict in the Oligocene and Miocene, but this fails to explain why Cambodia specifically would be the source. Could it be that in that country in particular, the terrible trauma seen as inflicted by Pol Pot has brutalised the populace and led to this tendency? Or is it more a question of economic necessity: people in particularly severe hardship will seek any source at all to support their dependents and themselves? One thing this has brought home to me is how little I know of Cambodia, and I would like to explore this on here in the near future.

Animal Sacrifice

Photo by Kat Jayne on Pexels.com

I’m sure the Talmud contains absolute screeds on the concept and value of sacrifice, and I will at some point be looking at that, but right now I’m confronted with the concept of killing other species one is deemed to own in one’s culture in order to atone or give thanks, and how alien it is to my mindset. Of course the days of animal sacrifice are more or less long gone now in Judaism, and it never got introduced to Christianity.

The difficulty, morally speaking, with the idea of sacrificing a lamb, for example, is that it presumes that the animal concerned has no say in the matter and is merely property. It goes beyond even the heinous institution of slavery to do so and firmly entrenches the idea that lives do not have value in themselves. The sacrifice of a lamb is supposed to be a loss for the farmer, and her life is irrelevant as something which is of intrinsic worth. There are similarities with the idea that men should have a break from labour, more specifically melachot, on the Sabbath because you are really only doing it for your own benefit and it cannot be a spiritual activity, when in fact labour should ideally be undertaken for the benefit of all, including oneself, but sometimes as an actual sacrifice. There seems to be an assumption, in spite of the absence of a concept of original sin in Judaism, that human beings are bent to doing wrong.

Spelling this out formally, you “own” a farm animal who is of some value to you because you can eat their flesh, drink their milk, wear their wool or sell any of that, and could also be bred to produce future generations of livestock, and there’s that word which really has no right to exist. At no point do the interests of the animal come into consideration. You care for them, but that’s an investment which will increase their value to you or in economic terms. Therefore when you give up that animal to the priests, you are losing that value and investment. This is brutal. But is it also true that in the circumstances there was no choice but to abuse other species in this way? Were there any other options? Is it the case that a pasture only has potential for goats, sheep and bovines to feed on it rather than being farmed or foraged for human food? Was human life at that point so tough and short that we had no choice but to blunt our empathy for what we regarded as our cattle? Did it become that way because of something which had happened in the past?

Regarding the Sabbath, if we really are talking about Bronze Age shepherds then their lives were devoted to the exploitation of sheep and therefore in a sense it’s only right that they spend one day a week not engaging in labour to bring them to market, prepare them for eating or shearing their wool, all of which is doubtless under one of the thirty-nine types of melachot. However, melachot are creative deeds. All the creative work that goes into caring for sheep is ultimately for human benefit, and is in a sense destructive.

I can’t pretend, though, that shepherds don’t genuinely care for sheep. For instance, if a gap appears in an enclosure for a flock and they begin to wander out of that gap, they could fall prey to wolves on the other side, and the shepherds don’t want that to happen. I think in fact this is not merely concern for loss or damage to property, but partly focus on the welfare of the sheep. This raises the issue of what happens to the sheep when they’re not being cared for on the Sabbath, and this question has in fact been addressed. There’s a story of a shepherd who noticed there was a gap in the wall on that day, and restrained himself from creating a new section of wall, as ’twere. The next day, a tree had sprung up. Literally true or not, this seems to form part of a theme where G-d will provide, as happened in the wilderness when enough manna would fall during the week to allow the Israelites to feed themselves on the Sabbath without extra work, and by extension during the Jubilee enough food would be available to tide them over for a whole year. This is about trusting in the Lord or Providence.

A little oddly to contemporary understanding perhaps, sacrifice is not always “to” someone. In the Zoroastrian-allied religion of Zurvanism, the primordial being Zurvan makes a sacrifice in order to create a new being, if I remember correctly Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman. Since at that point Zurvan is the only person in the Universe, the sacrifice is more like a magical ritual that leads to a new deity being created, and the act of giving up something is almost karmic, in that it’s compensated for by a possibly positive consequence, although in this case it seems to be the existence of balanced good and evil entities. I find all of this rather inscrutable.

Actual animal sacrifice is, on the whole, a thing of the past in Judaism. However, there is a sense in which the Paschal Lamb is a sacrifice of this nature, where the Zeroa symbolises the goat or lamb sacrificed for Passover in the Seder. But it is a night different from all other nights, so it’s the exception rather than the rule.

