NY Times Publishes Reckless Op Ed by Ex-Vegan

In an opinion piece in the NY Times entitled “The Enigma of Animal Suffering,” “former vegan” Rhys Southan gives readers permission to eat animals while simultaneously acknowledging that their treatment is so inhumane that only nonexistent remedies would make their lives tolerable: “Some ideas include breeding genetically modified animals who are insensitive to pain, culturing non-sentient animal products in a lab, and giving chickens virtual reality helmets so that they think they are living in a nice environment even if they’re not.” Based on his own description about how farm animals are tortured (“Even small, high-welfare farms tend to subject their animals to at least some painful procedures like castration without anesthetic, dehorning or the separation of mothers and their newborn children”), his conclusion should be “don’t eat animals.” Instead, he seems to be justifying animal consumption by suggesting that animals are ignorant and that the parallels we make between human and animal suffering are “unsound.” The phrase “former vegan” is,  in and of itself, a detriment to the animal rights movement because it suggests that they “saw the light” and realized that eating animals is a good thing. If you’re going to betray the animals and the movement to protect them, please go away quietly.

Ex-Vegan Rhys Southan