Three major animal rights philosophers agree: it is okay to kill animals when you have no other form of sustenance.

None of this discussion is intended to suggest that people who need to kill animals in order to survive – people living in poverty who are struggling to get enough to feed themselves and their families, or those living a traditional hunting and gathering existence – should not do so. If cows, pigs, chickens and the other animals we usually eat are self-aware, they are still not self-aware to anything like the extent that humans normally are. I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one’s life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a geographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation toward the future.

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, p. 122

There are five survivors, four normal adult human beings and a dog. The boat will support only four. All will perish if one is not sacrificed. Which one ought to be cast overboard? The rights view’s answer is: the dog. The magnitude of the harm that death is, it has been argued, is a function of the number and variety of opportunities for satisfaction it forecloses for a given individual, and it is not speciesist to claim that the death of any of these humans would be a prima facie greater harm in their case than the harm death would be in the case of the dog. Indeed, numbers make no difference in this case. A million dogs ought to be cast overboard if that is necessary to save the four normal humans, the aggregate of the lesser harms of the individual animals harming no one in a way that is prima facie comparable to the harm death would be to any of these humans. But suppose, a critic may conjecture, it is not a question of having enough room on the boat. Imagine it is a question of which individual to eat if four others are to survive. Who should be eaten? The rights view’s answer, once again, is: the dog. And it is the dog who should be eaten because the harm that death is in the case of that animal is not as great a harm as the harm that death would be in the case of any of these humans. In lifeboat cases, in short, the obligation to be vegetarian can be justifiably overridden, according to the rights view. The survivors would be acting within their rights, justified by appeal to the liberty principle, if they chose to kill and eat the dog in these dire circumstances.

— Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, p. 351

What about the situation in which we have no choice but to eat an animal or starve? Assume that Simon is stranded on a remote, snow-covered mountain after a plane crash. He is starving and there is neither a reasonable hope of rescue nor any vegetables available. When a rabbit happens by, Simon is confronted with the choice of killing the rabbit or starving. Just as we would be inclined to excuse Simon if, under these extreme circumstances, he killed and ate a human—which has in fact happened more than once—his killing the rabbit would also be excusable and completely consistent with the animal rights position. … [In] the case of animals, we may well decide that although animals are similar to us in that they are sentient—the only characteristic that is relevant for the purpose of having a right not to be treated as a resource—there may be other characteristics of humans that cause us to tip the balance in their favor in these extreme and unusual cases.

— Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, pp. 158-159

Now don’t take this to mean that it’s okay to eat meat when you’re not in a lifeboat, crashed on a mountain, poor or in a hunter-gatherer society. Sure, most vegans would say it’s okay to eat meat if you’re trapped on an island with no other choice. Since we’re not trapped on a vegetable-free hypothetical zone and likely never will be, however, vegans consider it a moot point.

Sounds reasonable. But let’s see how moot it really is.

What’s interesting about the hunter-gatherer/plane crash/lifeboat scenario is that it forces vegans to admit that human life is more valuable than animal life, although they go to pains to assure us that this admission has nothing to do with speciesism. In the above quotes, both Regan and Singer give supposedly non-speciesist rationalizations for why it’s less of a harm to kill a non-human animal. Due to the nature of other animals and their more limited capacities for enjoying experiences, all humans have more to lose through an early demise than all animals do. None of the million dogs that Regan is so eager to throw off the lifeboat could possibly have a more valuable life than any “normal human.”

Huh. I’ve never seen a feminist say that due to the less satisfactory nature of life as a woman, it would be okay to kill a million women to save a few men. Nor have I heard a gay rights advocate say that it’s okay to kill a million gay people to save a couple of straights. Despite their innocent pleas to the contrary, Singer and Regan are allowing speciesism in survival scenarios, making it the sole form of prejudice that becomes okay when you’re in tight spot. If the lives of animals are less valuable than the lives of humans when you’re on a mountain, in a boat and or hunting and gathering, there is no reason to think animal lives are as valuable as ours when we’re in civilization… which already makes the case for mandatory veganism start to look pretty flimsy.

