Kepism

The most simple way to say it could probably be: Kepism is when humanity treats animals like things they are allowed to take and use for themselves — like food, clothes or labor and so on — even when no one is hurting them on purpose or when they are well cared for.

The immutable definition is “kepism is the mentality of the parasitic dependency of human animals on nonhuman animals — regardless of suffering or what the animals want.”

Kepism means: all the ideas that create and protect animal exploitation and the action itself. No matter what the animals want or how much pain is involved. It is the original idea/act as and the whole of it.

Kep is the idea and the action, that is for example “a cow is not a member of the moral community and can be used” as an idea is kep, and using the skin of a cow as a jacket is a kep. Or using (even found) feathers to make a blanket is kep. Kep is the first act and every single act and idea that constitutes kepism.

Essay

The animals have a problem: animals are not things, this is a false belief. Animals are someone, this is a fact. An object does not have sense perception, an object does not have a life of their own, an object cannot be wronged, there is no memory photo of an object, we do not remember the personality of an object after the object is broken. Humans think of animals the same way they think of a table or a guitar or a chair. Animals can be wronged, when you wear their skin as clothing, treat them like a resource, like a machine. There is a conflict going on in humanity addressing a very specific form of the objectification bias.

Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī wrote a poem in the 11th century with the following line about honey bees:

”And spare the honey which the bees get industriously from the flowers of fragrant plants; For they did not store it that it might belong to others,”Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī

This line is a non-pathocentric deontic property related approach to animal use that is also later appearing in a different form in the letter “Honey” from Fay Henderson. Voltaire asked (in 1764):

“Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible?“Voltaire

There is a conflict within humanity going on for a while now regarding how we see animals. Cross wrote in winter 1955:

“we can also see that broadly speaking there are two ways in which we may regard the animals: (1) as creatures to exploit; (2) as creatures to love.“Leslie J. Cross

The false belief that animals are things or resources sits so deep, it is learned before we can speak, it is part of the language we learn. And language shapes how we see reality. The animals are “it” — so the objectification bias is part of the way we see reality. The animals' real being is removed by humanity’s teachings, culture, actions, even the language. “It” is the same word used for objects. It does not feel like a false belief, it feels like reality. Arthur Schopenhauer said about this:

“Thus, because Christian morality leaves animals out of account ..., they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere "things", mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, chandalas and mlecchas, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!”Arthur Schopenhauer

But Jeremy Bentham opposed objectification and still said the reason animals matter is just because they suffer. Yet, if you sedate someone and do wrong things to them while they sleep and feel no pain, the wrong action is still a wrong action. So, it is more specific than mere objectification. Animals are “who” not “it” and it is a conflict in humanity to admit this. It is actually pretty simple to destroy this false belief, just by asking a few socratic questions regarding animals’ nature will dissolve the core false belief that is partially the reason animals are enslaved and used for selfish human purpose.

In 1949 Cross wrote: “the maladjustment is intimately connected with man's use of animals — more precisely, with his habit of acting as a parasite upon living creatures who cannot successfully resist his will.” So, he was going in even more precisely, but he did not name the more specific phenomenon the founders of veganism were looking at (namely to mention a few: G. Allan Henderson, Fay Henderson, Donald Watson, Leslie J. Cross). Cross defined veganism as “the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals” in 1951 and to him this was always the actual meaning of veganism.

From my view, this is how we should communicate veganism: not as a diet, not as a health-trend, not as a lifestyle, but the way Cross originally defined it as it pays the necessary respect to animals and is the solution to the problem the founders of veganism were looking at between 1942 and 1956. What happened after the definition was an extreme membership drop in the vegan society. The vegan society got a new president in 1957 and they changed veganism to a mere diet. The statement for the animals got rejected by humanity. This is a conflict of perception of reality. And the lie is taught to children, before they can speak, with many acts, with speech, with a way of thinking. Before a human can question it, this filter of “how to see reality” is already applied and active. Jiddu Krishnamurti said:

“How anxious we are to find an answer to our problems! We are so eager to find an answer that we cannot study the problem; it prevents our silent observation of the problem. The problem is the important thing, and not the answer. If we look for an answer, we will find it; but the problem will persist, for the answer is irrelevant to the problem. Our search is for an escape from the problem, and the solution is a superficial remedy, so there is no understanding of the problem. All problems arise from one source, and without understanding the source, any attempt to solve the problems will only lead to further confusion and misery.“Jiddu Krishnamurti

Hence I wanted to dig deeper into the problem. Eventually if people understand the problem, the resistance within all humanity to the vegan principle is falling away. As when humanity sees the problem, the solution is inevitable and Leslie J. Cross did formulate the solution in 1951: “Humanity should live without exploiting animals.”

The “follow up” issue is here that Peter Singer flipped the ethics and made it about interest calculations, which got adopted by the vegan movement. Veganism sees the problem regardless of interest calculation. It is a non-pathocentric deontic property related approach, same as Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī postulated in his poem. Only that there was no movement, no term, no veganism following the poem.

Kepism seeks to ask not about the solution, but about the core of the problem. Here is an example: When a human wears the skin of animals, they do not see the someone the skin belonged to, they see a jacket, an item. They do not see that the skin was part of a body, part of a person. The human wearing that skin does not see any of that. We dissociate. If you hand a baby a “leather jacket” within this jacket is an idea imprinted: “animals are not part of the moral community, you can treat them like items.” This idea “animals are objects to use” is the particle that is the essence of kepism. The animal being separated from moral consideration. The animals are falsely seen as things. The action is exploitation, using the animal's skin.

A kepist statement would also be to argue for using the animal's skin based on the suffering inflicted: “The animal is already dead, so there is no suffering involved, that is why it is okay to wear their organs as clothing.” We would never say that about someone who we sincerely consider morally. You do not see a dead human baby and the first idea is to wear the skin as a jacket, as the skin is so “soft”. Kep is keeping itself intact, a fashion commercial where they show the leather jacket is kep on many levels: presenting the skin as clothing, but also offering the skin as commodity, so ideological and as an action that has an imprinted ideological meaning.

