Why Vegan?
We are animals just the same as any other animal. It makes no sense to separate us by species and say that we are superior to and can kill, eat, exploit, torture, or do whatever we want with our fellow animals. Speciesism and Human Supremacy are the terms for this form of oppression. It fits alongside sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, classism, and the oppression of the preborn.
Non-human animals are particularly vulnerable as they often don't have the right body types to fight back, can't fight against a bunch of humans force-breeding them or capturing them from the wild anyway, and humans don't have the ability to understand their forms of communicating "no". They go through things that would be labelled as beyond horrific if they were done to humans, such as mass killing, rape, torture, kidnapping, and being forced to do labor for humans.
The treating of our fellow animals as property to be bought and sold and to do work for humans is something all humans can understand is wrong. It really is only in practice beause our cultures got so used to it because the animal agriculture industry wanted to turn a profit and made it the norm. But everyone is capable of having the empathy and understanding to look at our fellow animals and see that they too should get to be free, that they too should get to live, and that they too should not be harmed.
Veganism has been around for quite a while as humans throughout history have questioned the oppression of our fellow animals and rejected eating them. We understand that we walk this earth with our fellow animals and that they should not be objectified by being made to provide products for or do work for humans. They are here with us, not for us. We are all part of the ecosystem. We are all earthlings.
Evolution can really help one get a sense of how connected we are to our fellow animals. Our species is new, only existing for a few hundred thousand years. Tracing back the roots of our species can help us understand the different species we descended from. Evolution takes millions of years, so no, your grandmother wasn't a monkey, *but* your grandmother 50 thousand generations back was of another species. So one must then ask themselves, how can we look at members of other species and oppress them, knowing that none of us would even have existed in the first place if it weren't for other species? And how can we oppress a group based on things that we know are wrong to oppress humans for (intelligence, sentience, ability to contribute to society, looks, size etc.)? We think it's better to allow everyone to live instead.