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Vegan Epistemology: Reforming Human Knowledge Practices from a Vegan Perspective

Elizabeth Anderson argues that the political objectives of feminist epistemology—a line of inquiry concerned with the influence of gender-related issues and concepts on knowledge and research—are compatible with the “fundamental internal commitments” of science, such as commitments to theoretical reason and empirical evidence.1 While some might resist political goals as disruptive to the ‘objective’ standpoint favored in scientific inquiry, Anderson finds that such goals can actually be beneficial for the “self-critical and self-reforming institutions of science” insofar as they raise empirical questions that promote “critical self-reflections” and thereby remove unreliable belief-formation mechanisms and enable reliable ones.2 Thus, mainstream theorists cannot outright dismiss the concerns of feminist epistemologists on grounds of their political motivation alone; rather, Anderson argues, such theorists must contend with

“epistemic reasons to reform our knowledge practices” identified by feminist epistemology in order to maintain commitments to methodological improvement.3 But Anderson’s point is not limited to alone; rather, it extends to other motivations with the potential to spark needed reforms of knowledge practices. One such motivation is : the moral and ethical stance predicated on ending the exploitation and slaughter of animals for human purposes, including food and clothing production, animal labor and captivity, and biomedical research.4

Veganism provides a standpoint from which many epistemological errors can be observed, challenged, and corrected. Such errors result from commitments to a series of

1 Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense,” Hypatia 10, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 50-84, 51-56. Anderson defines ‘theoretical reason’ as “the power to acquire, reject, and revise our cognitive attitudes (beliefs and theoretical commitments) and our practices of inquiry through reflection on our reasons for holding them and engaging in them” (52). 2 Ibid., 55. 3 Ibid. 4 The term ‘vegan’ is often wrongly conflated with a -based diet, which has led to a distinction between ‘veganism’ as a dietary lifestyle and ‘ethical veganism’ as a normative ideology. I find the term ‘vegan/veganism’ alone suffices to indicate the normative ideology based on its etymological history and origin. Becker - 2 underlying assumptions and beliefs integral to the epistemic condition of the animal-exploiting society. I argue that rational inquiry stands to benefit from vegan epistemology, here understood as a branch of naturalized social epistemology that studies the various influences of ‘’ on knowledge production in order to identify and critique problematic practices. I begin by defining carnism, naturalized social epistemology, and vegan epistemology. Then, I identify three categories of carnist influence on knowledge, which vegan epistemology stands to correct: , , and testimonial injustice. I conclude by addressing the role of vegan epistemology as a necessary counteragent of carnist social ignorance.

‘Carnism’ and Vegan Epistemology

Carnism is the belief system in which the eating of certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate.5 It entails a set of assumptions and biases about humans, non-human animals, and nature, and comprises the ideology upon which the choice to exploit animals for human purposes, especially the choice to consume meat, is founded. Moreover, this belief system is largely “invisible,” explains, because “we don’t see meat eating… as a choice, based on a set of assumptions about animals, our world, and ourselves. Rather, we see it as a given, the ‘natural’ thing to do.”6 The term ‘carnist’ is necessary to combat this invisibility, Joy continues, because the more familiar term ‘meat eater’ “isolates the practice of consuming meat, as though it were divorced from a person’s beliefs and values. It implies that the person who eats meat is acting outside of a belief system.”7 ‘Carnist’ is also more appropriate than ‘carnivore’ or

‘omnivore,’ as these terms denote biological constitution (the physiological ability or need to

5 Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (Newburyport: Red Wheel Weiser, 2009), ePub. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. Becker - 3 ingest certain things) rather than philosophical choice. “Carnists eat meat not because they need to, but because they choose to,” Joy concludes, “and choices always stem from beliefs.”8

Thus, carnism is an ideology: a system or set of ideals and beliefs, each of which contributes to satisfying one’s conception of what is moral or true. Carnism is an ideology upon which animal exploitation depends. Like all ideologies, carnism is capable of infusing into self-purportedly ‘objective’ rational inquiry. Moreover, as an ‘invisible’ ideology that is pervasive in human society and institutions, it is especially dubious and yet remains largely unchecked even in the growing field of ‘meta-research’—a line of inquiry which seeks to improve research methods and practices in order to eliminate biases in performing, communicating, verifying, evaluating, and rewarding research.9 Furthermore, as an ideology deeply rooted in cultural identity and custom, carnism manifests in ways that are particularly resistant to criticism and reform. While vegans have done much work in the field of value theory, few have investigated the effects of carnism on knowledge and inquiry. Vegan epistemology, modeled after Anderson’s interpretation of feminist epistemology, serves to benefit institutions of science and inquiry as a ‘naturalized social epistemology’ with a commitment to ‘modest empiricism,’ which are defined as follows.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, particularly the theory of justification for belief. Naturalized epistemology, as defined by Theresa W. Tobin and

Alison M. Jaggar, is a “methodological turn… toward more empirically informed philosophical research,” which is necessary for making research “more continuous with results from empirical

8 Ibid. 9 John P.A. Ioannidis, Daniele Fanelli, Debbie Drake Dunne, and Steven N. Goodman, “Meta-Research: Evaluation and Improvement of Research Methods and Practices,” PLOS Biology 13, no. 10: 1-7. Becker - 4 science.”10 Just as clinical drug trials may be successful under controlled conditions and yet fail in various real world conditions, Tobin and Jaggar explain, models of justification created in the

“controlled conditions of the philosopher’s imagination” (albeit with unacknowledged assumptions) may similarly fail to justify claims in the context of real life.11 Naturalized epistemology, then, is a form of meta-research, which aims to improve our knowledge practices

(such as scientific methodology and rational inquiry) by grounding them in empirical terms.