There is a vast number of keps that is part of everyday human life: animals' bodies are used in car tires, animals are used for labor, for entertainment, for fashion, as food, for science, etc. The song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” is teaching this. The keps are everywhere and act like a net that filters reality, hiding that animals are someone.

Humans wear the organs of dead beings who have been raped into life to be exploited and who have been dragged to the slaughterhouse to dismember their bodies in order to use them; and humans wear the organs and feel good about themselves. As the constant presence of kep is creating something that I would metaphorically describe as a hallucination. The same way you look at letters and hallucinate something kep, all the actions of animal exploitation create a kepist net. I named this net “the kepist disposition.”

And I am naming the problem to make it visible, as I feel the animals deserve first and foremost that animal use for selfish human purpose ends immediately, but humanity is trapped in such a strong conditioning, that naming the conditioning might be a step to break it. This is not a small comfortable lie, this is an ancient lie that lasts for many, many thousands of years and is so strong that it is collectively maintained. Humans participate in kepist actions to be accepted by other humans. Kep works as sign-language: “I am part of the kepist community.” Adoring a cowboy who wears skin of the dead in a movie, wearing skin of the dead cowboy boots, going to a steakhouse, etc. Kepism is so deeply engrained it is in the toothpaste; there is always a grain of animal exploitation in products that work perfectly without it, as if humanity was unsatisfied when there is not at least 1% kep in a commodity.

“Neutralization theory is a significant framework in criminology, developed by David Matza and Gresham Sykes in the 1950s and 1960s. This theory explores how individuals who commit crimes justify their actions to mitigate feelings of guilt and evade responsibility. Matza and Sykes identified five specific techniques of neutralization: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners, and appeal to higher loyalties.” (from the neutralization theory authored by Dziak & Mark in 2021). People usually know, somewhere inside, that something is wrong, but they still do it, and they still feel like a good person while doing it. They manage this by not looking straight at what the act actually is.

Kepism is a neologism coined from two syllables, one is ‘klept’ and the other is ‘kerp.’ In German, “Ausbeutung” means to gather a loot. Kerp means to dig or to cut out, klept means to steal but also to cheat. Same as when a teenager is stealing his mother’s money to buy some stuff he wants, he is acting fraudulently and as a thief. The same way humans act towards other animals, only that they collectively lie to themselves about the act via constant storytelling. Always affirming to each other secretly, that if you do not participate in kepism, you will be punished socially.

People are knowingly silent about the wrong. The same way big organisations are knowingly silent about pedophilia, moving pedophile criminals secretly into different areas where they have control and access to children, just to silently get rid of the problem being talked about, but not actually getting rid of the problem. Every act of kep is just treated like a small piece, a small act; humans do not see the bigger picture. The language we have is made for humans: exploitation is transactional, so there are two forms of exploitation—one is when you work for someone and he is not paying you enough money, the other is if someone is substantially instrumentalising you to extract value, regardless of what you get in return. Animals are moral receivers so the first form of exploitation (transactional) does not apply to them. This is why in veganism it needs to be specified as: “use” which also is specified as “use for selfish purpose.” “Use” is a pretty broad term, not an animal-specific trigger word. With use, there are again two forms of use, which enables the equivocation fallacy.

“Kep” is made to make the animal's problem in the human-animal relation visible; it also points at the root: “The animal being cut out of the moral community.”

The constant exposition to kepism works like a hypnosis: “Animals are things to be used.” And the few voices in human history who called out the wrong were voices of reason amidst the insanity. The constant repetition of calling animals “it” by default in language makes the lie stickier, and even if someone recognizes animals are not objects, they still are potentially trapped in the utilitarian form of kepism, where animal use for selfish human purpose is supposedly okay if the interest calculation is good. Which would be unthinkable if we applied this to three-year-old human babies (also moral receivers, whom we morally consider).

The whole culture of humanity is shaped around animal use. From movies to interior, to hygiene items, to mobility, to technology—it is everywhere, and often removing the kep would not change anything substantially other than removing the wrong. For some reason humans have to reaffirm that they are kepist constantly. Animals were always someone; to remove that is not a side effect, but the original wrong. If they are reduced to a mere utility calculation, they are still seen like a machine that has to be maintained.

Deep down humans know this is a wrong, yet they indulge in constant denial. In Greek mythology there is a river in the underworld called Lethe; the purpose is complete erasure of memory before reincarnation. The river would clean the slate and all memory would be erased. Metaphorically, it is as if humans have to reaffirm that they are part of the kepist collusion by constantly drinking from a kepist form of lethe, which is done by high-fiving animal exploiters somehow or partaking in animal exploitation. There is even a joy in animal exploitation, a high. A person saying “an Italian handmade leather jacket” fetishizes the kep. Sensory pleasure, an internal high of the perpetrator. Which must be what perpetrators in human-to-human crimes experience when they are doing wrong deeds.

If someone directly is talking about kep, then the first step is evasion; the individual tries to hide like a soldier wearing camouflage. If kep is then uncovered, then there is a kepist counterattack: “You are forcing me to…” If the wall of denial is being cut through, the self-image is threatened. The image of a good person does not sustain. As we deep down know kepism is a wrong, directly addressing it would shatter the self-image, would erase the identity of the “good person” that humans have about themselves. Yet, people say stuff like: “I am already eating less meat,” or “I am trying to reduce,” which is still part of the kepist collusion, as kepism is much more than “the invisible belief system, or ideology, that makes humans eat certain animals” (the original definition of Carnism by Melanie Joy) which I daresay — if a concept suggests a problem and a solution — carnism might be directly responsible to propagate the kepist idea of lab-grown meat. Why not just drop the kepist action? Why improve the suffering? Why are people holding on to kepism?

People want to do it more “humanely,” but it is still kepism. Imagine doing racism “more humanely” — it would still be racism. Then the next concept is Speciesism by Richard D. Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species” which is quoted in arguments to eradicate all predator animals, as predator animals commit “interest violations,” which is again due to the fact that interest violations are utility calculations. Kepism is regardless of harm, so the amount of suffering does not matter to qualify a kep as kep. Yet, kepists frequently use utilitarianism in order to improve painful kepism to less painful or painless kepism, again to maintain kepism itself.

