• 16 Dec, 2025 *

TL;DR: Reducing animal consumption to environmental impact erases the harm animals experience and ignores their moral worth.

Kim Kardashian

I recently came across a reel on Instagram of a guy commenting on Kim Kardashian taking a private jet just to get a slice of cheesecake (lmao). He then compares the amount of CO₂ emitted by the jet to the emissions generated by individuals consuming meat. While the video raises an important point about how collective efforts are often overshadowed by the actions of billionaires, it overlooks a crucial ethical dimension.

Animals vs. the Environment

Unfortunately, discussions about meat consumption are very often reduced to environmental impact, lumping fauna, flora, land, water, and air into a single category. While environmental degradation is a serious and urgent problem, this framing obscures a crucial distinction: animals are not the same kind of entity as ecosystems, rivers, or the atmosphere.

The environment does not experience harm in the way individuals do. Animals do.

Consuming animals is not neutral

It is important to recognize that consuming animals is not a neutral choice. The use of animals, especially outside contexts of subsistence, is a relationship of oppression and subjugation. There is no neutrality when choices require the control, confinement, and killing of others for one’s own purposes.

Animals are not abstract components of "nature". They are sentient individuals with subjective experiences. They feel pain and pleasure, fear and relief. They have interests in bodily autonomy, in freedom of movement, in forming relationships, and in continuing to exist. These are not symbolic or philosophical interests; they are observable features of their lived experience.

Social conditioning and discrimination

The reason this reality is so easily overlooked is not simply a matter of personal indifference. We are socially conditioned from an early age to see animals as food, resources, or commodities, rather than as individuals. Ethical questions about animals are largely absent from formal education, public discourse, and moral training. At the same time, industries built on animal exploitation actively shape narratives that normalize use and conceal the individual lives involved. This conditioning produces both ignorance and moral distance.

Discrimination based on species functions in much the same way as other forms of discrimination. It assigns different moral weight to individuals based solely on the species to which they belong. In doing so, it violates a basic principle of moral reasoning: the equal consideration of similar interests. If an individual has an interest in avoiding suffering, in maintaining control over their own body, or in continuing to live, that interest does not become morally negligible simply because the individual is not human.

The moral relevance of animals

Within this framework, animals’ interests are routinely dismissed as morally insignificant when they conflict with human convenience, pleasure, or tradition. An anthropocentric worldview treats animal bodies as resources, as tools, as means to human ends. Their suffering is acknowledged but deemed acceptable. Their deaths are considered unfortunate but necessary—or worse: invisible, a non-issue.

This is why discussions that focus exclusively on environmental impact often miss the core ethical issue. Climate change, land use, and biodiversity loss are collective and systemic harms. But animal exploitation is also a matter of individual injustice. It is about what is done to someone, not something.

Animals are sentient individuals who exist for their own sake. They are not means to an end. They are ends in themselves.

Making the invisible visible

Recognizing this does not require believing that animals are identical to humans or that all harms are equal. It requires only a minimal moral consistency: that the capacity to suffer and to have an interest in one’s own life is enough to warrant moral consideration. When we deny this consideration to animals, we do not do so because of reason, but because of habit, culture, and power.

Challenging this worldview requires making visible what has long been obscured: the individual animals whose lives are routinely sacrificed and whose moral status is denied.

#animals #ethics #veganism