Social epistemology is a branch of naturalized epistemology focused on social aspects of inquiry; that is, it investigates social, collective, or interactive paths to knowledge, examines the spread of information across group membership, and examines social environments of inquirers such as economic and political situation.12 Social epistemology provides a much-needed correction to traditional epistemology’s focus on the mental operations of individuals in isolation or abstraction from others, Alvin I. Goldman argues, because it accounts for “the deeply collaborative and interactive nature of knowledge seeking,” especially in the modern world.13

Social epistemologists investigate the influence of specifically social factors on knowledge production, including the formal and informal inclusion or exclusion of types of people from research, the prestige of different fields and styles of inquiry, and facets of the inquirers, their subjects of study, and their investigational and cultural environment such as political and economic conditions, social settings, ideologies, biases, , assumptions, and cultural narratives used to structure observations and interpretations of results.14

10 Theresa W. Tobin and Alison M. Jaggar, “Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology,” Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 (July 2013): 409-439, 411-412. 11 Ibid., 410. 12 Alvin I. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology,” 54. Becker - 5

Empiricism is the philosophical belief that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. Modest empiricism, as defined by Anderson, is the view that “observation provides the least defeasible evidence we have about the world”—a less controversial claim, which avoids the absolute position of traditional empiricism and thus prefers certain types of evidence without eliminating the possibility of the existence of other types.15 Commitment to modest empiricism, then, requires framing questions of epistemology as empirical questions (constrained only by empirical adequacy) that cannot be responsibly ignored or dismissed; questions that pertain to phenomena and practice that are, at least in principle, empirically observable.

Vegan epistemology, therefore, is a branch of naturalized social epistemology that seeks to raise empirical questions meant to improve knowledge practices and to identify social dimensions of carnist ideology in both the production and content of knowledge. I propose three dimensions of the carnist ideology that stand to benefit from investigation by vegan epistemology: anthropocentrism, speciesism, and testimonial injustice against vegans. Each of these categories represents a part of the carnist ideology; that is, each may result from, support, rationalize, justify, or otherwise pertain to the central carnist belief that it is permissible to exploit animals for human purposes.

I. Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism refers to the belief that human beings are the central, most important, or most significant species on earth. Sandra Jane Fairbanks calls anthropocentrism “a form of environmental egoism, in that it views the human species as ‘above’ nature as well as superior to all other species, [and it treats nature] as a resource for human beings to use for their own

15 Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology,” 51-52. Becker - 6 purposes.”16 This error presents in numerous ways: cases in which data is given undue attention, is resisted, or is rejected based on its perceived role in supporting or challenging the narrative of human importance; cases of ‘anthropomorphism’ in which the human perspective or human qualities are projected onto non-human animals or other entities; cases in which observations of natural phenomena are framed in terms of their value to humans; cases in which non-human animals are examined only as ‘resources’ to be exploited; and cases of ‘human exceptionalism’ in which humans are assumed to have unique and morally relevant qualities not shared by nonhuman animals, such as minds, souls, or divinely sanctioned dominion over nature.

Accusations of anthropocentrism in human inquiry are nothing new. As far back as the 6th century BCE, philosophers like Xenophanes have criticized the use of anthropomorphized gods and human interests in cosmology.17 A well-known example of anthropocentrism is the centuries-long resistance to the ‘Copernican Revolution’ in which Renaissance astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric astronomical model in which the

Earth and planets revolve around the sun, thereby displacing Earth and its human occupants from being the center of all things. Similar anthropocentric resistance to evidence continues a century and a half after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, which finds that humans are the result of the same natural processes from which other species originated, thereby closing the perceptual divide between the nature and origin of humans and non-human animals. Even twentieth-century psychological theories of the unconscious and childhood development face similar resistance for challenging the belief that humans are the masters of their own minds and

16 Sandra Jane Fairbanks, “Environmental Goodness and the Challenge of American Culture,” & The Environment 15, no. 2 (2010): 79-102, 85. 17 Xenophanes, B14, B15, and B16, A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Curd (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 34. Becker - 7 for connecting human cognition to instinctual ‘animal’ drive.18 While irrational resistance to these ‘Copernican Revolutions’ is often used as an example of human hubris and biased rejection of scientific knowledge, the same anthropocentrism continues to pollute contemporary human thought and inquiry unabated.

A recent example comes from the field of animal behaviorism, which purports to study the ways in which non-human animals (especially undomesticated or ‘wild’ animals) interact with others and with their natural environment. Initial studies of the social behavior of wolves established and popularized the concept of a “lead dog” that gains and asserts authority through aggressive domination of other wolves in the pack.19 Such studies described wolf behavior in

“terms of competition for the social role of ‘alpha,’” Jane M. Packard diagnoses, finding this explanation “anthropomorphic” because it mimics human structures of social authority, competition, and dominance.20 Paradoxically, this view also anthropocentrically refuses to identify characteristics that many humans and wolves have in common, such as “nuclear family” relationships, peacefully cooperative group dynamics, and individual behavior profiles

“analogous to ‘personality,’” Packard explains.21 Updated models identify typical wolf packs not as hierarchies established through dominance, but as families led by a patriarch and matriarch

(usually biological parents and their offspring), which operate cooperatively and peacefully in most circumstances, and even adopt orphaned wolves into the pack.22

18 The famous example here is Sigmund Freud’s work. While many aspects of Freudian psychology have been discredited, his work nevertheless remains hugely productive, as many of his ideas continue to be adapted and expanded and remain relevant in their abstract form to current psychological investigation. 19 R. Schenkel, Expression Studies on Wolves: Captivity Observations (Basel: University of Basel, 1946), 6, http://www.davemech.org/schenkel/, accessed April 22, 2016. 20 Jane M. Packard, “Wolf Behavior: Reproductive, Social, and Intelligent,” Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, edited by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 35-65, 55. 21 Ibid., 55-56. 22 Packard, “Wolf Behavior,” 35-65; L. David Mech, “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 77 (1999): 1196-1203. Becker - 8

The ‘lead dog’ or ‘alpha’ misconception resulted from initial studies in which animal behaviorists focused only on wolves in captivity, and only studied groups of primarily unrelated adult wolves without their parents and without previous relationships. Moreover, studies repeated these errors for decades, each confirming the findings unaware of their own problematic methodology. Vegan epistemologists may identify a number of carnist fallacies in this case and others like it: the assumption that non-human animals are not individuals with unique

‘personalities,’ so individual behavior can be extrapolated to entire species; the assumption that non-human animals cannot form unique relationships with other individuals or with specific groups or families, so the behavior of unrelated groups can be extrapolated to natural social groups; the assumption that the social relationships of non-human animals may be analogous to competitive aspects of human interaction, but not to cooperative or familial aspects; the assumption that non-human animals (being ‘uncivilized’) have no special relationship with their environment or surroundings, so their behavior in artificial environments can be expected to resemble their behavior in natural environments.