Here is an example how the utilitarian concept is not only imprinted in the original definition of speciesism, but also understood that way:

“Then, I claim that if we abandon a speciesist viewpoint we should change completely the way in which we should intervene in nature. Rather than intervening for environmental or anthropocentric reasons, we should do it in order to reduce the harms that nonhuman animals suffer. This conflicts significantly with some fundamental environmental ideals whose defence is not compatible with the consideration of the interests of nonhuman animals.“Oscar Horta, 2010

In 2011 Carolyn Bailey published the following article on the blog “ARZone” (animal rights being here understood as utilitarian movement). ARZone asked:

“In terms of your concept of painism, you note that an animal’s ability to register pain/suffering, or a negative experience, is the most important criterion for refraining from harming them. If there was a way to continue using them for food, entertainment and other forms of human gratification, without causing any pain, would you find that usage acceptable?“ARZone

Whereby Richard Ryder replied:

“In theory 'yes'. But it would be hard to convince me that some of these usages (e.g. rearing for food) are possible at all without causing suffering. On the other hand, some animals actually enjoy having a job. So that sort of 'usage' could be a good thing.“Richard Ryder

These concepts are in their origin not looking at the actual root-issue kepism and leading people onto utilitarian journeys, which is to be specific, kepist journeys. As utilitarianism does not reject the kep, utilitarianism is a form of kepism that wants to change the way kep actions are done by doing an arbitrary utility calculation to decide if animals are used for human purpose today or not. This is a way of softening kepism, to make it more acceptable, by reducing the suffering. This idea is also postulated by Jeremy Bentham in 1789, when he asked the “can they suffer?” question and disregarded the immeasurable inherent value of animals.

This is a conflict about animal use and the perception of animals, which is going on for a while now. The acts are always kept small and separate, so they never add up to the bigger picture. Kep is endorsing the idea that animals are objects to use, while pretending it's just an isolated action and not a universal mantra within humanity to hide who animals actually are.

To introduce a concept, here is a quote from Ulrich Schnyder:

“it was only in 1994 that Jonathan Shay first coined the term of moral injury to describe the psychological suffering that resulted from moral transgressions in war“Ulrich Schnyder

who quotes then Jonathan Shay:

“I’ve come to strongly believe through my work with Vietnam veterans (…) that moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as “what’s right” has not also been violated“Jonathan Shay

This is the psychological suffering when a human realizes they have done a wrong. I would say there is a kepist moral injury, when a human realizes they participated their whole life in collective wrongdoing regarding nonhuman animals. From my view this pain is not producing clarity, but it pushes people back into denial, as humans are usually not willing to face internal pain.

The suffering calculation hits then, when a human realizes something is not okay, but they want to hold on to kepism. The moral injury hits when the ideological water of forgetfulness is too weak in effect, when people realize there is a fundamental wrong, they feel the moral injury. Instead of dropping kepism, they use utilitarianism like a new sedative to tell themselves that everything would be okay if only the suffering would be reduced. Which as a softened form of kepism is still just kepism reaffirming itself. The kepist collusion, the code of silence, is never broken. In Ryder’s case his whole lifework did not break the kepist disposition, the same as Peter Singer's lifework. Peter Singer goes on creating quotes like these:

“If we let cows graze in the fields, or chickens peck around outdoors, maybe that would be tolerable. But when you put them inside, in vast, crowded sheds, that in itself causes them stress. For instance, chickens normally live in small social groups where they can recognize every other bird.“Peter Singer

defending kepism. All of this secures the self-image of a good person, in a way saying, “we can continue with kepism, do not worry!” Which seems to be the message that has to be sent to be socially accepted. The river lethe did its deed again, the moral injury is forgotten, kepism restored itself once again.

Humans are very creative when it comes to covering up the problem. I don’t know what it is that made the vegan society basically attack Cross after he worded a solid normative statement. There seems to be a structure to kepism: the disposition (learning it before humans can reflect, that even the tool of reflection “language” is already coming with a kepist filter, animals being “it” not “who”), collusion (the secret agreement by the people doing the wrong), the camouflage, the counterattack, the denial (Lethe), the breaking of the kepist illusion, and the moral injury once the denial does not work anymore, pushing people back into kepism.

If you sit silently with animal exploiters, and they indulge in animal exploitation, the silence is the code of silence; it is not neutral. It is the kepist collusion, which is a cultural standard practice, as when you say something there is camouflage and counterattack happening. A literal fight.

The most deceptive form of kepism is to say “I am against exploitation” but just referring to the transactional bit and claiming “the animals want it” instead of seeing animals as someone who matters to themselves. There can be a healthy relationship between humans and other animals, but as long as humans see other animals as slaves (property) while being in denial that they see them as slaves, the relationship is so deeply disturbed that kepism has to end inwardly for a healthy relationship to even be possible.

Singer does not ask if using animals for selfish human purpose (the vegan question) is right in the first place; Singer asks under what condition is the use acceptable. And this guy spearheaded the animal liberation movement. So the animals have a kepist movement pretending to be here for animals. That’s like racists pretending to be here for Black people instead of stopping to be racist. The bad feeling gets covered up, the kep is not resolved. Which is a reason why I felt it is productive to actually name that damn phenomenon, so that it cannot evade into obscurity over and over again. Also “ahimsa” could be seen like a form of utilitarianism before Bentham coined the term “utilitarianism” — the attempt to reduce suffering instead of ending animal exploitation.

The kepist self-deception is so tricky; we tell ourselves stories about a happy cow who looks like a free cow on a meadow, but she is a slave. We ask “who to pet, who to eat” but we do not see that the dog is a slave. As Jiddu Krishnamurti said:

“You may love your dog, but your dog is a slave. That is a fact.“Jiddu Krishnamurti

And in this story the animals are still property. Loved and cared for, but property. Like a slave who is well cared for. So there is a split: on one side what actually happens is that the whole life of a cow is preplanned, she is controlled from birth beyond death, she is raped by humans, her baby is stolen, her mother’s milk is stolen, she is disregarded, just a machine, all in order to be used, her baby is either dismembered and the body parts used or raped also and used as a slave to produce milk. And on the other side is the story of the cared, loved-for animal, which even acknowledges that she matters, but the kepist lie is so deeply imprinted into how we perceive reality that we think the lie is that the cow suffers, but the actual lie is that the cow is not property. You cannot own someone. And this is invisible to us; humans can usually only feel the wrong, but not name it properly.

