When it comes time every year for the big holiday meals of Thanksgiving and Christmas, vegans like myself surely must seem to everyone else to be the biggest of buzz-kills, the grouchiest of party-poopers.  Why is it, it is often wondered by dismayed family members, that you cannot simply show up for these one or two annual meals and not pass judgement on the main course?  We accept what you eat, it is said, so why can’t you accept what we eat?

If only it was a simple matter of dietary choice.  If only it was an easy question of watching someone eat rye bread instead of wheat, or drinking earl grey tea instead of chamomile.  But no, those are simply preferences, and do not involve the bloody slaughter of millions of living beings.

Being a vegan is not simply a matter of dietary choice or preference, it is an ethical code, a deeply-held wish to live in harmony with one’s fellow sentient earthlings instead of dismissing them as chattel.  They bleed and die in the same way that we do, and vegans are simply people who stand up and say that we are not going to cause this bleeding and death, as it is totally unnecessary, and we certainly would not want someone to do the same to us.  We will not eat these animals if we do not have to, we will not turn them into shoes if we don’t have to, we will not use them to test soap and cosmetics (we certainly don’t have to), and we will not think of them as our property, as ‘things’ we can simply use, as we would use a hammer or a toothbrush, and then throw them away.

The old argument that a turkey or a pig is just an animal holds no water since we, ourselves, are animals.  The argument that a turkey or a pig is so stupid as to deserve none of our most basic decency holds no water, as many humans are crushingly stupid - some by choice, others by birth - and if we started judging moral worthiness based upon intelligence, the SATs would take on an entirely new, far more urgent importance.  And the argument that humans are naturally superior to those animals which aren’t human holds no water, as superiority is in the eye of those who assume it.  Humans may be smarter than the other animals, but many animals are much stronger and faster than we are, and every other animal on this planet is somehow able to survive without electricity and indoor plumbing.  Most human beings would not survive if society collapsed tomorrow.  Certainly not the elderly, certainly not those in wheelchairs, certainly not most of the very young, and certainly not most of those who require daily insulin shots or other daily prescription medication in order to live.  Most of us superior humans would not last five minutes without our technological comforts and scientific advancements, yet the inferior animals that we share the planet with get along fine without them.

And besides which, if morality or ethics actually mean anything, then they ought to transcend human hierarchy.  Instead, our history is one of denying basic moral consideration to those considered lower in the hierarchy by popular opinion, those of a certain skin color, gender, nationality, creed or sexuality.  It was not very long ago that women were denied democracy in America simply because they were women, and it was not very long ago that this country had separate drinking fountains for people with “separate” skin color.  Our own history shows that we always claim moral superiority and then quickly go about finding the best ways to oppress, shoot, maim, torture and slaughter whomever we feel to be inferior.

The animal carcass which is the center of most Thanksgiving and Christmas meals in many countries was once a living, sentient creature, who was born into misery and captivity and died a bloody, painful death.  The meat of that animal that is carved and served on a plate once had blood flowing through it, blood that was pumped by a heart, blood which went to a brain, a brain which housed a consciousness, which was aware of its own heart, its own life, and the lives of others.  That brain received visual information from a pair of eyes, just like we do, and those eyes showed that consciousness a world in full color, just like ours do, with a big blue sky and beautiful green grass.  That consciousness also had ears, which introduced it to the singing of the other birds in the trees and to the chirping of crickets at night.

But the only humans that consciousness ever met in its brief existence were solely intent upon killing it.  The only interaction that animal had with humans was in the context of misery, confinement and death.  To those animals, nearly all humans must be torturing, vile murderers.  They might come in contact with some people who are nice to them, but even then those humans are still intent upon the creature’s death, no matter how nice they are.  Even those nice humans still consider that consciousness to have no inherent worth except in what it can do for them, and are only counting down the days and minutes until that animal’s bloody slaughter.