But anthropocentrism here is not limited to errors made in the initial inquiry; rather it persists in the social selection and evolution of ‘common knowledge.’ In this example, updated models of wolf sociology have since gained prominence in the scientific community, but this anthropocentric view of wolves nevertheless continues to resist new information in popular perception. The continued use of ‘alpha wolf’ terminology, which according to L. David Mech falsely implies “a rigid, force-based dominance hierarchy,” fits into a broader narrative of non- human animal social habits as ‘dog eat dog’—ruthless and instinctual behavior of ‘lesser’ beings incapable of social interaction unique to the ‘personalities’ of individual members.23

23 David L. Mech, “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 77 (1999): 1196-1203, 1201. Notably, Mech personally coined the term ‘alpha’ and has since dedicated his Becker - 9

Anthropocentrism in this case presents as the epistemic desire to separate human behavior from non-human animal behavior, thereby establishing human civilization as an achievement that distinguishes humanity from the natural world.

But a far more dire aspect of anthropocentrism—the perception of the environment and its inhabitants as resources for humans to exploit—is even more deeply rooted in human history and seems impervious to change. Fairbanks explains, “Traditional Western philosophies and religions have generally promoted [human] domination and exploitation of the environment.

Traditional, predominantly anthropocentric views… have conditioned the attitudes, values, and beliefs of human beings, with disastrous consequences for the environment.”24 Thus, anthropocentric treatment of the earth and its non-human inhabitants as ‘resources’ is responsible for environmental policies and practices that have generated resource scarcity, mass extinctions, and climate change.25 One might object to the necessity of the vegan perspective by pointing out that nearly all branches of science are already uniting to combat the negative impacts of anthropocentric practices, such as climate change. Indeed, the issue of climate change is certainly the most urgent subject for much of the scientific community, as researchers in many different fields contribute to the study of new environmental issues in hopes of identifying potential solutions and limiting human impacts on the environment. Despite all of this attention and urgency, however, so little press has been dedicated to the human practice that contributes more than any other to climate change and resource depletion: animal agriculture, the most integral life’s work attempting to correct his admittedly anthropocentric error. Despite his efforts, the flawed concept of ‘alpha’ wolves persists, and has even been erroneously extrapolated to domesticated dogs, as ‘dog trainers’ encourage humans to become the ‘alpha’ by aggressively dominating domesticated dogs despite research showing that dogs train better with positive reinforcement. S. Yin, “Dominance versus Leadership in Dog Training,” Compendium Continuing Education for the Practicing Veterinarian 29 (2007): 414-432. 24 Sandra Jane Fairbanks, “Environmental Goodness,” 79-80. 25 In response to unsustainability of anthropocentric environmental practices, theorists have proposed alternative views such as ecocentrism and biocentrism. See Jonathan Padwe, “Anthropocentrism,” Oxford Bibliographies, August 26, 2013, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199830060/obo- 9780199830060-0073.xml, accessed April 23, 2016. Becker - 10 institution of carnism in action. Vegans are leading the charge against animal agriculture by working to research and publicize its environmental impact, despite facing adversity from agribusiness and political institutions in the form of lawsuits, legislation, and threats. Without the vegan perspective, animal agriculture—the leading cause of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane greenhouse gas emissions, global deforestation, aquifer depletion, and groundwater pollution—would continue to remain invisible in environmental policy and public opinion, unchecked by mainstream environmentalists.

The process of adopting vegan ideology involves conscious awareness and rejection of the ‘invisible’ ideology of carnism, as many are enculturated into the exploitation of animals and later convert to veganism after investigating their own assumptions, choosing to recognize their own complicity in exploitative practices, adapting to new information, and reforming their behaviors to reflect this new awareness. Because of this, vegans have fewer epistemic barriers to achieving a non-anthropocentric perspective and have fewer ideological barriers to being empathetic towards the perspectives and experiences of nonhuman animals. Many initially adopt veganism as a personal or individual commitment rather than as a political standpoint; however, this individual self-reflection and self-correction primes vegans to investigate institutional assumptions and practices as well. Thus, vegan epistemology provides a much-needed platform from which to combat anthropocentrism in human inquiry without the restrictions of carnist assumptions and interests.

II. Speciesism

Speciesism refers to or bias on the basis of species, and it affects human inquiry in cases in which data is given undue attention, is resisted, or is rejected based on assumptions regarding the value, characteristics, or capacities of certain species. Speciesism, a subset of Becker - 11 anthropocentrism, is divisible into two categories: the first category, human speciesism or human supremacy, involves refusing to extend certain rights, protections, or moral status to all non- human animals on the basis of their non-humanity; the second category involves erroneously assigning value or characteristics to non-human animals on the basis of species alone.

Richard Ryder defines the first category, human supremacy, as “the belief that we are entitled to treat members of other species in a way in which it would be wrong to treat members of our own species.”26 For example, considers “the belief that human life, and only human life, is sacrosanct” to be a form of speciesism, including the notion that humans have

‘souls’ and animals do not.27 This belief serves to justify the sacrificing of non-human animals to human interests ranging from the crucial to the frivolous, from medical needs to fashion sense.

While the killing of animals for meat or fur proceeds with strategic invisibility, the harming and killing of animals for biomedical research is contrastingly a highly publicized and debated topic, particularly in the field of —a branch of value theory concerned with ethics of biological and medical research and practice. Many bioethicists contend that , while unfortunate, is necessary because it saves human lives, and human lives take moral precedence over non-human animal lives. Proponents of this view tend to recommend reducing the use of animal testing to only ‘necessary’ cases, and reducing the physical suffering involved as much as possible. Others, however, respond to criticism by proudly embracing speciesism, such as Carl Cohen, who considers it a ‘moral imperative’ and advocates for increasing the use of non-human animal testing to any relevant case in biomedical research: “I am a speciesist… It

26 Peter Singer, (New York: HarperCollins, 1975), 9. 27 Ibid., 18. Becker - 12 is essential for right conduct.”28 Regardless of whether researchers view speciesism as a necessary evil or a moral imperative, remarkably few have thought to examine the effects of their speciesist beliefs on research itself.