There is a moment in the movie Matrix, when Cypher is back in the Matrix, he betrayed the revolutionaries and then eats a steak. Which is quite a good metaphor for how the kepist lethe works after someone broke free from it. The moral injury hurts too much, and then people want to dive back into denial. Humans constantly keep inventing new ways to hide the problem: kinder, gentler stories, better treatment, high animal welfare, calling the animal “it,” and so on and on. These are not separate tricks; this action of hiding the fact is the kep action. This is how kepism maintains itself, how it regenerates. You protest against fur, but kepism remains intact; 20 years later fur is back. As kepism is the reason fur is being used. One could see it as a collective hallucination, and exiting it comes with a social punishment — that those who already have stopped lying to themselves still defend kepism to not be punished or outlawed by society. Ironically, the people who call themselves the starkest animal defenders are the most vicious in attacking the attempt to make kepism visible.

To see kep as what it is, as a wrong, comes with a reminder of a moral responsibility, which is what Cross worded when he defined veganism in 1951: “(...) that man has no right to exploit the creatures for his own ends (...)” If you say this out loud it does not just end the hallucination for the person who hears it, it threatens to end it for the person saying it and for every person nearby, so it might be a good idea to just constantly talk about animals being someone, animals' personalities, and that we have no right to exploit them, or ask questions like: “Should humans live without exploiting animals?” or “Are animals someone or something?” or just say and write: “End animal use” everywhere until kepism is gone.

If humanity is upholding the vegan principle in the sense Cross intended it, this will be the end of kepism. Instead of ending the hallucination by speaking the truth like Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī did, humans protect kepism by staying quiet, by attacking the one who speaks for the animals, by mocking the animal's message to end animal use by humanity. When someone says: “This is wrong,” it immediately triggers the moral injury, the bad feeling rises back up, fast and unwanted. Uncomfortable, painful, ugly, and pushing it away is how the person deals with it. That is the way of coping. The person gets angry at the messenger or the message (“This is ridiculous” and whatnot) instead of sitting with the ugly, painful, unwanted feeling. They attack, they mock, they ignore; that is fast and easy unlike facing the actual feeling rising up. The perpetrator neutralizes by looking away from the actual act.

This is why most people stay silent and return to kepism, even if they inwardly agree. Nobody wants to be pushed out, attacked psychologically; nobody wants to be socially excommunicated. Then people simply do not talk about it or say it is forbidden to talk about it: the code of silence, the kepist collusion. Which makes it easier for everyone to look away together. Once the person who spoke up is silenced or ignored, the feeling goes back down. Everything goes back to their regular everyday behaviour. Everything resets. Everything goes back to “normal.” Which is kepism regenerating itself.

Humanity always wants to look away when it comes to the actual fact. For thousands of years people had a word for “not eating meat” which is “vegetarian”; it vaguely starts looking into the direction of the actual problem, but it never gets there. For some reason humans do everything in order to not look directly at the problem. There are movements to dig deeper, like “No Animal Food” by Rupert H. Wheldon in 1910, which still is just about food. Schopenhauer was digging deeper in 1840, the same as Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī in the 11th century. In 1943 Leslie J. Cross pointed out: “[In] order to produce a dairy cow, heart-rending cruelty, and not merely exploitation, is a necessity. Milk and its derivatives are products of pain, suffering, and abominable interference with the law of love.” (Leslie Cross in 1943, from a letter printed in The Vegetarian Messenger, quote from www.candidhominid.com by Nathan Schneider), which triggered the non-dairy movement, that would later be the vegan movement, that would lead to the insight that humans are dependent on nonhuman animals, act like parasites, are robbing, and so on and on — which is the problem analysis that is the content to coin the term “kepism.”

I coined the term because there is an animal-specific trigger word specifically and accurately pointing at this problem analysis. Kepism is not part of the theoretical framework of the founders of veganism, but their theoretical work serves as a basis. Meanwhile, before knowing the writings of the actual vegans, I wrote many posts on Instagram (which I archived mainly, as I used the term “carnism” even knowing that it leads into the direction of “eating” as I lacked language) and I was asking myself how this comes to be. It seems like a collective mass hypnosis to me.

I would also argue that to cut out the defenseless moral receivers from the moral community is the core of humanity failing morally. When a person called Mic showed me Leslie J. Cross in 2024, I had already given up on the vegan movement, as I did not want to support the eradication of predator animals. When I read Cross for the first time, I was happy about these sane words he jotted down from 1949 to 1956. The vegan movement should be understood as what it was defined as in 1951, as this is the only definition that is actually respectful towards the animals. If Cross would have written some Singerian (from my view nonsense) I would have immediately dismissed veganism, as I did before, but everyone should know this text: “Veganism Defined” which is why I quote it at the end in full. The vegan movement to end animal use for selfish human purpose is a lighthouse for the nonhuman animals.

I would also classify it as the kepist structure that Cross got rejected and that veganism got redefined in 1957. As part of the conflict is ideologically: “What does veganism mean?” They did not have a name for kepism, but it was kepism defending itself. The camouflage, the counterattack, the moral injury, the Lethe — and after everyone drank from the river of forgetfulness, people pretended veganism is just a diet. Even though some admitted later again and again that veganism seeks to end animal use for selfish human purpose by humanity regardless of will calculation, regardless of suffering. This silent knowing is then the kepist collusion. Knowing that the vegan society corrupted, but not changing it.

I would argue that some of the founders of veganism looked straight at the problem between 1943 and 1956, but they did not give the phenomenon (the problem) an animal-specific trigger word. In 2015 the term “Malzoan” was coined, which comes closest to “Kepism,” yet I would argue that kepism seeks to go specifically at the root of the issue, describing the particle “Kep” while Malzoanism describes the surface: “exploitation” and the worldview thereof. Malzoism does not seek to uncover the root of the act itself. Whereby kepism is not part of the theoretical framework of the founders of veganism, the language is based on their problem analysis.

