Anthis is the author of The End of Animal Farming, a book in which he advocates, and offers a roadmap to, a world where slaughterhouses are obsolete. He is as compassionate towards animals as it gets, and he considers oysters and mussels to be a thoughtful and logical choice. This is despite their falling, biologically if not necessarily ethically, within the realm of animal products.
Vegans avoid animal products, he says, because it just so happens that the category of animal coincides quite well with the category things that have sentience. So this makes sense as a moral rule-of-thumb, but its not a perfect overlap.
Elisa Allen, the director of PETA, is less enthusiastic. She says that shellfish contain microplastics and release methane and nitrous oxide. She makes a point that Tomasik and Fleischman raise too: that we cannot be certain that these creatures cannot suffer. As with cephalopods and crustaceans, we might make discoveries that cause us to revise upwards our estimation of their level of sentience. Let's give these animals the benefit of the doubt, she says, and opt for oyster mushrooms instead.
My conclusion is different to Allens, and Im not certain that Im right. The study of consciousness isuncomfortably subjective, and the stakes of making the wrong call are high. Perhaps were one biological breakthrough away from discovering that oysters and mussels, for all their isolation, have rich and marvellous inner lives, that they are Emily Dickinsons of the ocean. To me, though, and to others, it seems overall a safe bet that theyare a compassionate choice of food, and, in ethical terms, more akin to plant than animal.
The most tangible consequence, aside from delicious pasta dishes,is that eating oysters and mussels alongside an otherwise vegan diet puts me at risk of simultaneously enraging both meat-eaters and vegans thus providing all sides, at long last, with something they can agree on.
Original post:
Why I've decided to add mussels and oysters to my vegan diet - Telegraph.co.uk