Proponents of animal testing in biomedical research face serious problems, both in their moral reasoning (the primary target of criticism) and in their scientific justification. Bioethicists continue to question whether or not it morally permissible to sacrifice non-human animal lives for the benefit of science, yet this line of inquiry is predicated on a blatant assumption that has somehow escaped due scrutiny: the assumption that non-human testing benefits science. Meta- research in the biomedical field has only recently criticized the fundamental error of attempting to extrapolate test results from one species to another. In nearly all cases, the scientific justification of drawing human implications from non-human test subjects is insufficient.

“Researchers realized that humans and non-human animals often had similar biological functions

[and assumed] they could safely generalize experimental results in animals to human beings”

Hugh Lafollette and Niall Shanks explain, “This assumption, though, overlooks the inferential gap between an organism’s underlying causal mechanisms and its emergent functional properties”—a gap which is “biomedically significant.”29

Bioethical problems aside, even if researchers place no moral value at all on the more than 25 million rodents, birds, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats, and primates (and the unknown number of fish and frogs) killed annually for the purpose of biomedical testing, the use of non-human

28 Carl Cohen, “The Case for Biomedical Experimentation,” New England Journal of Medicine 315, no. 14 (1986), 867. Cohen’s account, while influential, faces numerous moral and logical problems for which its leading proponents have yet to answer (See subsequent footnote). 29 Hugh Lafollette and Niall Shanks, “The Origin of Speciesism,” Philosophy 71, no. 275 (Jan., 1996): 41- 61, 47. Becker - 13 animal testing lacks scientific justification.30 It was not until people concerned with the political goal of saving non-human animal lives began to pose empirical questions about the moral justification that the scientific justification too became exposed to much-needed criticism.

Increasing demand for meta-research by advocates has resulted in more systematic review processes that continue to identify non-human animal testing procedures as methodologically problematic and unnecessarily wasteful and expensive practices that yield few

(if any) relevant results.31 Moreover, in the case of psychological research, speciesists face an underlying contradiction between their proclaimed scientific and moral justifications: “The researchers are caught in a logical trap: in order to defend the usefulness of research they must emphasize the similarities between the animals and the humans, but in order to defend it ethically, they must emphasize the differences,” argues, “The problem is that one cannot have it both ways.”32

Thus, the real justification for non-human animal testing remains the speciesist sentiment that such sacrifices will be worth the cost so long as a single human life can be saved. But belief that such testing saves human lives is less founded in empirical science and more founded in superstition and tradition, as medical historians find that non-human animal testing has played no discernable role in the breakthroughs of human medicine.33 “Clinicians and the public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of disease,” a British

30 “Annual Report Animal Usage by Fiscal Year,” Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, July 27th, 2011, http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_welfare/efoia/downloads/ 2010_Animals_Used_In_Research.pdf, accessed April 23, 2016. 31 Pandora Pound, Shah Ebrahim, Peter Sandercock, Michael B. Bracken, and Ian Roberts, “Where is the Evidence that Animal Research Benefits Humans?” British Medical Journal 328 (Feb., 2004): 514-517. Accessed April 24, 2016. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC351856/. 32 James Rachels, Created From Animals (Oxford University Press, 1990), 220. 33 Robert Sharpe, The Cruel Deception: The Use of Animals in Medical Research (London: Thorsons Publishing Group, 1988; , Slaughter of the Innocent (New York: Bantam Books, 1978). Becker - 14

Medical Journal study determines, “yet little evidence is available to support this view.”34

Despite the “lack of systematic evidence for its effectiveness” and the overreliance on “anecdotal evidence or unsupported claims” used in justification, the Journal notes, “basic animal testing still receives much more funding than clinical research.”35 Non-human animal testing, then, persists in no small part due to financial incentives rooted in speciesist assumptions and traditions for which there is insufficient scientific justification. Human supremacy clearly has profound impacts on knowledge practices, which demonstrates a need for the vegan perspective to investigate and identify the implications of speciesism in human inquiry.

The second category of speciesism, which involves assigning value or assuming characteristics or capacities on the basis of species alone, dictates common perceptions of animal characteristics, which in turn affect legislative policy.36 Activities performed in sociology and psychology classrooms demonstrate that students unreflectively ascribe markedly different characteristics to pigs and dogs; students perceive pigs as ‘fat, lazy, stupid, and dirty,’ whereas they perceive dogs as ‘cute, loyal, fun, and intelligent.’37 When given reason to believe that pigs are highly intelligent animals with individual personalities (and that dogs can be just as ‘dirty’ or

‘lazy’) and given reason to question the perceptual divide between ‘food’ and ‘pets,’ students begin to experience guilt or discomfort at the thought of breeding pigs for slaughter.38 “When our

34 Pound, “Where is the Evidence” 35 Ibid. 36 In the case of non-human animal testing, for example, legislators place more value on species that more closely resemble humans (such as great apes) or that are commonly used as companion animals (such as dogs and cats) by demanding certain standards of ‘humane’ conditions and care for test subjects. Other species, like rodents, fish, and birds, are valued less, so researchers are free to treat such animals with lowest care possible within the perimeters of their experiments. 37 Joy, Why We Love Dogs. 38 Ibid. Becker - 15 attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined,” Joy determines, “we can safely say we have been fed absurdities.”39

