I agree that vegans probably won’t get an “I told you so” moment or an “end of meat” day to celebrate. But I think there is a good chance of a future where eating/milking animals is unthinkable and in which people have respect and compassion for all animal life.
It must have rankled in the 1800s when slaveholders were actually compensated when slavery was banned in the British Empire—there was no “I told you so” moment, and much of the historic racial inequality endured in a different form for generations even up to the present day. But now slavery is a massive taboo; all people are recognised as human and entitled to rights; labour exploitation still exists but is condemned; the old days’ institutional degradation of an entire race is unthinkable now.
I’d argue that most of this moral progress hasn’t come from living people changing their minds. It’s from children reared in a society without slavery thinking “wow, slavery sounds really inhuman, let’s not do that again”. The ban enabled people to see how wrong owning humans was.
We can hope for something similar when it comes to factory farming. If fake meat makes factory farming obsolete, and kids have never tasted the real thing and have only encountered animals in nature and in zoos—they will find the idea of eating animals and their milk/eggs really gross. They will genuinely believe that factory farming is wrong.
It won’t be a day of reckoning but it will be a giant shift worth celebrating .
I agree that vegans probably won’t get an “I told you so” moment or an “end of meat” day to celebrate. But I think there is a good chance of a future where eating/milking animals is unthinkable and in which people have respect and compassion for all animal life.
It must have rankled in the 1800s when slaveholders were actually compensated when slavery was banned in the British Empire—there was no “I told you so” moment, and much of the historic racial inequality endured in a different form for generations even up to the present day. But now slavery is a massive taboo; all people are recognised as human and entitled to rights; labour exploitation still exists but is condemned; the old days’ institutional degradation of an entire race is unthinkable now.
I’d argue that most of this moral progress hasn’t come from living people changing their minds. It’s from children reared in a society without slavery thinking “wow, slavery sounds really inhuman, let’s not do that again”. The ban enabled people to see how wrong owning humans was.
We can hope for something similar when it comes to factory farming. If fake meat makes factory farming obsolete, and kids have never tasted the real thing and have only encountered animals in nature and in zoos—they will find the idea of eating animals and their milk/eggs really gross. They will genuinely believe that factory farming is wrong.
It won’t be a day of reckoning but it will be a giant shift worth celebrating .