Francione is a little more slippery than Singer or Regan. He says that death might be more harmful for a young, healthy pup than for a human with a severe a degenerative disease. This still makes a healthy human life more worthwhile than a healthy dog life, and no matter what the human has Francione’s permission to kill the dog with survival at stake, but this nuance makes Francione seem less speciesist than Regan or Singer.

Francione also says it would be excusable for a starving human to kill another human. However, the two real-life cases of humans killing humans for survival that Francione cites do not quite parallel his rabbit-on-the-mountain hypothetical. In the first, four people were trapped on a lifeboat and after nine days with no food and seven days with no water, two of the passengers conspired to kill one of the four. Though one abstained from the attack, all three consumed the blood and flesh of the victim, who was named Parker. (If Parker’s last name had been Lewis, all this might have turned out differently). The three survivors were rescued a few days later. The two killers were tried for murder and served six months. The one who abstained from the killing but not the consuming didn’t even go to trial, since, as all meat eaters who are against hunting know, it is okay to eat meat as long as you’re not the one doing the killing.

In the other example Francione cites, some people got tossed off a lifeboat to keep it from sinking. If there had been a million dogs on board, no doubt they would have got dumped too.

In both of these cases, the choice was between everyone dying or some people dying and others surviving. The fact that Parker could have died of dehydration the next day or the day after that, and that by this point it may have been too late for everyone else, makes his murder less disturbing. That rabbit on the mountain that Simon encounters, however, is adapted to that environment. The rabbit will go on living if Simon throws himself off the mountain to avoid the temptation of killing a sentient creature with the same right to life that he has. There was no such hope for Parker. Of course it makes sense to kill one person on a lifeboat when that means three people survive instead of zero, but would Francione approve of Simon murdering the first happy and healthy human who crossed Simon’s path? My God, Simon, just ask him for directions to town! Yet Francione says it is okay for Simon to eat the rabbit innocently hopping by, since Simon has no way to sustain himself without killing animals.

A typical human existence apparently trumps animal life every single time.

Vegans are not afraid to admit this, because how often do any of us find ourselves about to die if we don’t eat an animal right this second? But this admission has implications that reach beyond hypothetical survival scenarios.

Let’s assume Simon never gets off this mountain. As Francione says, “there is neither a reasonable hope of rescue nor any vegetables available.” Simon eating the rabbit, then, is not trading a life for a life. This rabbit will not sustain Simon until he dies of old age decades later, a grizzled mountain man with a nest of birds in his beard. That rabbit isn’t saving Simon’s life, it’s merely extending it a little. If he doesn’t find another animal to eat after the rabbit, he will still die. So not only is an animal life not worth as much as a human life, it is worth dramatically less. With one rabbit providing so few calories, Simon would have to eat eight rabbits a day to sustain himself — and even that might not satisfy him due to the lack of fat to balance out the protein load. Since the expected lifetime of a rabbit is 9 – 12 years, with potential for 18, and Francione didn’t specify the age of the rabbit or how many Simon could eat in a day, this means that 10 years of rabbit life is worth less than three hours of human life.

Say that right after consuming the poor rabbit, Simon stumbles into a deserted cabin with a working TV and spends the next three hours watching a marathon of Family Matters. Since Francione didn’t tell Simon what he needed to do with his slightly extended life, 10 years of a rabbit’s life are now worth less than Simon experiencing three hours of Steve Urkel.

Which is to say, Francione must not think much of that rabbit.

Couldn’t this mean that animal product consumption is justified even in non-emergency situations? If a rabbit’s life is worth only three hours of TGIF nostalgia, why is it so much worse to eat a small portion of a cow for 15 minutes of gustatory pleasure, and hours of satiation and nourishment pleasure?

Well, wait. Let’s not forget the distinction that vegans want to make, which is that it’s okay for Simon to eat that rabbit only because he doesn’t have any other way to get those three hours of TV in before he dies or finds another rabbit. If there were an orchard on that mountain, the fact that the rabbit life is only worth three hours of human life is no longer a justification for eating Bugs Bunny. Even if the rabbit is worth very little, it is at least worth something, whereas the sexual reproductive organs of trees are worth absolutely nothing. So Simon has to eat the fruit and not the rabbit.

