While Brittany Bisnott’s cover article on the VegFest correctly described it as a fun, inclusive event, I find it strange that she never actually mentioned its overall purpose: to spark serious thought about a little-known and largely-shocking issue. I came across the issue a number of years ago, when I happened upon brochures and then decided to research further. Now, I am running out of objections to the argument.

The growth of vegetarianism in the United States can be traced in large part to Peter Singer’s 1975 book “Animal Liberation,” and the extensive scholarship that followed. Singer and others point out that one of our fundamental ethical principles is an opposition to causing unnecessary pain and suffering. They then note that nonhuman animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone; share our five physiological senses; and, in the case of birds and mammals, have complex emotional lives caring for their babies and grieving when family members die. They can suffer, physically and emotionally, just as we can. If this is what matters ethically among humans, then, animal advocates argue, our exclusion of nonhuman animals from serious ethical consideration may reflect a form of prejudice, similar to prejudices against groups of humans. To describe this apparent prejudice, Singer popularized the term “speciesism,” by comparison with racism.

But it goes even further. Every year in the United States alone, we raise billions of animals for food, keeping nearly all of them in cramped, filthy conditions for their entire lives. Chickens, for example, spend their lives crammed into windowless sheds. Their beaks are partially sliced off to prevent chickens from pecking each other to death because of the stress of their confinement. Moreover, they are bred to grow so fast that they live in permanent, crippling pain.

Strangely enough, Paul McCartney takes on this issue better than anyone in his narration of the video “Glass Walls,” which can be located at http://meat.org. And what is it all for? Because we prefer the way they taste over some other food? As a result of vegetarian dvocates, millions of people have withdrawn their economic support of those practices, and the number grows every year. As a consequence, millions fewer animals are raised under those conditions than there would otherwise have been.

If the animal advocates’ arguments about speciesism turn out to be correct, then our treatment of nonhuman animals may be one of the most important ethical issues of our time. And the future of that issue may be up to each one of us, individually.

Please note that this article was submitted to Nota Bene on September 25, 2010. Due to an unfortunate incident involving our spam filter, we are just finding and printing this article now. Our sincere apologies to Mr. Devries.