The 5 Obstacles I Had to Overcome to Become Vegan

Today, I became vegan.

Just 24 hours ago, I couldn’t have imagined this would be the case — at least not so soon.

Reading Óscar Horta’s Making A Stand For Animals (MASFA, from now on)^{1I'm very grateful to Melanie Brennan for having given me this book. This is the meaning of a life-changing book.} hit me like a freight train as I turned page after page, chapter after chapter. Now there was something I could no longer unsee — something that compelled me to act in accordance.

Internally, this feels like the first major moral decision I’ve made in my life. I had made important decisions before to align with my values. Volunteering, joining Effective Altruism, committing to upskilling in AI Safety rather than pursuing a Master’s or a conventional job, taking the 10% Pledge, saying “yes” to helping run an EA university group.

It’s not that these weren’t hard decisions, but they didn’t feel like hard moral decisions. They involved practical challenges, but they simply felt like what I had to do.

With becoming vegan, the moral struggle to reach this decision has been much more arduous, even if deep inside I already knew it was right.

In this article, I want to guide you through that struggle via 5 obstacles I’ve had to overcome to become vegan. Not literal obstacles, but self-imposed or imaginary ones — which are sometimes the hardest to overcome.

This article might be relevant to my past self, and to others who also face, knowingly or not, these or similar hurdles.

I

The first obstacle was ignorance.

We love dogs. We eat pigs. We wear cows^{2 Borrowing from Melanie Joy's book.} .

The first step was noticing this moral inconsistency — that something didn’t feel right.

We would not willingly harm or kill an animal, yet we choose to participate in this intricate system where we reap the benefits of doing so without having to feel guilty.

Seeing the reality of factory farms (I thank Pablo Rosado in particular for his video) can lift the curtain on the tragedy that plays out every day on a massive scale. An estimated 83 billion farmed land animals and 124 billion farmed fishes are killed for food each year, according to Animal Charity Evaluators. But this knowledge alone isn’t enough to dispel ignorance. You then have to make the connection.

As the pieces of the puzzle come together, you start seeing the contradictions, and you can no longer unsee them.

In 2011, a cow named Teresa made headlines in Italy after escaping a farm in Sicily and swimming toward Calabria, before being rescued by the Italian Coast Guard and Fire Service. However, since there had been cases of brucellosis on her farm, she was destined for the slaughterhouse — except that, after a public campaign, she was spared.

Imagine instead that the story had taken a different turn, and she had ended up in the slaughterhouse. That evening, you go to a restaurant, and they announce the specialty of the house: meat of Teresa.

Would you order it and eat Teresa?

But really — aren’t all animals just like Teresa?

Thought experiments like these presented in MASFA helped me make the connection.

II

The second obstacle was questioning the sentience of non-human animals.

In my view, it is the capacity to suffer and feel that matters for giving especial consideration to certain beings. But where is the line between sentience and non-sentience?

Here I had been influenced by reading David Deutsch. I know I’m conscious, and I can assume that your brain is sufficiently similar that you are conscious too. But perhaps what makes humans different from other species, which for Deutsch is our capacity as “universal explainers”, is also what gives rise to consciousness?

It’s true that many animals exhibit behaviours that we associate with pleasure or pain. But since we don’t yet understand how consciousness arises, might it be that these behaviours are the result of blind processes without any qualia to experience them?

We could also say that smoke alarms are “averse” to fire and react by ringing, but obviously they aren’t conscious. For non-human animals, the web of mechanical calculations is far more intricate, which could trick us into anthropomorphising and attributing to them our same capacities for feeling — but maybe the simpler explanation is that these mental operations can occur without any consciousness at all?

This argument (outlined more clearly here) still makes some sense to me, and I assign a tiny probability that it’s correct — that is, that non-human animals might not be sentient.

However, that’s just one point of view, which in fact contradicts the scientific consensus. Of course, scientific consensus could be wrong until we truly understand what produces consciousness.

This, then, is a case of epistemic uncertainty. Given this, what’s the right thing to do?

If animals are not sentient, we can keep the wheels of the animal industry turning and continue enjoying animal products and services.

If, however, animals are sentient — if the suffering of billions or trillions of animals in this very moment is real —...the horror is unspeakable.

The negative consequences of acting as if animals aren’t sentient when they are far exceed those of acting as if they are sentient (with more respect, compassion, and grace toward them) when they’re not.

And if we add that the second hypothesis (that animals are sentient) might be much more likely according to scientific consensus…Well, the well-reasoned arguments to disregard animal welfare start to look more like excuses than like sufficient reasons.

III

The third obstacle was collective harm problems.