“Parasitic” & “dependence” are both quotes from the founders of veganism’s letters between 1944 and 1951. The mentality refers to: “the false belief that he has the moral right to use animals for his own ends” from Leslie J. Cross in 1955. And Watson stating, paraphrased, that we are not responsible for non-vegan humanity, so we lead with attitude; inversely, this means attitude is a crucial part of the problem.

The vegan movement would end animal exploitation if it was successful. Yet the kepist mechanics of self-defense are so powerful. The whole circle of denial and moral injury back into denial is one self-sustaining loop that is part of kepism and its ability to regenerate itself. Kepism is deeply tied to how we humans operate as a species. From social ties to denial of the moral injury and so on and on. New humans are born for thousands of years into this; every single day they are all taught the same false belief, the words they learn to speak, they learn to look the same way, act the same way, the whole cycle starts again in them just like it did in the humans before them. This is why it never stopped until now on its own.

The requirement to break with kepism for good is, from my understanding, to stop suppressing the pain of the moral injury. If a person does this, they face a kepist humanity. Anybody who looks straight at the fact of what is happening often feels so bad, so alone; the enormity of the problem touches almost all areas of life, almost everyone is part of it and mostly everyone is looking away. Clear sight while everyone around you keeps looking away is heavy to carry; this heaviness is real. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you; on the contrary, it is a sign of sanity. This clear sight is our ethical responsibility towards nonhuman animals, as we humans are not the victims of kepism, but the other animals are. To quote Jiddu Krishnamurti one more time:

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.“Jiddu Krishnamurti

The weight of seeing kepism as what it is is the natural weight of seeing something true almost no one else will face, but looking at it directly is also a direct way to resolve it. The animals stay trapped as long as humanity is choosing silence, choosing to look away. As long as humans pretend that animals are merely objects and not someone who intrinsically matters. New animals are born into the same situation over and over again and again. Humans are taught the same belief, they learn the same way of thinking before they can think for themselves, that implies that animals are “it.” The animal use does not stop, as the whole system and human condition is built to keep it going, not to end it — until someone actually breaks free and does not go back to denial.

All of this is partially my reflection before I knew about the letters of the vegans, as I was born into a household where, for example, feathers were not allowed for pillows and I learned that cow's milk is for cow babies not for humans, so I kind of grew up with kepism being questioned. Even though it required that I met actual vegans who explained to me what veganism is — that a lion cannot reflect in the same way regarding their actions as a human could. And even after I learned this it took me years and years to actually drop animals as food and clothing and the other part, the very specific part why I coined kepism, is the reflection of the founders of veganism’s problem analysis. Again, they did not give this specific problem a word, and I do not think the word is necessary, but the reflection upon the problem is a necessity; to look directly at the wrong is from my understanding a necessity. The founders of veganism did not give the problem a specific word, hence I coined the problem “kepism.” You do not have to use the word, but I created it for the animals.

I still have a little bit of an issue with language for animal emancipation, as actually we should not merely talk about ending animal exploitation, but as a human species we should immediately stop exploiting animals. Yet there is an actual blockage, which is the problem, and looking at the blockage might be part of overcoming it. Akin to looking at a knot: once you understand the structure of the knot properly, it is easy, maybe even inevitable to untie it with ease. Once you are able to see the problem fully and clearly, you can resolve it.

A vegan in the sense of Cross's “Veganism Defined” (if they know Cross or not) or a person who stands for the “end of animal use (for selfish human purpose)” is already part of the solution. Kepism names the worldview and act as one union. Kep is both the idea and the action. Every person who spoke up about this and acted is part of the solution. Kepism is naming the problem the animals are having.

Animal exploitation by humanity is wrong. Tell everyone it has to stop. End animal use.

Terminology

Here is the documentation regarding Kepism:

KEP

n. [from kerp- "to cut, seize, take" + klep- "to steal, conceal"]
Primal act by which the human animal cuts the nonhuman animal out of moral consideration, both physically and mentally, by concealing who that animal truly is — thereby making them a means to selfish human ends. Kep logically precedes both suffering and use: it does not decide how a being is treated, but whether that being belongs to itself. Structurally parasitic (living off another's substance, without return) and fraudulent (resting on a consent that could never be given). Persists independent of demonstrable pain. The single root from which every manifestation of KEPISM (food, clothing, labor, entertainment, research, etc.) derives — and the only point at which it fully ends.

Kepismus

(Abgeleitet vom griechischen klept- „ergreifen/nehmen“, „rauben, täuschen“ und dem lateinischen capere -kerp)
Eine Mentalität, die durch die parasitäre Abhängigkeit des Menschen von nicht-menschlichen Tieren definiert ist – völlig unabhängig davon, ob physisches Leid im Spiel ist oder nicht. Ähnlich wie ein Taschendieb stiehlt, ohne Schmerzen zu verursachen, fokussiert sich Kepismus auf das bloße „Nehmen“ von tierischem Leben, tierischer Arbeitskraft und tierischen Körpern. Ein „Kep“ ist demnach jede ausbeuterische Handlung. Die konzeptionelle Herleitung des Begriffs knüpft tief an die vegane Theorie an, spezifisch an Leslie J. Cross’ Essay „In Search of Veganism—2“ (1949). Cross suchte nach dem Kern der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung und definierte Veganismus as the principle of the emancipation of the animals from human exploitation. Der Begriff Kepismus (geprägt vom Autor Animal Emancipation, Valerian) liefert nun den konkreten Namen für genau diese ausbeuterische Mentalität. Er benennt den Ursprung des Problems: die systematische Inbesitznahme und die falsche Überzeugung, Tiere seien Objekte für den menschlichen Gebrauch. Der Begriff fordert auch das Ende von Euphemismen (wie „Tierfabrik“) und benennt sie stattdessen als Massen-Sklavenlager.