But is this distinction all that meaningful? Eating a fish because you are trapped on an island with nothing to eat but fish temporarily satisfies hunger, as does eating a fish when you live in a city and can also eat a Gardein veggie burger. Does the context change really make so much difference? To paraphrase Francione, sentience is all that matters in our treatment of animals, but uh, well, er, ya know, there might be some other traits that suddenly matter in a life or death scenario; don’t worry, though, none of that applies when we have a choice between killing and not killing animals. Yet do we ever have that choice? Even vegans admit that vegan consumption is not a zero suffering solution. At best it is a reduction in pain and death.

In Practical Ethics, Peter Singer writes:

It is sometimes argued that even vegans cannot avoid responsibility for killing, because a tractor plowing a field to plant crops may crush field mice, and moles can be killed when their burrows are destroyed by the plow. Harvesting crops removes the ground cover in which small animals shelter, making it possible for predators to kill them. Steven Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has claimed that the number of animals killed by growing crops is greater than the number killed by rearing beef cattle on pasture, even including the deaths of the cattle. His findings have been used by other defenders of meat-eating, including Michael Pollan. Davis has, however, failed to take into account the fact that an area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef. When that difference is fed into the calculations, Davis’s argument is turned on its head and proves that vegans are responsible for killing about a fifth as many animals as those who eat grass-fed beef.

— Practical Ethics, pp. 121 - 122

Singer could also have mentioned the harm to animals from massive habitat destruction and pest control measures. All these factors make it impossible to estimate how many sentient creatures are killed for any particular diet, but we’ll give Singer his five to one. That means if Simon is on the mountain and has a choice between a cow and five pigs, the vegan ethic would have Simon kill the cow because it provides more sustenance per animal death. But could vegans really get that pissed off if Simon had a thing for treif and killed the five pigs instead of the cow? That is essentially what Singer’s philosophy comes down to. Singer kills one, we kill five, and that makes us categorically worse and him totally blameless. Does this make any sense? Can it really be okay to kill a million dogs to save four humans, but not okay to kill five pigs rather than one cow?

Since pigs can be trained to play video games for treats, let’s say a pig’s life is around eight times more worthwhile than a rabbit’s life, making it worth an entire human day. The lives of these five pigs, then, are worth approximately one human business week. Unless Simon can eat more than a pig in a day (in which case we would have to say there are six pigs, ha!) he is squeezing more than enough human life out of each pig to justify their deaths. Yes, the cow would provide an even better ratio of human life to animal death, but if a cow’s life is worth approximately a human day too (cows can’t play video games, but they’ve got size going for them), Simon would be going way above and beyond by killing the cow instead of the pigs. That doesn’t make killing the pigs indefensible.

Animal rights philosophers are not just saying that they understand why someone would kill an animal out of desperation if it was the only way to survive — they are saying that for the human to kill the non-human is best. If vegans can admit that animal interests are subordinate to human interests, why are they so scandalized when humans put their desires for taste, habit, convenience, tradition and nourishment before animal lives? Vegans do the same thing every time they don’t eat out of a dumpster.

Vegans say that it is okay to kill an animal if there is no other way to sustain your life or health, but it is not okay to kill an animal for the pleasure of the taste and satiation the animal provides. I see two main problems with this. One, the distinction between life/health and pleasure is not as clear as vegans think it is. Two, many people consciously do things that compromise their life and health for the sake of hedonistic pleasure; clearly, then, it is possible to value pleasure over lifespan. So how can vegans say that health is the primary value and that can justify killing animals, but pleasure cannot?

Hypothetical Simon’s life is so important to Francione that it is worth his extinguishing 10 years of rabbit life just so Simon can kick pebbles for a few more hours. Regan and Singer say that human life consistently bests animal life because humans have a greater variety of opportunities for satisfaction. In other words, we should favor human life because it is so much more enjoyable. But what is pleasure if not one possible form of enjoyment?