Increasingly, there are people who are claiming a kind of joy or happiness in being able to slaughter an animal for themselves.  In this article, a mother who takes her daughter to slaughter a turkey says that the experience turned out to be “surprisingly lively and fun.”  The turkey in this story is just a thing to kill, not a consciousness, and all kinds of moral and intellectual superiority is claimed by the author for having herself ‘lived through’ the experience.  But the fact that the animal did not also live through it is only a footnote.  And so this morally and intellectually superior human being even manages to make killing all about herself; what did the killing do for her, what was it like for her, what did she learn from it, etc.  It is this extreme level of self-centeredness, then, in our dealings with the other animals, that vegans like myself object to perhaps more than anything.

Yet this same accusation of self-centeredness is exactly what vegans and vegetarians face every time they must explain what they will or won’t eat, or why they won’t come to a family meal and simply look away while everyone else happily eats the last remnants of a doomed consciousness.  If there is one thing that people do not understand about the ethical choice of being a vegan, it is that, unlike most human endeavors, it is not about the person making the choice.  It is not an act of vanity or narcissism, it is a choice of consciousness.  It is a choice for the lives of billions of innocent animals who are tortured and slaughtered daily.  It is a choice for the health of the ecosystem and all future life on the planet.  And it is also a choice to live in congregation with those who are different from us rather than in conflict.

There is a verse in Isaiah which is part of a section about a mythical peaceable kingdom, one in which “the wolf shall live with the lamb.”  Our morality towards others is often just like the morality of the wolf - eat or be eaten.  But humans also live with animals every day as members of our own little peaceable kingdoms.  Cats and dogs are considered by many to be family members, and we would never think that we could simply do anything to them that we wish, let alone send them off to a slaughterhouse to be made into a holiday meal.  But that is exactly what we are saying every day about chickens and cows and turkeys, that we can and should simply use them as things to be slaughtered, instead of simply leaving them alone to live or die by their own choices.

It is all of this and more that is going through the minds of vegans and vegetarians every Thanksgiving and Christmas, times that we must contemplate choosing between eating with our families or living according to our most basic ideals, and whether we can simply set those ideals aside and watch people eat a once living, breathing, thinking creature, or risk offending our families who simply don’t understand the depths of our feelings.  While many dismayed relatives and friends must think that this is an issue of diet or of simply being a contrarian, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Holidays ought to be happy occasions, ones filled with good eating and good friends.  But for vegans and vegetarians, holidays are conundrums.  It is not that vegans don’t want to have fun on the holidays, it’s that they cannot have fun when the centerpiece of the experience goes against their most basic ethic.  This is why there are so many vegan Thanksgiving potlucks and community meals that are now annual traditions all across the country.  Because to many of our relatives, in the context of our family meals, which are usually centered around turkey carcasses, we are simply anti-social contrarians.  We are the party-poopers, the buzz-kills, the do-gooders who won’t simply shut up and be happy.

It is no wonder, then, in that context, that many vegans and vegetarians will no longer eat a Thanksgiving meal with their families, choosing instead to eat their own meal and then go visit their relatives afterwards.  This choice must, again, seem to family and friends to be incredibly self-centered.  But it is not.  It is a choice to eat good, healthy food, which does not involve bloody slaughter, and to have a happy holiday, free from unnecessary death.  It is a choice for the animals, not for us, and if you are an omnivorous parent or relative of a vegan or vegetarian and you are reading this, please remember that you can eat whatever you want at Thanksgiving, in whatever environment you wish; the only thing that your vegan son or daughter or nephew or niece is asking is to be able to make that same choice.

To those here in America, I wish you a happy and safe Thanksgiving.  I also wish you a compassionate Thanksgiving.  I hope you have compassion for your vegan or vegetarian family members who are facing what is probably now an annual ethical dilemma, and I hope that you have at least some compassion for the millions of animals slaughtered for this occasion, like the one that will sit in the middle of your dinner table, who did not need to be.