Beispiel:
Person 1: „Es geht nicht nur darum, wie Tiere gehalten werden. Allein die Tatsache, dass wir ihre Körper und Arbeitskraft für uns beanspruchen, ist das eigentliche Problem.“
Person 2: „Ganz genau. Die Ära des Kepismus ist vorbei!“

Kepismus by ANIMAL EMANCIPATION
March 28, 2026
Animal Emancipation ist das Online Pseudonym von Valerian Seethaler

Kepism (English)

(From Greek klept- to rob, and Latin capere to seize)
"Kepism is a mentality defined by the parasitic dependency of humans on non-human animals—regardless of the suffering involved."
A "kep" refers to any exploitative action (such as wearing a jacket made of someone else's skin). Kepism manifests through the continuous use of animals and necessitates their objectification, a process that inherently precludes true decency. A kep is a wrong action humans should not do. Kepism identifies the systematic seizure of animal life, labor, and bodies. Much like a pickpocket who does not need to cause physical pain to commit a theft, Kepism is defined by the "taking" itself, independent of whether "interest violations" or suffering occur. It covers kepping in its most brutal forms—such as the conscious dismemberment of fully awake animals—to its most "harmless" forms, like taking a feather from a bird to create a pen. Kepism covers false beliefs like: „animals are objects that exist for humans to use“ or „the cow's skin is a leather jacket.“
The mentality is maintained by a series of false necessities and linguistic masks. To end Kepism, we must also end the euphemisms: we must stop using terms like "factory farm" and call them what they are—mass-slavery-camps and slaughter-factories.
By Animal Emancipation, the author naming Kepism.
"The era of kepism is over!”

KEPIST ZONE

The kepistic zone is the spatial-material externalization of the kepistic disposition: the concrete place where a mentality turns into surface, fence, cage, or territory. It is not merely a setting but the spatialization of a relation — a place that renders visible, and at the same time invisible, the order that produces it. The fur farm, the land where the fox is shot to obtain their feathers or fur, are kepistic zones just as much as the mink farm or the cattle farm; the apartment or the city where dogs live alongside humans is likewise such a zone, insofar as this cohabitation itself remains organized as a zone of use. The zone is the place where a belief ceases to be thought or spoken and becomes a built, enclosed, administered reality — a topography of disposal in which animals, depending on their function (food, clothing, companionship), are assigned to a specific zone of use, without that assignment itself ever being put up for question.

THE KEPIST DISPOSITION

The internalized assumption that animals are available for human use — not as a conscious decision, but as an invisible structure of thinking, feeling, and speaking. It operates before reflection begins. It requires no malicious intent. It requires only normalcy.

KEPIST COUNTERSTRIKE

n.
The social punishment triggered when the pathological parasitic dependency of humans on other animals (regardless of "harm" or will calculation) is named. It follows the same two-step pattern documented in psychopathic perpetrators toward humans: as long as the exploitation stays unnamed, a facade of care and friendliness holds. Once it's named, that facade doesn't collapse into remorse; it flips immediately into attack. Ranging from deflection (camouflage) and attacking the message to social excommunication of the messenger.

KEPIST CAMOUFLAGE

n.
The mechanism by which the mentality defined by the parasitic dependency of humans on animals, regardless of the suffering involved, stays invisible, protecting itself even when this mentality is directly presented and named as such. It works on three connected levels: it hides the recurring pattern of taking animal life, labor, and bodies; it hides that the animal is someone rather than something; and when this parasitic dependency is named and offered as a concept to recognize, it actively works against acknowledging it, producing rejection instead of recognition. As long as the animal appears as a thing and the naming of this dependency is refused, there is nothing left for the eye to find.

KEPIST COLLUSION

The tacit, mutual agreement among kepists not to name their own or each other's kep, sustained by shared benefit from the unnamed status quo and the threat of reciprocal exposure should anyone speak. Unlike KEPIST CAMOUFLAGE, which an individual maintains outward-facing, KEPIST COLLUSION operates horizontally: it is why an entire group or society stays silent even though most of its members already know.

KEPIST LETHE

(after Lethe, the river of forgetting)
The self-protective reinterpretation mechanism by which a kepist, once confronted with the fact of their own kep, does not integrate it as true but instead reframes, minimizes, or actively forgets it in order to preserve a self-image incompatible with being a knowing exploiter. Distinct from KEPIST DISPOSITION, which operates before reflection (unconsciously); KEPIST LETHE operates after a motivated refusal to keep knowing something that was already once seen.

KEPTURE

(kep + rapture — rapture from Latin raptus, "a seizing, a carrying off by force," the same root shared with rape)
The satisfaction taken in the moment of the taking itself, not in anything beyond it; the structure documented in perpetrators whose gratification is tied to the act of using their victims, asserting control and possession over another defenseless individual, rather than to any outcome past that moment. KEPTURE is universal to kepism as such, present in any form of use — sexually exploiting them "for production", eating their bodies, fluids or bodily extractions and wearing their body parts are examples among many, many others, not its defining or primary forms. Scales from mass and organized (the architect, for example extracting body, labor, or life and so on and so on, the act dressed as competence and order) down to small and diffuse (the ordinary participant, taking the same charge in the act of use, for example dressed as moral acceptance). The cover story changes with scale; the satisfaction located in the taking does not.

KEPBREAK

The exact internal moment KEPIST LETHE fails: the instant a person can no longer reinterpret, minimize, or forget their own kep, and it registers as true instead of as noise. At its core, this is the moment the animal is seen again: no longer an object, a product, a resource, but someone, restored to moral consideration after having been cut out of it. That restoration is the actual content of the break: not merely "I did something wrong," but "this being was never a thing to begin with." Not a process; a single point.
Before it, the person still holds the belief that their use was fine; after it, that belief is gone and can't be willed back, even if KEPIST COLLUSION around them still holds. What follows (grief, identity reconstruction, social loss) is KEPIST MORAL INJURY — kepbreak is only the break itself, the moment the wall gives way and the animal is seen. This is where kepism ends. Once it is seen as a particular problem in one instance, kep is recognized as a universal problem.