Such speciesist ‘absurdities’ affect not only cultural perception, but also rational inquiry in areas like ecology. One such example is the formation and perpetuation of oversimplified or erroneous ecological models like the ‘food chain:’ a linear hierarchy of domination based on the perceived predatory order of animals, which places humans at the top (capable of eating any other animal below) followed by carnivorous ‘apex predators’ with no natural predators of their own and continuing all the way down the ‘chain’ to the ‘producer species’ at the bottom (which presumably exist only for the purpose of being eaten). The food chain owes its origin not to empirical scientific research, but to a concept in Western metaphysical theology called the ‘great chain of being’—a complex of chains into which Neo-Platonists in the Middle Ages ordered everything from heavenly bodies to insects into fixed places in an anthropocentric hierarchy, with human beings (ordered from kings to slaves) above all earthly beings and underneath the

Judeo-Christian God alone.40 More accurate ecological models rooted in empirical research reject the notion of fixed hierarchies and instead identify ‘food webs’ comprised of interlocking and interdependent food chains in which species have varying degrees of mobility. Nevertheless, the ‘food chain’ concept continues to resist new evidence and seeps into cultural perception and even into elementary education, partly due to its role in confirming the narrative of speciesist hierarchy and the bias of human supremacy.

Some carnists use the food chain myth to justify human exploitation of other species, as well as to justify the inconsistent treatment of varying species by appealing to their perceived place in the hierarchical chain. Carnists perceive carnivorous apex predators as more valuable by

39 Ibid. 40 Edward P. Mahoney, “Lovejoy and the Hierarchy of Being,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (Apr.-Jun., 1987): 211-230, 216-217. Becker - 16 virtue of their position ‘high in the food chain’ and afford such predators a certain prestige, whereas they perceive species that are ‘low in the food chain,’ particularly herbivores like cows and chickens, as less valuable and existing only as a food source for others. But this view contains numerous problems, beginning with the narrative of human domination, as the belief that humans are at the top of the global food web fails to withstand empirical investigation. In ecological theory, a basic metric for understanding the relative position of various species in the food web is the ‘trophic level:’ a metric calculated by synthesizing the composition of food in a species’ diet as well as its nutritional relationship to other species (what a species eats and by what species it is eaten).41 One study performed to correct the omission of humans from ecological theory calculates the global human trophic level as only 2.21 on a scale of 1 to 5, which ranges from plants and phytoplankton at level 1 to carnivorous apex predators like polar bears and killer whales at level 5.42 Far from being classifiable as apex predators, humans’ trophic level fits into the food web at roughly the same level as anchovies and pigs.

Of course human beings as a species do manage to kill and exploit carnivorous apex predators and even drive some to extinction, but this speaks to institutional practices and does not reflect the physical ability of most humans operating outside of these institutions, such as humans in hunter-gatherer communities or hikers encountering grizzly bears. Moreover, the humans who actually kill apex predators represent a small minority of the total human population such that extrapolating the ability of some humans to all humans is questionable. Nevertheless, the notion of an anthropocentric ‘food chain’—a common justification for carnist practices—

41 Trophic levels are scored from 1-5 reflecting the number of intermediaries between a species and those at the base or apex of its food web; ‘producer species’ form the base of the food web and are defined as trophic level 1, whereas carnivorous ‘apex predators’ form the top and are defined as trophic level 5 (see subsequent footnote). 42 Sylvain Bonhommeau, et. al, “Eating Up the World’s Food Web and the Human Trophic Level,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 110, no. 51 (2013), accessed April 24, 2016, http://www.pnas.org/content/110/51/20617.full. Becker - 17 continues to pollute social perception as well as scientific inquiry, and the belief that ecology is reducible to a fixed speciesist hierarchy has epistemic implications as well.

China’s Four Pests Campaign (1958) exemplifies the dangers of speciesism in environmental perception and policy. In this campaign, the state mandated all citizens to participate in a cull of four species perceived as ‘pests,’ including sparrows, which were despised for eating crops.43 The campaign successfully culled millions of birds and drove the region’s sparrow population to near-extinction; however, the research that led to the cull focused only on the sparrow’s role in the depletion of human grain rather than on its ecological role, which included eating insects. Without sparrows as a natural predator, the insect population increased tremendously and swarmed agricultural crops, contributing to what Judith Shapiro calls “the greatest famine in history” in terms of human casualties with death toll estimates ranging in the tens of millions.44

Thus, speciesism profoundly affects human perception of the natural world and of humanity’s place in the ecosystem, causing carnists to arbitrarily determine which animals are companions and which are food, to rationalize unsound ethical positions based on perceived human domination of a monolithic ecological hierarchy, and to enact disastrous environmental policies based on the perception of the environment and other species as resources for human consumption. Vegan epistemology, which entails belief in the moral status or value of all species, stands to reevaluate the narrative of human supremacy and speciesism that underlies carnist interaction with the natural world, thereby inducing much needed reform of knowledge practices in ecological science and environmental policy.

43 Denis Summers-Smith, In Search of Sparrows (London: A&C Black, 2010), 123-124. 44 Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86-90. Becker - 18

III. Testimonial Injustice

As veganism struggles for visibility in mainstream culture, carnism continues to evolve new defenses against the dissenting vegan ideology, including satirical portrayals and negative meant to discredit vegans in popular culture—a phenomenon involving what

Miranda Fricker calls identity power, defined as an operation of power that depends on “shared imaginative conceptions of social identity.”45 According to Fricker, operations of identity power affect social conditions of knowledge by inflicting testimonial injustice: the “prejudicial dysfunction in testimonial practice” that occurs when perceived aspects of one’s identity

(especially race and gender) result in one receiving a credibility excess, defined as more credibility than one would have otherwise, or a credibility deficit, defined as less credibility than one would have otherwise.46 For example, consider a case in which a woman is presumed to have less knowledge in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) than her qualifications warrant due to cultural perceptions of such fields as ‘male’ pursuits, so she receives a credibility deficit that keeps her from being recognized as an expert by colleagues, from being hired or promoted to prestigious positions, or from having her work published.

