● What do we believe?
Our Mission
We may have mentioned our commitment to a vegan ethos a few times already.
Here’s what that means to us, and why we have committed ourselves to creating a vegan world.
● What is veganism?
What is Veganism?
Veganism is in equal parts a belief and a lifestyle.
Vegans believe that animals ought to be free from unnecessary harm and exploitation.
Because humans, like all Great Apes, can thrive on a plant-based diet, vegans consider the farming of animals — that is, raising animals to be killed and eaten — as a form of unnecessary harm and exploitation.
Therefore, vegans do not consume any products that are made from animals — including meat, fish, dairy, eggs, honey, and more.
Vegans also avoid leather (from the flesh of a cow) and wool (the coat of a sheep) in clothing, and we avoid cosmetics and other chemicals that are tested on animals in laboratories.
Simply put, vegans are against cruelty to animals, and believe animals have a right to fair treatment.
Isn’t Being Vegetarian Enough?
People often confuse vegetarians with vegans.
Vegetarians often still eat milk, eggs, honey, and other non-meat animal products.
Some vegetarians even eat fish — although these are more properly called ‘pescatarians’!
While vegetarianism often feels somehow more ‘accessible’ to many people than veganism (which still gets seen as being ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’ — even though it isn’t!), milk, eggs, honey and other animal products often cause just as much harm to animals as meat production does.
For instance, male calves born to dairy cows are not needed by the dairy industry (as boys don’t produce milk), and so they are often killed within a few weeks of their birth.
For the same reason — boy chickens don’t lay eggs — male chicks are sorted out and macerated (crushed) by a machine within the first hours or days of their life, or else suffocated in a bag with hundreds of others.
This is not even to mention the excruciating life that egg-laying hens and dairy cows are forced to lead — always ending up being killed anyway in order to provide extra cheap meat for the supermarket shelves.
We could go on and on, but the pattern is always the same: every time animals are used for profit, the animals suffer.
Veganism is the only position that is truly against animal suffering in thought, word, and deed.
Vegetarianism, and any other ‘-ism’, simply isn’t enough.
What about ‘Humane Slaughter’?
‘Humane slaughter’ is the idea that you can kill animals kindly, compassionately, and ethically. But truly humane slaughter does not exist.
If an animal does not want or need to die, then killing them is taking away the most important thing to them — their life, and their liberty.
When animals are killed for food, their entire life is forfeited simply for a few moments of convenience for a person eating a burger… even though the person could just as easily have had a burger made out of plants instead.
We do not believe there is a ‘humane’ way to take the life of another being like this — especially for something so trivial as taste, convenience, or a quick bite to eat.
Terms like “ethically sourced,” “humanely raised,” “free range,” and “cage free” show up on animal products to put the consumer at ease — but it is simply impossible to ‘kindly’ kill an animal that does not want to die.