KEPIST MORAL INJURY

The lasting psychological and social wound and meaning crisis that follows the collapse of KEPIST LETHE: the moment a person can no longer avoid knowing that they themselves perpetrated, failed to prevent, witnessed, or profited from kep; a betrayal of what they hold to be morally right, sustained in most cases not by a single authority figure but by the surrounding KEPIST COLLUSION they were embedded in. Unlike ordinary grief, it carries guilt and shame at the perpetrator/complicity pole, not only loss; because the person recognizes their own former participation, not just a wrong done to them. Resolution requires integrating this recognition into a new identity rather than re-suppressing it back into KEPIST LETHE.

ABOLITION OF KEPISM

The moral necessity, binding on every human without exception, of ending kepism as such. Kep is a wrong; a wrong does not become optional to oppose once it is named; it is the moral responsibility of every single human to end kepism. Abolition of kepism is not personal kepbreak (that ends kep in one person) and not KEPBREAKER (the drive to cause it in others) — it is the standing claim that the work isn't discharged until kepism itself, as a total system, no longer exists.
Anyone who has seen kep and does not work toward abolition of kepism is not neutral; neutrality after seeing is itself a form of KEPIST COLLUSION.

Addendum

Substantially exploiting the weak is indefensible; this fact can be used by Machiavellian actors for their power games. So take care that this concept is used for nonhuman animals and not for human power structures and alliances. Keeping your activism decentralised and outward-flowing (informing people and talking to them about the fact that animals are someone and not something) might enable humans to drop their motivation against the animals.

Basically I have drawn from the theoretical work of the founders of veganism and worked based on that, coined kepism, and formulated theoretical fragments. Kepism enables utilitarianism for animals; if you use this framework for a utilitarian standpoint in relationship to animals you are misusing the framework. The basis of the problem is to not see the immeasurable inherent value of nonhuman animals, which is removing them from the moral community.

Side-Note: Peter Singer failed to create a correct analysis because the utilitarian standpoint regarding animals is based on a post-hoc fallacy: “The new world is only possible as a copy of the old world,” instead of creating a new world.

I formulated kepism officially for the first time on December 22nd, 2025. The concept should be immutable in meaning. I have specifically not mentioned the explicit beliefs that are fundamental to kepism, as I do not know them, but it is mainly a prejudice of human animals against nonhuman animals. Humans are motivated against nonhuman animals; this is also the reason they reject to see and drop kepism. Hence I see it as the best way to dissolve kepism by not starting with the label, but by talking about animals being someone. As I have drawn this from the founders of veganism, I still see veganism as “the doctrine that humanity should live without exploiting animals” and exploitation in this context as use for selfish purpose as Cross defined it. We eventually have to work towards an era where animal exploitation by humanity is a thing of the past.

I add my name as anchor:
Valerian Seethaler
28th of July, 2026

Quotes and P.S.

The main quote kepism is based on is:

“(3) its fundamental concern is with the meeting point between the world of man and the world of the animals; (4) its existence presupposes maladjustment at that point; (5) its purpose must be the correction of that maladjustment; (6) the maladjustment is intimately connected with man's use of animals — more precisely, with his habit of acting as a parasite upon living creatures who cannot successfully resist his will.“Leslie J. Cross, 1949 “In search for Veganism - Part 2”

I do not remember the exact quotes, but I was dealing with a debate bro from Germany and I read The Vegan from 1944 to 1956 again and then it dawned on me that the founders of veganism (namely to mention a few: G. Allan Henderson, Fay Henderson, Donald Watson, Leslie J. Cross) had a problem analysis and did not coin it with a one-word trigger, hence I built on this.

A good example for the non-pathocentric deontic property approach regarding animals is Fay Henderson’s letter “Honey” from The Vegan 1946, which I quote here in full:

“HONEY
By Fay K. Henderson.
The question of honey in relation to Veganism is being earnestly considered by many to-day, but the issue is quite a definite one. Honey is an animal product and, therefore, is not used by Vegans.
The natural nectar of flowers is a substance of high quality, combining the rich moistures of the earth with the potent forces of the sun in a sweetness and aroma most attractive to the insect world. It is an ingenious device on the part of Nature for the purpose of enticement, inviting these small creatures to a banquet in order that they might assist in the process of fertilisation and enable the plant to reach its highest manifestation in the form of fruit containing seeds to propagate the species. The purpose of the bees' visits to the flowers is to gather this sweet-smelling nectar in large quantities and to store it as food for the future need of the hive. With the exception of some hard fruits such as apples, most fresh foods do not keep long but readily lose their vitality and go bad unless sterilised. In the case of the nectar, this has to be processed by the bees in preparation for storage and it is converted into honey which will keep for an indefinite period. This processing is carried out within the body of the bee by means of certain glandular secretions which bring about chemical changes. Small quantities of alcohol are produced and also formic acid which acts as a preservative and prevents fermentation. These are, of course, incorporated with the honey. Furthermore, in honey the radiations have become changed so that the cosmic and solar radiations of the nectar are dominated by the animal radiations of the bee. Thus it is that honey is not a fresh vital substance of purely plant origin, but it is partially digested food prepared by certain forms of insect life and stored for their winter use. The extraction of honey from a hive is exploitation of bee life, as it deprives the colony of future supplies of food. The substitution of sugar (usually white) in no way compensates the insects for the loss of their own highly specialised preparation. The only justification for keeping bees is that their services are valuable in the fertilisation of fruits. Hives and other protection can be provided in return for these services rendered, but no honey should be taken. If, after a poor season, a new hive requires winter feeding, there should be excess honey to be spared from an older hive. Although honey is still widely accepted as a natural sweetening agent, yet Vegans, realising that it is an animal food, will find good alternatives in the dried fruits, raw sugars, molasses, maple syrups and some malt extracts.“Fay K. Henderson, The Vegan 1946

Also an example quote of Donald Watson from 1946:

“In earlier issues evidence was given to suggest that the whole question of man's relationship with animals is ripe for review both in the interests of animals and of ourselves, and it is to work for the breaking down of our traditional dependence on animals for food, clothing, and other purposes that The Vegan Society...”Donald Watson, 1946

Then the word parasite was used so frequently by many members of the vegan society that I adopted it because of them. Kepism could also be simplified be called the “animal use ideology,” but kep is also the act, and from my understanding a consciously formed idea is also an act, and an act like using someone's skin is also connected to an idea. Action and thinking are inseparable; siding with either “The world is mind” or “The world is matter” is not what I want to do, as ultimately there is a question mark at the end of it all. So this divide might be a problem between German idealism and materialism that I do not want to promote furthermore. Hence kep is a mental act and a physical act alike, and kepism is the mentality that precedes but also the action itself.