Of course, veganism is not nearly as embedded in cultural perceptions of one’s identity as gender or race, and it has not been subject to the history of and domination of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, or minority religious groups; moreover, unlike other features of one’s perceived identity, veganism can be hidden or revealed in most circumstances, and only in very rare circumstances would one’s identification with veganism increase one’s risk of personal attacks and bodily harm. Thus, the degrees of injustice vegans face are in no way analogous to the severity of oppression and injustice faced by women

45 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14. 46 Ibid., 17. Becker - 19 or persons of color. With that in mind, the concept of testimonial injustice proves useful for understanding operations of identity power against vegans by identifying ways in which carnism resists not only dissenting viewpoints, but also dissenting persons.

Richard Kahn identifies ways in which “Vegans not only encounter across society, but also ‘microinequities,’” defined as “the pattern of being overlooked, underrespected, and devalued,” which results from “widespread structural ignorance to vegan issues.”47 Such ‘microinequities’ include lack of vegan options in school lunch programs, non- disclosure of animal ingredients on food packaging labels and restaurant menus, and undisclosed use of animal products in produce products such as bananas and oranges. In social situations, family members and friends become upset, insulting, or coercive when vegans decline offers of carnist food; parents neglect and even refuse to consider the moral decisions of vegan dependents when purchasing or preparing food; restaurant employees intentionally or unintentionally mislead vegan patrons into ordering dishes with animal products. Some vegans are actively bullied, harassed, mocked, and tricked or even forced to eat animal products. In most prisons, vegan inmates must choose between eating flesh and starving.48 Vegans, therefore, face many kinds of oppression ranging from microaggressions to violence perpetrated on behalf of prejudice against veganism.

But testimonial injustice remains the primary defense mechanism of the carnist ideology.

Media portrayals perpetuate a number of distinct vegan stereotypes; for example, the hypocritical vegan who is repressed and desperately tempted to consume non-human animal flesh or wear fur. Phoebe (a vegetarian) on Friends craves meat, so she rationalizes carnism by having a

47 Richard Kahn, “Towards an Animal Standpoint: Vegan Education and the Epistemology of Ignorance,” Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education, edited by Erik Malewski and Nathalia E. Jaramillo (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2011): 53-70, 60. 48 Amy Ogden and Paul Rebein, “Do Prison Inmates Have a Right to Vegetarian Meals?” Vegetarian Journal 20, no. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 2001). Becker - 20 carnist eat vegetarian meals on her behalf, thereby ‘cancelling out’ her carnist choices.49 Nora

Zinman, a minor character on How I Met Your Mother, refuses meat and sarcastically whines to the carnists, “Oh, I’m a vegan. I wish I could tune out that moral voice inside me that says is murder. But, I guess I’m just not as strong as you are.”50 After breaking off her engagement with another vegan (who is mocked and called an “idiot” by a carnist for insisting that “fish feel pain”), she is then seen moaning in satisfaction while eating meat.51 Other stereotypes depict vegans as insincere and self-righteous, such as Jesse the ‘ecoterrorist’ in an episode of The Simpsons who belittles Lisa’s and says of himself, “I’m a level 5 vegan—I won’t eat anything that casts a shadow,” or Steve Small on The Amazing World of

Gumball who admits he is vegan only “for the feeling of superiority it [creates].”52

Negative stereotypes of vegans exemplify what Matthew Cole and Karne Morgan call

‘,’ defined as prejudice against vegans and veganism.53 Cole and Morgan investigate the effects of vegaphobia on human inquiry, finding that researchers often misinterpret results of studies involving vegans because of their internalization of prejudice against vegan testimony.

Veganism “tends to be viewed [by researchers] as a form of dietary involving exceptional efforts of self-transformation,” Cole and Morgan explain, noting that only in cases in which vegans are researched specifically do animal rights “clearly [emerge] as the primary motivation.”54 In a Foucauldian study of vegaphobic discourse in British national newspapers,

49 “The One With the Fake Party,” FriendsWiki, accessed April 24, 2016, http://friends.wikia.com/wiki/ The_One_With_The_Fake_Party 50 “How I Met Your Mother: Shelter Island (2008),” IMDB, Internet Movie Database, accessed April 24, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1256187/quotes. 51 Ibid. 52 “Straw Vegetarian,” TVTropes.org, accessed April 24, 2016, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ Main/StrawVegetarian. 53 Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan, “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspapers,” The British Journal of Sociology 62, no. 1 (2011): 134- 153, 135. 54 Ibid., 135. Becker - 21 out of 397 articles containing discourses of veganism, only 22 could be categorized as ‘positive,’

80 were ‘neutral,’ and 295 were categorized as ‘negative.’55 The anti-vegan content in these

‘negative’ discourses fit into the following six categories listed in order of frequency of occurrence: ridiculing veganism, characterizing veganism as asceticism, describing veganism as difficult or impossible to sustain, describing veganism as a fad, characterizing vegans as oversensitive, or characterizing vegans as hostile—each of these discourses actively works to discredit the character and testimony of vegans in public perception.56 Moreover, the ‘neutral’ discourses also worked to reiterate the perception of vegans as difficult to accommodate by stressing that certain restaurants ‘even cater to vegans.’57 Crucially, in the very few ‘positive’ discourses, none of the writers made any mention of the ethical motivations of veganism and instead referred only to practical benefits of the vegan diet and lifestyle.58

Vegan testimony is particularly unwelcome in education, as vegans face the possibility of being persecuted for vocalizing their stance. Keith Allison of Ohio was fired from a 2nd grade teaching position for posting an anti-dairy message on his personal social media account, which the school superintendent feared “might offend the community and the economic interests” of its agricultural population.59 Similarly, Dave Warwak, a 5th through 8th grade teacher in Chicago, was suspended and then fired by his public school for trying to “influence students against the school lunch program” by teaching art from an animal standpoint and by encouraging students to protest for the removal the National Dairy Council promotional posters from the lunch room walls—an attempt by corporate agribusiness to utilize public education as a place to naturalize

55 Ibid., 138. 56 Ibid., 139. 57 Ibid., 147-148. 58 Ibid. 59 Dave Nethers, “Vegan Teacher Fired Over Facebook Post,” Fox 8 Cleveland, December 12, 2014, accessed April 24, 2016, http://fox8.com/2014/12/12/vegan-teacher-fired-over-facebook-post/. Becker - 22 carnist habits and increase profits.60 Warwak’s art program “sought to provide a form of epistemological rupture of the educational status quo in order to call attention to the role being played” by non-vegan food and carnist ideology in his own school.61

