The notion that animals are not self-aware is based on nothing more than a stipulation that the only way to be self-aware is to have the self-awareness of a normal adult human. That is certainly one way to be self-aware. It’s not the only way.
We should stop bringing more domestic animals into existence.
There is no difference between sitting around the pit watching dogs fight and sitting around a summer barbecue roasting the corpses of tortured animals or enjoying the dairy or eggs from tortured animals.
Animal rights without veganism is like human rights with slavery. It makes no sense. None whatsoever.
There is no moral distinction between fur and other materials made from animals, such as leather, which also is the result of the suffering and death of sentient beings.
We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the ‘humane’ slaughter of animals.
An aim of an argument should be progress, but progress ultimately means little without victory.
There is no ‘need’ for us to eat meat, dairy or eggs. Indeed, these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.
There is no morally coherent difference between fur and other animal clothing, such as leather, wool, etc., just as there is no morally coherent distinction between meat and milk or eggs.
The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
Being vegan is not just a matter of being ‘kind’ to animals. First and foremost, it is a matter of being just and observing our moral obligation to not treat other sentient beings as things.
We should never present flesh as somehow morally distinguishable from dairy. To the extent it is morally wrong to eat flesh, it is as morally wrong – and possibly more morally wrong – to consume dairy.
We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.
We should take good care of the domestic animals we have brought into existence until they die. We should stop bringing more domestic animals into existence.
We are vegans not simply because being vegan will reduce suffering. We are vegan because every sentient being values her or his life even if no one else does. We are vegan because justice minimally requires that we not take life for trivial purposes.
Who I’ve been is not as important as who I’m becoming.
If an animal has any rights at all, it’s got the right not to be eaten.
It costs us so little to go vegan. It costs animals so much if we don’t.
Veganism must be the baseline if we are to have any hope of shifting the paradigm away from animals as things and toward animals as nonhuman persons.
Vegetarianism as a moral position is no more coherent than saying that you think it morally wrong to eat meat from a spotted cow but not morally wrong to eat meat from a non-spotted cow.
Domesticated animals such as dogs and cats are vulnerable and entirely dependent on us for all of their needs. They live very unnatural lives because they are not part of the human world and they are not part of the animal world.