Why so many people have selective empathy?
I am a vegan. I decided to become one because of multiple reasons. The first one being that I was walking around a market during summer break with my grandparents when they decided to buy norway lobsters. They were alive. I saw them flair and wriggle, I stared at them and all that i could think was "image someday, some kind of alien or something manage to overpower humans and there i would be, wriggling in ice cubes, hoping that i could somehow survive, surrounded by dozens of other people, and the aliens would just stare merciless and buy my whole existence as it i couldn't feel anything, as if i was a bare object, a product. That just because i don't look like them, feel like them, they'd assume l’m not worth living". My grandmother bought around thirty of them. They were struggling in a plastic bag as it swayed. She put them in the fridge the whole day before boiling them alive for dinner. I felt sick to my stomach. I didn't eat them, I turned vegetarian right after. But this was only the event that made me stop. A couple of weeks before, I ate a chunk of a dead chicken, then i looked at my dog. And the chicken smelled exactly like her and I felt like I was eating her for a second. I threw up. A couple of days before I became vegetarian, I watched the TV news and they were talking about the death of the pope. My first thought was that I didn't understand why people always made a huge deal out of the death of celebrity because why are those people more important that a random lady who helped tons of prostitues to get out of poverty or the firefighters, surgeons, sanitation workers, etc. Then I asked myself why people cry and make a huge deal out of pets and people passing but never animals such as chicken, cows, pigs, ducks, fishes, and more. Because why would some "animals" be more worthy than others because they are associated with humans and not as products for humans, why would humans be more worthy of life than "animals" who feel pain just like they do? A brain is a complex thing and i don't even understand the logical thinking behind "but we understand complex things" because maybe to us but in this case would it be legitimate and would people be okay with more intelligent forms of life cruelly killing humans because they don't understand the world in this "more intelligent" way? And pigs are actually smarter than dogs so why kill one but not the other? Also, I realized that killing really is a choice, because I noticed how easy it is in a store to, instead of taking the dead body steak, just walk a few feet and take the plant based steak. From there, I just kept learning about the treatment that humans inflict to animals. The rape to reproduce them or just straight up bestiality, the babies that are being killed, the captivity, the injuries, the insults, and overall just the murder. So only two months after, I became vegan.
(Sources : Animal Welfare Committee, Opinion on the Welfare of Decapod Crustaceans and Cephalopod Molluscs (2021) ; University of Cambridge, Declaration on Consciousness (2012) ; Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish knows (2016) ; European Commission ; FAO ; PETA, Animals are Sexually Abused on Factory Farms (2024) ; ITVX, Police investigating claims of animals abuse at Warwickshire abattoir after secret footage released (2025) ; The Guardian, French abattoir closed after secret videos shows suspected animal cruelty (2016) ; Nahf, Pigs Intelligence vs Dogs: Cognitive Abilities Compared (2011) )
I understand that we are raised to think dogs and cats as friends and family and pigs and fishes as disgusting and/or food but the thing that confuse me is how do people stay in such stuck up mindset. I thought of all of this as a teenager. I managed to connect the dots, why do grown people keep making cruel choices just because they want to be right. After I realized and educated myself on all of this, I tried to get people around me to turn vegan. I tried to show them videos of slaughterhouses, I talked about the treatment they have to go through, the torture, the rape, the loneliness, the grief of the mothers and children. I got two kinds of answers, either "but [meat] is tasty/I don't care" or "oh that's terrible, that's why I only get "the happy animals" meat/I don't eat much meat anyway". I'm so confused because the second type of people is the kind to be left winged, be pro equality and think that every lives matter, until they're too different, and I don't understand how you can be left winged and pretend to think that everyone deserve to live but drawing the line the same way racists, sexists and homophobic people do : "Too different, I don't understand them, not my problem and I get something from it."