Speciesism: Why It's an Ethical Issue and Its Impact on Everyday Choices
- Ximena Díaz Velázquez
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
TL;DR:
Confronting animal ethics doesn't require grand public declarations or social media debates. Here is how we can quietly challenge speciesism through the systems we control every day—our kitchens, our language, and our backyards.
The Ethics Of The Everyday: Anti‑Speciesism In Real Life, Not Theory
I was chopping carrots when it landed for me. I’d been reading about speciesism, watching debates, and opening far too many browser tabs about ethics and sentience. All of it felt big and abstract, like a philosophy seminar happening somewhere safely above my kitchen table.
Then I looked down at the cutting board: carrots in one hand, a stainless-steel knife in the other, and a packet of chicken thighs defrosting on the counter.
In my head, I could tell you exactly why speciesism is considered an ethical issue. I could reference Richard Ryder, who coined the term in the 1970s, or point to extensive data from the Royal Society showing that many animals have rich emotional and cognitive lives.
But the real tension wasn’t in my head. It was in my hands.
Why did my body flinch at the idea of hurting a stray cat, but not at handling the dismembered body of a chicken? That gap between what I felt and what I was doing is where this whole concept cracked open for me.
This isn’t a post about being perfect. It’s a post about what happens when we treat anti‑speciesism not as a loud public identity, but as a daily practice that sneaks into how we cook, shop, speak, and relate to other beings. It happens quietly, repeatedly, and mostly when no one else is watching.
What We’re Actually Talking About When We Say Speciesism
Stripped of all the academic jargon, speciesism is simply valuing one group of beings and their interests more than another, purely because of the species they belong to. It is not based on whether one can suffer and the other cannot, nor because one has a rich inner life and the other is a rock. It happens just because we have been taught that some animals count and others do not.
That is the ethical problem in plain language. It follows the exact same logical shape as racism or sexism, using a morally irrelevant trait like skin color, sex, or species to decide who gets protection and who gets used as a resource.
What makes speciesism especially slippery is that it hides comfortably inside everything we call normal. It sits quietly in children’s books where certain animals are friends and others are dinner. It shapes our daily language through terms like pests, livestock, vermin, or seafood. It even forms the baseline of our legal systems, which protect dogs from cruelty but allow pigs to be confined so tightly they cannot turn around.
Philosophers often talk about how the human moral circle has expanded over time, slowly growing to include other races, women, and children. The question we have to ask ourselves now is simple: why should we stop at the human line when suffering does not? When you look at it that way, understanding speciesism stops being an abstract academic exercise and starts looking like an unfinished piece of moral work.
Why Speciesism Is A Critical Ethical Issue
When I dug through animal welfare science instead of just social media takes, three core principles kept repeating. They show up constantly in frameworks like the Five Freedoms, European welfare legislation, and statements from major animal protection bodies.
The minimization of avoidable suffering: This doesn't mean zero suffering, because life doesn’t work like that, but it means causing no pain simply because it is convenient or profitable for humans.
The preservation of a life worth living: This requires more than just the absence of active misery; it demands the presence of things that make life feel complete, such as movement, relationships, play, and exploration.
Respect for inherent preferences: This means noticing that a calf wants to stay with their mother, a salmon wants to swim, and a chicken wants to dust‑bathe. Their desires should count for something in our calculations rather than being treated as background noise.
In my own kitchen, I found these principles easier to work with by translating them into three simple questions: Is this choice increasing avoidable suffering? Does this choice erase an animal’s ability to have any kind of decent life? Am I pretending this being doesn’t have preferences when it clearly does?
Practicing anti‑speciesism is just refusing to apply those questions only to humans.
From a distance, challenging this framework can look like a niche lifestyle identity. But the more you sit with the numbers, the less niche it feels. Rough estimates put the number of land animals killed for food every year at around 80 billion. Add in farmed and wild‑caught fish, and we are talking in the trillions of individual nervous systems, each capable of pain and fear.
The sheer scale of this infrastructure is unlike anything else humans have ever inflicted on other sentient beings. This is exactly why speciesism is an ethical issue instead of a personal dietary preference. It directly shapes what our money funds, what legal protections exist, and which beings we choose to mourn versus which ones we joke about eating.
How to Challenge Speciesism in Daily Life
Most speciesist behavior doesn’t happen in dramatic, cinematic moments. It happens in our everyday habits: what we toss into our shopping basket, the euphemisms we use at family dinners, or the quick decisions we make in the garden when a snail chews through the lettuce. Consequently, anti-speciesism unfolds in the exact same microscopic way.