Collective, or diffuse, harm problems occur when many individuals each cause a tiny harm that seems negligible alone but is disastrous when combined. The argument, in short, is that it makes no difference whether you eat animals or not, because one person won’t cause grocery stores to order less meat nor factory farms to breed and kill less animals.

The first convincing objection I encountered was the expected value argument from Doing Good Better. Generally, abstaining from a product once won’t alter the food chain, but supermarkets have ordering thresholds. A single act probably won’t reach that tipping point, but there’s a chance that it will. Over a lifetime of purchases (or abstentions) you might indeed contribute to fewer animals being harmed and killed.

In fact, when your act happens to hit a threshold, several animals’ lives may be spared — more than your individual portion of meat would suggest. So across your life, the number of animals you save might roughly correspond to the number of animals you would otherwise have “consumed”.

A second objection, and the one that hit me like a freight train just yesterday, appeals to responsibility.

In MASFA, Horta introduces a thought experiment by Jonathan Glover:

100 bandits
Imagine that in a certain village there are a hundred people whose only food is beans. Each person has a hundred beans to eat. A hundred bandits arrive in the village. Each one steals all the beans from one person in the village. As a result, all the villagers are left without food, and they starve to death. It's clear that each of the bandits is responsible for the death of one villager.

Suppose that, some time later, the bandits return to the village, where there are a hundred more people each with a hundred beans. But now the bandits change their ways. Each one no longer steals his hundred beans from one person. Instead, each bandit steals just one bean from each of the hundred villagers. The result is the same as before. Each bandit steals a hundred beans, and each person in the village is left with no beans, just like before. So, again, they all starve to death. But the difference is that no one bandit causes any particular person to die on his own. After all, no one dies from eating one less bean. In a case like this, would we say that the bandits aren’t responsible for anyone’s death?

Imagine that one of the bandits claimed that, even if he had not carried out the robbery, the people of the village would still have died (since no one survives by eating only one bean). The same could be said by each of the other bandits. If we accepted what they say, we would have to conclude that none of them is responsible for anyone's death. However, this is absurd. The bandits are indeed responsible for the deaths of these people, but responsibility is joint.

Likewise, whether we eat small portions of many animals over time or eat an entire animal at once, the consequences are the same: we share responsibility for the harm and killing of the animals.

IV

The fourth obstacle, but the easiest for me to overcome, was comfort.

By comfort, I mean the direct benefits we get from consuming animal products. In my case, primarily, the taste (yes, I love a good burger) and the convenience of buying whatever you want at the supermarket.

Once I had accepted the moral necessity of stopping animal consumption, making this “sacrifice” felt quite trivial.

Yes, I haven’t lived fully as a vegan before, and I’m sure it will sometimes be very hard and inconvenient — but it’s a trade-off I willingly make.

Having eaten vegan at EA events and noticed how pleasant it can be has also made this easier.

Being vegan has never been easier than it is now.

V

The fifth obstacle was the mother of all obstacles: social pressure.

My social circle is quite homogeneous. None of my family or friends (outside EA) is vegan, and several strongly oppose or mock veganism. In Spain, meat and dairy are central to the everyday diet, and veganism still lacks broad social acceptance. It’s the land of bullfighting. It’s hard to imagine a Christmas without soup, turkey, or meat stew, or a summer without paella.

It always felt like this leap was too much for me. Like if other vegans had had it easier: they had more willpower, less family pressure. My situation felt different. Except it wasn’t. In fact, it was surely easier than for many others.

Social pressure has always been an obstacle to overcome for moral progress.

I suspected that the next step in humanity’s expanding moral circle would include animals, and that future generations would look at meat-eaters with outrage and disgust. My choice was either to ride that wave of slow moral progress, or to not wait any longer and take my moral beliefs seriously now.

So instead of postponing this decision — until I left home and became independent, until after Christmas, until next week — why not do it right now?

And does it really matter if others disapprove, when so much suffering is at stake?

We shouldn’t be slaves to social pressure.

Being vegan as a case of EA in practice

As someone who believes in the principles of Effective Altruism, overcoming these obstacles has felt like actually doing EA in real life and putting these principles into practice.

Being vegan embodies some principles which are also a core part of EA:

1. Open-mindedness to question comfortable, entrenched beliefs;
2. Taking the implications of one’s moral reasoning seriously;
3. Doing something that has a big impact for a relatively low cost.

Of course, being vegan — or calling oneself an "EA" — doesn’t automatically make one a saint. Unfortunately, I’ll still get angry, still react from fear and selfishness rather than compassion. And I’ll probably continue to ignore many horrors of the world that I’m still complicit in.

But this decision is what acting in accordance with one’s moral values feels like, and it commits me to stay on the lookout for behavioural updates and opportunities for good that, either through wilful or unwilful ignorance, I had been overlooking.