I recently saw a vegan message board thread discussing a New York Times article called Epilepsy’s Big Fat Miracle, which is about how a meat-, dairy- and egg-heavy ketogenic diet helps many epileptic kids reduce or end their seizures. The vegan reaction was positive; all the vegan posters who took a definite side said that if they were in the position of these parents, screw the animals, they would have their kid eating bacon, cream and omelets every day too. Consider all the male chicks killed for the eggs alone and we can see that the lives of animals are worth far less than a day without seizures for an epileptic. And all this male chick grinding isn’t in the name of extending life — instead, the purpose is to improve quality of life.

Hold up. Isn’t quality of life what non-vegans and ex-vegans are after when they shun an animal-free existence?

There’s no question that having 100 silent seizures a day is more intolerable than not feeling completely satisfied after a meal, being tired all the time, getting bored of food, having brain fog or feeling alienated in a world of animal murderers. But the difference is in degree. Why would we want to kill animals to cure a child’s seizures? Because life without seizures is more enjoyable. Why would we want to kill animals to make our meals tastier and more satisfying? Because life with steak and butter is more enjoyable.

Vegans say it is selfish for meat eaters to kill animals for taste enjoyment, but how is it any less selfish of Simon to kill rabbits for the general enjoyment opportunities life offers — of which taste sensations are one? Vegans complain about the feeble “fleeting pleasure” that eating animal products provides, so why value the fleeting life (and thus enjoyment) extension that eating animals in an emergency provides?

The dichotomy vegans want to erect between pleasure and lifespan/health is a false one. Health is valuable because being healthy makes life more pleasurable. A long life is valuable because life is enjoyable, and more of it provides more enjoyment. When vegans say that pleasure and enjoyment are not reasons to kill animals, but extending life and improving health are, they are contradicting themselves.

With their survival exemption and lack of a pleasure exemption, vegans are trying to claim that quantity of human life matters more than its quality. Yet the quantity of human life is justified over animal lives because human life has more quality!

Even if we could extricate life and health from pleasure and enjoyment, vegans are holding imaginary tablets over their heads when they insist that we must value health and lifespan over hedonistic pleasure. If lifespan is a good reason for killing animals, but enjoyment of eating is not, then clearly we all agree that lifespan is objectively more valuable than pleasure. But then how to explain drug abuse, unprotected sex with strangers, stuntmen, homeless people with cheeky signs about preferring beer over food, sky diving, Heart-Attack Grill, cigarettes and autoerotic asphyxiation?

Of course self-delusion plays some part in risky hobbies. Not everyone who dives out of a plane will have a chute that doesn’t open, and not everyone who smokes gets cancer, so surely you will be one of the lucky ones. Yet people are often aware that they are compromising their health and reducing their lifespan, and this doesn’t stop them. They would rather have a shorter and more thrill-packed life than a longer and less exciting one. They are not suicidal. They just value intensity of pleasurable experience over a larger window in which to have less intense pleasurable experiences. A simplistic way to put this is that they are valuing pleasure over life. So what basis do vegans have to say that life is a good reason to kill animals, but not pleasure?

It’s not a fact that a longer life with the pleasure more spread out is better than a shorter life with the pleasure more concentrated. If health is our primary value, and pleasure is a base desire to always be suppressed in favor of loftier goals, why is anyone who ascetically avoids all unhealthy activity thought of as weird? And if vegans don’t believe in ever putting pleasure before lifespan, why is a vegan singing about being a “Diabetes Time Bomb” because he loves sweets so much?

To maintain their exemption from mandatory veganism in survival scenarios without abandoning mandatory veganism altogether, vegans need to do two things. They need to prove that life extension and health are totally separate from enjoyment and pleasure, and then they need to prove that life extension and health are objectively more important than enjoyment and pleasure. Otherwise, allowing a survival exemption to veganism on the grounds that human life is enjoyable means that we can all eat animals whenever we want, so long as we enjoy it.