In higher education, Kahn identifies the tendency for academics to “uncritically reproduce the sentiments of corporations and the state about the as being composed of irrational and increasingly criminal elements,” which inflicts testimonial injustice against vegans by institutionally delegitimizing research on non-human animal rights and welfare issues.62 , a professor of philosophy, lost his departmental chair at the

University of Texas at El Paso, received a permanent ban on visitation rights by the United

Kingdom, and has been branded an ‘ecoterrorist’ in response to his written work on animal liberation.63 Kahn himself recalls being “actively discouraged by mentors from doing animal standpoint work,” being coached to deemphasize vegan research in his curriculum vitae, having prospective employers seek assurance from his professional references that his veganism was just a research interest and not a link to criminal activity, and even being unjustly accused by a graduate school professor of participating in a publicized act of vandalism (‘ecoterrorism’).64

Even within activist communities, vegans suffer from a credibility deficit due to mischaracterizations of vegan activists as “white liberals who have adopted a political cause that

60 Kahn, “Towards an Animal Standpoint,” 62. 61 Ibid., 64-65. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. Notably, groups like the and the Earth Liberation Front have been labeled domestic “terrorist” organizations despite limiting their crimes to property damage and animal theft, whereas organizations known for killing people, such as anti-abortion extremists, groups (including the Ku Klux Klan), and right-wing militias, have yet to be labeled as such. See Leighton Woodhouse, “How the Pursuit of Animal Liberation Activists Became Among the FBI’s ‘Highest Domestic Terrorism Priorities,” Huffpost Politics, The Huffington Post, accessed April 24, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leighton-woodhouse/animal- liberation_b_2012426.html. 64 Kahn, “Towards an Animal Standpoint,” 65. Becker - 23 works to divert them from the need to examine the other forms of prejudice.”65 Vegans are told that they should be concerned with instead of animal rights, and that their priorities are offensive in the context of oppression against human beings. This unjustly renders vegan people of color invisible, thereby serving to discredit the animal standpoint by reducing veganism to feature of , preventing the merger of human and animal rights discourse and instead pitting them against each other, and negating the voices of vegan activists of color in the struggle for human and animal rights.66 Moreover, criticisms of vegan priorities fail to acknowledge the profound ways in which vegans contribute to human rights and welfare by protesting the hazardous working conditions and unfair treatment of laborers in the agricultural industry, educating people on nutritional health and wellness, opposing political and corporate corruption in agribusiness, and combating animal agriculture—one of the leading contributors to climate change, which endangers human lives.67 Such accusations wrongly assume that moral action is a finite resource and necessarily limited to a single cause, thereby negating the combined human and animal rights activism of vegans in the fight for social justice, including César Chávez, Coretta Scott King, Alice Walker, and Michael Franti.68

Carnism interconnects with a broader network of unreflective prejudices embedded in oppressive societies, including prejudices rooted in cultural norms of gender. “It is significant that the vegans singled out for press vilification are women,” Cole and Morgan observe,

“Faddism is frequently associated with women’s subculture as a trivialization strategy [and] the discourse of the ‘over-sensitive’ vegan plays to a gendered stereotype of sentimentality… as it

65 Ibid., 61. 66 For a resource designed to combat the invisibility of people of color in the vegan movement, see Black Vegans Rock, accessed April 24, 2016, http://www.blackvegansrock.com. 67 For a bibliography of sources regarding animal agriculture’s impact on climate change and other environmental concerns, see “The Facts,” .org, http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/. 68 Kahn, “Towards an Animal Standpoint,” 61. Becker - 24 draws on gendered stereotypes of women as ‘over-emotional’ or irrational.”69 Testimonial injustice against vegans taps into the more pervasive testimonial injustice perpetrated against women, as the existing structures of gender used to perpetuate the subordination of women to men depends on widespread internalization of discrediting portrayals of women.

Vegaphobia enlists cultural conceptions of masculinity as well, as carnist culture attempts to discredit male vegans by connecting veganism with being emasculated or ‘unmanly.’

“Throughout much of European history, meat has been closely associated with power and privilege,” Matthew B. Ruby and Steven J. Heine explain, “meat is a symbol of patriarchy, due to its long-standing associations with manhood, power, and virility,” and many men claim that a meal without meat is not a ‘real’ meal.70 Numerous studies of perceptions of food and gender find that men who abstain from eating meat are perceived as “less masculine than omnivores.”71

Thus, carnist men not only stigmatize male vegans for their abstinence from symbols of masculinity, but also fetishize meat itself through performances like ‘bacon culture’—the turning of cooked pig flesh into a cultural icon, which is appropriated as a symbol of ‘masculinity’ in television, crafted into absurd fad foods, advertised and consumed in gratuitous quantities, and even depicted in images worn on clothing.

Carnist ideology is also interconnected with cultural perceptions of race, as the oppression of humans and the oppression of animals have both involved attempts to justify the exploitation and killing of other beings on the basis of assigning status as ‘non-human.’ apologists and pseudo-scientists spent centuries inventing, emphasizing, and seeking to confirm perceived differences between ‘races’ of humans in order to deprive black people of the moral

69 Cole, “Vegaphobia,” 144-145. 70 Matthew B. Ruby and Steven J. Heine, “Meat, Morals, and Masculinity,” Appetite 56 (2011): 447-450, 448. 71 Ruby and Heine, “Meat, Morals, and Masculinity;” Margaret A. Thomas, “Are Vegans the Same as Vegetarians? The Effect of Diet on Perceptions of Masculinity,” Appetite 97 (Feb. 1, 2016): 79-86. Becker - 25 status of ‘personhood.’ White supremacists used this assigned deprivation to justify to themselves the oppression, enslavement, and murder of countless human beings. Such justifications could only serve as justifications by appealing to the speciesist belief that exploiting and killing non-human animals is morally permissible. Both and speciesism rely heavily on the assumption that biological difference is a morally relevant category, and human inquiry, rife with confirmation bias, continues to focus on emphasizing difference.

