Dr Steiner (m): As we recognize more and more the similarities rather than the differences between humans and animals, the idea of a dividing line between the two becomes more and more obscure and difficult to draw.
The difference between humans and animals is not at all clear.

HOST:  Halo thoughtful viewers, and welcome to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants. On today's program, we meet Dr. Gary Steiner,  a John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University, USA and author who strongly believes that animals merit a moral status comparable to that of human beings.

He has written several books including “Descartes as a Moral Thinker,” “Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents” and his most recent work, “Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship.” Dr. Steiner considers himself an “ethical vegan” and now describes what is meant by this term.

Dr Steiner (m): People come to veganism for different reasons.   Some people do it because of health concerns, some people do it for environmental concerns, and some people do it,   because they feel that we have specific moral obligations toward animals.

People who are ethical vegans believe that we have the obligation not to eat animals, not to use them. Depending upon how strict a vegan a person is, they might decide not to wear leather, not to wear silk, not to wear wool. 

Then of course this opens up the door to all sorts of other sorts of products, like medications and cosmetics that might involve animals in their production or in the composition. So to be an ethical vegan is to recognize, as a specific direct duty to animals, to treat them with kindness and to employ the principle of ahimsa or non-violence toward them.

HOST:  For Dr. Steiner, becoming an ethical vegan was a gradual evolution, with refinement coming over the course of many years.

Dr Steiner (m): What led me to ethical veganism was a long process in my life. It started from a very early age with simply loving animals, having a real feeling of kinship with animals.

And as I got older and went into my adolescence, and into my 20s, I started thinking more seriously about the contradiction between loving animals on the one hand, and eating them and wearing them and so forth.
And so I stopped eating meat one day, and I just never ate it again. So I went vegetarian first of all. But I was still thinking about other things like eggs and dairy products and the fact that the production and consumption of those sorts of substances requires viewing animals and using animals in certain ways.

I decided that it was something I couldn’t participate in any longer. I stopped eating all animal products at that point. And then over a period of years I started thinking more and more about the fact if I am not going to eat animal products, I have to start thinking about wearing them, and doing other things that involve the uses
of animals as basically objects for the satisfaction of human needs.

More recently it has moved on to things like cosmetics, medications and other things. After a period of time, Dr. Steiner felt it was not enough for him to simply live an ethically vegan lifestyle.

He decided get his students at Bucknell University thinking about society’s views of animals and how animals see the world.

For more details on Dr. Steiner, please visit
www.FacStaff.Bucknell.edu/GSteiner
Books by Dr. Steiner are available on Amazon.com