In my childhood, my cousin Zoe once fostered a kitten, inky black, whose name I have long forgotten. I was some age before morality, clearly, as I remembered learning that cats had nine lives so I decided to see whether that was true. Testing this hypothesis felt unextraordinary, like testing if plants could prefer green tea to soda, or if they could understand human speech. So when my parents were gone and my cousin was out and my grandparents weren’t looking, I would fling the few-months-old kitten across the room. 

She would always land on her feet. I do not remember much, but I remembered this. There was one time when she landed, flailing, on her back and I noted in my experimenter’s diary that something must have gone wrong. Perhaps I flung her too high — she almost grazed the ceiling that one time — and her innate sense of balance faltered for a moment. Perhaps it was then when she lost one of her nine lives. 

I remember thinking that because she was a kitten, she must have many lives to spare, so even if my flinging would cause her to lose some lives, she would still have three or four left. That was still more lives than me, so I figured it was fair. 

Needless to say, I was socialized to realize the full horror of what I had done since then. In fact, a few weeks ago, my housemates and I welcomed a cat named Iris into our home. Iris was originally named Isis, after the Egyptian goddess, by her previous housemate. I refuse to call him her “owner,” because I think of her like a child, who owns herself and her freedom. Her name was changed for political reasons so obvious that stating it outright would be gauche, but either way since I laid eyes on her, I decided that I would worship her.

Remembering the cat-flinging incidents of my youth would usually trigger a flood of shame that would drown out every other thought. But as I showed today, I suddenly saw the connection between this incident and a scene from an undercover investigation by a journalist named Liz Pachaud for Mercy for Animals in a CAFO — a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, more commonly known as a “factory farm.” 

Liz was wearing a hidden camera as she worked at the CAFO. Footage showed her colleagues neutering male piglets and clipping their tails without anesthesia. There was a spray of fresh red blood during the neutering process where, what I can only assume is the piglet’s reproductive system was wrenched out of his body. When Liz asked if flinging the piglets across the room — bleeding — hurt them, the farm worker training Liz told her to not worry about it. “Pigs are very,” she paused to search for a word as the piglet squirmed in her grip, “bouncy.” 

I truly do not believe that people who consume meat are morally depraved. Driving through central California, I would see farms with cows grazing and sheep braying. Even Nietzsche allegedly envied the cows because they didn’t have historical consciousness. On TikTok, I would see chickens raised in cottage-core coups by pastoral guardians like the infamous “Ballerina Farm.” With these postcard-worthy scenes, we are made intentionally ignorant of the fact that 99.97 percent of chickens in the U.S. are factory farmed along with 99.9 percent of turkeys, 98 percent of pigs and 70 percent of cows. Our ignorance is owed partly to ag-gag laws preventing people from taking footage in factory farms and making them public. Although many first-amendment lawsuits have been launched against these laws, ag-gag laws remain completely or partially active in states including Arkansas, North Dakota, Missouri, Montana, Idaho, Iowa, North Carolina, Alabama. Even when these laws are held unconstitutional, they can be quickly passed through through the legislature, with the help of lobbyists, with just enough revisions to avoid future lawsuits. Liz from Mercy for Animals recorded the bounciness of pigs at the risk of prison time. The pigs we see outside of factory farms are the lucky 2 percent.

Since coming out as a vegan, people have expressed concerns that going vegan is a privileged choice, as meat is an affordable and accessible form of protein that many Americans depend on. However, the portrayal of a vegan diet of plant-based alternative meats, fruits and vegetables as expensive and elite is far from the truth. A study in Portugal found that vegans spent less money on food in comparison to vegetarians, who spent even less compared to omnivorous consumers.

Furthermore, meat is only deceptively cheap in America — made possible by heavy government subsidies. Ironically, the USDA spends much more money each year subsidizing farmers who grow feed for animals, than those who grow food for humans. According to a report released by Farm Action in 2022, 30 percent of all farm subsidies each year went to produce feed crops for dairy, eggs and meat, whereas only 4 percent of farm subsidies went to fruits and vegetables for human consumption. No economy but a highly artificial — and manipulated — one could make a bag of corn or edamame almost as expensive as an entire rotisserie chicken, if only by the simple logic that chicken feed consists mainly of corn and soybeans. But the Costco catalog tells me so. The difference comes out of the pockets of taxpayers and the checkbooks of voters. 

I truly believe that if elementary school students were taken on field trips to the interiors of factory farms instead of the family farms that are quickly being pushed out of the industry by CAFOs, they’d all become vegan. And that’s before they learn about the fact that animal agriculture is the unspoken giant in greenhouse gas emissions. Even I was floored when I learned that if we reached net-zero carbon emissions from fossil fuels tomorrow, we’d still surpass the 1.5 degrees Celcius Paris Climate Accord warming limit with agriculture emissions alone. 

There is no moral high horse to be ridden as someone who once threw a kitten across a room. But now that I know better, I can’t buy pork, or chicken, or beef, or eggs anymore. I still eat dairy, but somehow the image of female cows being impregnated repeatedly for the sake of milk production and the image of their udders latched to milking machines makes the feminist in me deeply uncomfortable. Is it so strange that I think of these cows as women? 

My tutor, Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert, at Oxford once told me that the animal rights movement is strikingly predominated by women. At 68-80 percent female, the movement for the rights of non-human animals represents the political movement with the largest female to male ratio second only to the women’s rights movement. Before we got Iris, we decided that cats should be neutered because having kittens would decrease her life span — and to us, no woman should be used as a means to an end. 

I will admit that being a vegetarian made it cognitively much easier to look into the ethics of eating animals — non-human, non-cat, non-dog animals — because it’s easier to think about liberation when my stomach isn’t full from the Popeyes chicken of last night. The cognitive distance that vegetarianism creates makes me recommend it, if only to examine with less prejudice the morality of eating meat.

ELAINE DING is a senior in Grace Hopper College. She can be reached at elaine.yilin.cheng@yale.edu.