Furthermore, vegans of color continue to identify ways in which the justifications of carnism on the basis of difference and non-humanity directly or indirectly impact the conditions of oppression faced by minority groups. A. Breeze Harper criticizes the association of the vegan movement with “whiteness” and the exclusion of many diverse voices from the mainstream vegan movement, and advocates instate for a race conscious vegan movement.72 Social space,

Harper contends, is “racialized, and simultaneously sexualized, gendered, and classed, directly affecting individual and place identities, including one’s philosophy of what counts as a moral food system.”73 This unequal mapping of social space has epistemic consequences, Harper explains, as “collectively low-income urban black Americans in the USA know that a holistic plant-based diet is most often nearly impossible to achieve; simultaneously, the collectivity of white middle-class urban people in the USA know that a holistic plant-based diet generally is easy to achieve.”74 Black female vegans conceptualize a veganism that reflects the cultural and socio-historical experience of their race and sex, noting that many black women transition to a plant-based diet in order to combat racial health disparities (such as diabetes, fibroids, and heart disease, which disproportionately affect people of color, as does unequal access to nutritional

72 A. Breeze Harper, “Going Beyond the Normative White ‘Post-Racial’ Vegan Epistemology,” Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by Psyche Williams Forson and Carole Counihan (London: Routledge, 2013): 155-174, 155. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. (emphasis in the original) Becker - 26 education, plant-based foods, and health care) and to “[decolonize] their bodies from the legacies of racialized colonialism, such as institutional and structural racism”—motivations which are rendered invisible by the perceived ‘whiteness’ of the mainstream vegan movement.75

The intersection of race, gender, and veganism demonstrates the interconnected nature of various ideologies of oppression, such as carnism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, all of which affect human perception, entail epistemic injustice, and seep into human inquiry. Despite their pervasiveness, however, these ideologies of oppression are remarkably fragile for those who benefit from their existence, as they must be nurtured and protected by hypersensitive defense mechanisms that activate at any sign of dissent. “The sheer effort to discredit veganism may be evidence [that] human violence towards nonhuman animals is deeply problematic to most humans,” Cole and Morgan conclude, “If it were not, there would be little purpose to vegaphobic discourse.”76 By investigating the ways in which carnism as an ideology of oppression perpetuates testimonial injustice against vegans—and by extension against vegan women, vegan people of color, LGBTQ vegans, and vegans at the intersection of these and other identities— vegan epistemology stands to improve cultural ways of knowing, not only in inquiries of non- human animal rights, but also in inquiries of human rights and social justice, as some vegans have already demonstrated in the fields of ecofeminism and postcolonialism.

Moving Beyond Carnist Ignorance

Veganism is an ideology founded on awareness, whereas carnism remains an ‘invisible’ and unreflective ideology that is vehemently resistant to criticism; restated, veganism is an ideology of knowing whereas carnism is an ideology of non-knowing. Carnism is a particular type of ideology that is not only ‘invisible,’ but also “especially resistant to scrutiny,” Joy

75 A. Breeze Harper, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, edited by A. Breeze Harper (New York: Lantern Books, 2010); Harper, “Going Beyond,” 157. 76 Cole, “Vegaphobia,” 144-145. Becker - 27 explains.77 Thus, vegan epistemologists must approach carnism not as a passive lack of knowledge, but instead as what Charles Mills calls “an ignorance that fights back,” here adapted and referred to as carnist ignorance—a combination of the absence of true belief and the presence of false belief, which prejudicially polices and defends carnist ideology and practice.78

Such forms of social ignorance shape the conceptual map with which humans navigate the world, Mills explains: “Because language acquisition is socially mediated, the concepts we acquire are themselves socially mediated from the very beginning,” and as a result, our concepts are not neutral; rather, they are “oriented toward a certain understanding, embedded in subtheories and larger theories about how things work.”79 Thus, Mills concludes, the conceptual array with which humans approach the world needs to be “scrutinized… for how well it maps the reality it claims to be describing,” as conditions of social ignorance reflexively ‘filter out’ problematic perceptions and induce confirmation bias.80

Carnism is mapped onto social and individual perceptions of the world, orienting humans through prejudicial language and concepts toward a certain understanding of humanity, non- human animals, and the environment. Carnist epistemology is pervasive, unreflective, invisible, resistant to dissenting information, and devouring of false confirmation; moreover, it is rooted in assumptions that are fragile, unstable, and dependent on indefensible moral and scientific reasoning, such that most humans are uncomfortable with any self-reflections suggestive of their

77 Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (Newburyport: Red Wheel Weiser, 2009), ePub. 78 Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 24. This concept comprises part of Mills’ theory of “white ignorance,” which identifies the ways in which racialized society and issues such as white normativity, racial oppression, social invisibility of people of color, and the editing of historical memory for the benefit of whites affect social modes of knowing. By adapting this concept, I do not intend to compare the situation of oppressed people and non-human animals; rather, I use this concept to illustrate the types of barriers and constraints that perpetuate and preserve a social ideological status quo. 79 Ibid., 24. 80 Ibid. Becker - 28 complicity in violence against non-human animals. Operating within this epistemic blindspot, even self-purportedly objective methods of inquiry are saturated with unacknowledged bias, which leaves inquirers no clear path to making visible the invisible.

Combating carnist ignorance, therefore, demands not investigation from within, but revolution from without—accomplishing this requires a perspective such that in order for one to have it, one must self-consciously seek to eradicate carnism from all aspects of one’s life and thought. Since veganism stands in opposition to countless practices and beliefs that comprise the default position of human societies and institutions, any efforts to veganize human operations are necessarily efforts of reform, framing vegan choices as a form of political protest and enlisting vegan voices into a chiefly political enterprise. In a society in which carnist ignorance remains the universal default, however, such political goals are not merely permissible in human knowledge practices; they are epistemologically necessary. Veganism is the price of admission for dismantling carnist ignorance, as it provides the perceptual liberation required to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist assumptions, to reclaim credibility for marginalized human and non-human animal voices, and to reform the institutions of human knowledge. Becker - 29

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