In fact I would say the seeds of veganism exist in the written Torah. Thrice it forbids the practice of boiling a goat kid in his mother’s milk, in Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26 and Deuteronomy 14:21. Although this can look inexplicable to some, and there have been attempts to account for it in terms of forbidding a Canaanite ritual, an emotional approach to this makes things pretty clear. It’s simply in appalling taste to take a baby and instead of using the milk that sustains her life to do that, use this precious fluid to cook the corpse. I think you’d have to be very cold and separated from your feelings not to recognise the shocking essence of such a practice. Rabbinical Judaism then extended this prohibition to the mixing of any dairy and animal body parts in food, and millennia later this proved to be extremely useful to us vegans, because it means, for example, that Jacob’s products are often vegan. I don’t think this is a coincidence. It arises from an ancient recognition of the immorality of how we treat other species. Another advantage of kosher food for vegans is that it must not contain bits of insects, which otherwise it often does.

There are certain items the sense of whose names is distorted by the fact that we live in a carnist culture. For instance, the word “livestock” refers to farm animals, but also makes it sound like they’re merely items to be exploited with no interests of their own, and also the property of humans, which they clearly cannot be. Apart from anything else, the concept of property seems to be largely human. Some other species probably do have something like property in the form of territory, kinship relationships and food items, and may feel their personal space is invaded, although it’s all too easy to anthropomorphise. The high concept of property, however, seems unique to humans and as such is merely our custom imposed on an indifferent world. A similar word is “cattle”, obviously cognate with “chattel”. One of the oddities of the English language is that it has no everyday word for a bovine which is not somehow marked in another way. There is no simple concept of “bovine”, even though other Germanic languages often have this. Instead we have “cow”, “bull”, “calf”, “ox” and “cattle”, plus a few rather more technical terms such as “heifer” and “bullock”. This seems to be because we’re too “close” to this species in our quotidian experience to have this word, although this doesn’t explain why other European languages do have this word.

It’s also notable that our words for farm animals are often not regular, or have only been regularised in the past few centuries. The plural of “ox” is “oxen”, the historical plural of “cow” is “kine”, and the plurals of “calf” and “lamb” have been “calveren” and “lambren” in some situations. This seems to have been more durable when the item referred to is more part of daily life, and it’s our association with these species which has led to this irregularity. We have irregular plurals for body parts more often than of most other items, such as “eyen”, “teeth” and “feet”, and also of items which are “closer” to us such as “lice” and “mice”. This is potentially benign, but it’s notable that we still have “cats” and “dogs” rather than maintaining what might’ve been mutation or weak plurals, although they were never in that category. There’s also a zero plural, as with “sheep” and “fish”. Notably, the treyf “pig” has an S plural. This appears to be significant, and may reflect the species we used to share our living space with.

Then there are the inanimate items obtained from other species: milk, eggs and wool. These all have more general meanings, but the usual sense of these words refers to things taken from other species. Milk usually means cow’s milk, eggs come from chicken (another zero plural, although I’m never clear if this is dialectal for me or general) and wool is generally from sheep, although it is also a mammalian body covering. The question arises, however, of what other textures of mammalian fur or hair we lack words for because we don’t encounter them as often. For instance, primate hair is not a mixture of long and short fibres in the same area as it is for other mammalian fur and hair, but we don’t call it something else. Other than even-toed ungulates, all other mammalian hair is generally referred to as hair or fur, even on our own bodies, so far as I can remember. Consequently I feel uneasy talking about wool, because it feels like it’s for human use.

After the Norman Conquest, the English language took to internalising the class structure of the society in which it was spoken by using French words for a higher register and English ones for a lower one. This notably extends to meat. In fact we use a Germanic word whose scope has narrowed to refer to meat as opposed to “flesh”, another Germanic word, but the principle was established by this initial division. Thus we have “beef”, “ham”, “mutton” and so forth, as well as the words for the species. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is to do with disguising what they are conceptually, and it could also be that the more Germanic-speaking peasants were involved in rearing, slaughtering and butchering the animals, who would then appear on the plates of the French-speaking nobles. This is probably the cause, but it seems rather convenient as a way of shielding ourselves from the reality, or rather one reality.

Nothing I’m saying here is meant to be judgemental. I am aware that the ecosystem runs on carnage, and since I consider plants conscious I’m not immune from rationalising my own behaviour. It should be borne in mind that since innumerable organisms are killed as a matter of course for sheer reasons of survival, even by our own immune systems, the impact our own species can make on that is small in terms of the number of deaths and the amount of suffering we inflict compared to the unintentional pain and killing which has to exist for a functioning ecosystem. Nonetheless we have strong signs of distortion in our language resulting from our carnism, and we should be aware of these things. This is particularly evident in the concept of animal sacrifice, which simply has no consideration for the animal concerned as an end, but merely as a means. We need to get beyond this brutal and callous way of thinking, and maybe think about retiring words such as “cattle” and “livestock”. Aren’t we better than that?