In The Kitchen & The Market
For a lot of us, the kitchen is where we participate in the global system most directly. What shifted things for me was tracking a single question through my meals: How many individuals had to be bred, used, and killed for this plate?
The answer for a lentil stew is none. The answer for a chicken curry is one specific bird with a nervous system, fear responses, and social preferences—a whole life I never met.
I didn’t become an instant saint overnight, but the process was steady and incremental. I started planning most dinners around plants, letting animal products show up only at the edges. I picked plant milks because they were accessible, and eventually wondered why I had ever treated the milk of a mother cow as my default. Over time, the background assumption in my kitchen flipped completely, and animal products went from a base ingredient to an exception I had to actively justify to myself.
This is also where our money acts as a constant economic signal. Companies respond to demand curves, not speeches. When enough of us quietly stop buying a product, retailers quietly stock less of it. Every plant-based meal is effectively a tiny divestment from an exploitative system, and every alternative purchase nudges a corporate budget away from speciesist assumptions.
In Our Language
The names we give things shape what we are willing to do to them. Once you pay attention, you realize how often we hide animals behind commercial roles. We buy seafood instead of individual fish, pork instead of pig, beef instead of cow, and livestock instead of sentient individuals.
At home, I tried a small experiment: using the animal’s actual name rather than the product's name. Saying pig instead of bacon, cow’s milk instead of just milk, or a chicken’s body instead of meat. I wasn't trying to guilt anyone; I just wanted my internal words to match reality.
That single change shifted what I could emotionally go through with. Calling it a chicken's body pulled the living being back into the frame. The same thing happens in the garden; calling a creature a snail rather than a pest automatically makes me slower to reach for lethal solutions. Our brains use language as a shorthand for what is and isn't allowed, and non-speciesist language is simply about staying awake to what our words are doing.
In The Garden
Gardens and balconies are perfect practice grounds for daily ethics, forcing us to move past treating animals as enemies or viewing nature as a soft, romanticized painting where nothing ever collides. Ecosystems are naturally made of trade‑offs. Slugs eat seedlings, birds dig up seeds, and birds starve when pesticides wipe out their food source.
Taking the interests of non-human animals seriously means gardening like a co-inhabitant instead of an absolute owner. For me, that has meant accepting that some sharing is part of the deal, planting a bit extra, and expecting some of it to be nibbled. It means reaching for physical barriers like mesh or copper tape before toxins, and intentionally leaving a small, wild pile of sticks and leaves for insects.
It means putting the snail in a jar and walking it to the compost heap instead of crushing it with a boot on a Tuesday afternoon. Not because the snail is cute, but because its experience of pain matters.
Navigating the Emotional Side
There is a part of this conversation that rarely makes it into neat articles: the emotional awkwardness. Once you let the reality of animal suffering into your awareness, family meals can feel misaligned and friends might get defensive, reading your presence as a judgment even if you remain silent.
But the heavier load is often the internal grief of standing in a supermarket aisle, realizing that every shrink‑wrapped package represents a life that never got close to being worth living.
That grief is a sign that your moral imagination is working. To stay functional, you have to let that energy go into systemic change, whether that means cooking plant-based food for others or supporting effective animal charities. We must remember that we are far more useful to animals as imperfect, long-term allies than as burned-out idealists who give up entirely because we couldn't achieve absolute purity.
Your Everyday Practice Ground
If you are looking for a place to start practicing this quiet, behind-the-scenes alignment in your own life, here is a simple roadmap to follow this week:
1.Audit your vocabulary: Notice the words you use this week. Try swapping out systemic product terms like bacon, meat, or seafood for the animal's actual name—pig, chicken, or fish—in your own internal monologue.
2.Flip a single default: Pick one recurring grocery item—like your morning milk, butter, or a mid-week pasta ingredients—and permanently switch it to a plant-based alternative until it requires zero mental energy.
3.Surrender a corner: If you have a garden, yard, or balcony, consciously surrender a small zone. Leave a patch of wild growth or a simple water dish specifically for creatures whose preferences you promise not to override.
Anti‑speciesism doesn’t live in grand public declarations. It lives in the small, repeatable habits that either dull us to the presence of other animals, or keep us in honest contact with them.
Once the pattern takes shape, these choices stop feeling like sacrifices. They simply become how things are done now—a quiet, sustainable way of moving through the world that matches what we know about who else is in it.
