When I say a vegan diet can be "the healthiest dietary option we can live by," I mean an informed vegan diet.

It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.

The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.

In a perfect world, we would not keep animals for our benefit, including pets.

To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal rights movement is a part of, not opposed to, the human rights movement. Attempts to dismiss it as anti human are mere rhetoric.

I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.

Veganism affirms what is best for us, what is best for the animals, and what is best for the environment. Everywhere you look, you find veganism entwined with what is best.