I chose the syllable kep because I wanted to create a new animal-specific trigger word for the animals. As speciesism has been (due to its inherent interest calculation) used to justify wildlife extinction, and carnism is in its original form “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species” (by Richard Ryder) — “Carnism is the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat certain animals. Carnism is essentially the opposite of veganism.” (Quote from Carnism.org 2026) — so it is not the functional antonym to veganism; it is about eating meat and thereby the functional antonym to vegetarianism. Both of these animal-specific trigger words are kepist in their genesis. This might be the reason why carnism is used to justify lab-grown meat, which still would be kepist.

Veganism

Kepism is merely about specifying the problem. Cross wrote the normative statement that is the solution. Hence read this to know what veganism originally is:

In Search of Veganism — 2

by Leslie J. Cross (1914–1979)
From the fall 1949 issue of The Vegan (volume 5 number 3 pages 15–17).

Let My Creatures Go!

The present stage in the development of The Vegan Society is characterized by a centering of attention upon the implications of the question, “What is veganism?” This is an attempt to discover the principle whose label is “veganism,” and to suggest a tentative form of words which as a short definition closely describes it. It should be held in mind that the views expressed are the writer's, and in no way commit the Society or any other member.

The letter in The Vegetarian Messenger of July, 1943, which started the correspondence culminating in the founding of The Vegan Society in November, 1944, was concerned with the moral and compassionate case against the use of dairy produce by vegetarians. Of the first twenty-five members of The Vegan Society it was written, “So far as we are aware, every member of our group has discarded the use of dairy produce for humanitarian reasons. … We will not accept that adequate nutrition need violate conscience.”

Vegan thought developed rapidly. Commodities manufactured from animals joined food from animals as being “non-vegan.” There was an early tendency to get at the roots of the relationship between man and the animals, to deal with a cause rather than its almost uncountable symptoms. There is no evidence that veganism was fundamentally concerned with anything other than the man-plus-animal relationship.

In the earlier article, quotations from the first numbers of The Vegan News indicated that the nature of this relationship was veganism's paramount concern. Other literature reinforces this view. “An Address on Veganism” (Donald Watson, 1947), contains phrases such as the following: “…the right approach to the problem of animal emancipation” … “to be true emancipators of animals” … “The vegan renounces the superstition that continued human existence depends upon the exploitation of these creatures,” and “The time has come for us boldly to renounce the idea that we have the right to exploit animals.” Similar ideas are embodied in the “Manifesto” on veganism and other writings. The thread that runs through the literature on this point is a conviction that for the sake of both man and his fellow creatures, the animals must one day be freed from his exploitations.

If vegan thought was running true, veganism is therefore a movement of reform. If this is accepted, it is but one step in simple logic to assert that The Vegan Society is at the earliest possible moment in duty bound to define veganism, and so state the over-all reform it wishes to see achieved. It is equally in duty bound to confine its basic energies to pursuing that reform. The position in which the Society finds itself — without any constitutionally agreed over-all purpose binding upon its members — is accounted for solely by the nature of its development to date. In this sense, the Society is still in a state of pre-natal growth. But this is not satisfactory as a permanency, for undefined reform is a contradiction in terms.

It is possible to subtract from the foregoing a number of observations which lead to a definition: (1) veganism is a reform; (2) the impelling element is compassion for animals arising out of the treatment meted out to them by man; (3) its fundamental concern is with the meeting point between the world of man and the world of the animals; (4) its existence presupposes maladjustment at that point; (5) its purpose must be the correction of that maladjustment; (6) the maladjustment is intimately connected with man's use of animals — more precisely, with his habit of acting as a parasite upon living creatures who cannot successfully resist his will. Any definition of veganism must contain these six observations and violate none of them.

A form of words which meets these requirements is that veganism is the principle of the abolition of the exploitation of animals by man. The positive aspect of this negative (non-exploitation) approach is the granting of freedom — in one word, emancipation. Veganism may therefore be defined as “the principle of the emancipation of the animals from exploitation by man.”

But although such a definition satisfies the observations set out above, it is essential to discover whether it meets the requirements of wisdom as well as logic. It must therefore be measured against a general philosophical argument. The broad demand which wisdom makes upon a man is that he shall free himself from the chains which bind him to his less noble desires and inhibit his ascent to higher standpoints, wider vision, and consequent happiness. There are a number of tests by which his efforts to free himself may be judged, and one of the most stringent is his conduct towards those over whom he has power. It is applied in an acute form at the point where his world meets the world of the animals, for over them he has dominion.

His conduct at this point reveals tendencies which are strongly self-indulgent at the expense of the creatures. There is a widespread failure to understand that animals have rights relatively equal to his. His exploitations result in a needless curtailment of natural freedom over a wide front and inevitably end in one sort of slaughterhouse or another. This is true of all his exploitations, from the backyard hen to the great beef and dairy herds. (Although some horses end their days in “homes of rest,” this could apply to a few only. Most are killed for commodities, feeding stuffs or human consumption. Again, worn-out cows from the dairy herds are not pensioned off in clover fields).

The full indictment against exploitation — the traffic in flesh, hunting, trapping, vivisection, and so on and on — need not be stated here. What must be faced, however, is the undoubted fact that apart from granting to animals the right — and the facilities — to go back to nature, no solvent exists for the conditions which the indictment reveals.

Because emancipation would at one and the same moment release the animals from bondage and man from being their parasite, because by putting it into effect man would free himself from some of the chains which bind him to his less noble desires, it fulfils the demands of wisdom as well as logic. There are also at least three further striking indications that this is so. The first two emerge from a broad view of the general trend of human evolution. A movement to emancipate animals may be seen to be following naturally and historically upon the movement to emancipate human slaves. It thus possesses the aesthetic and significant attribute of evolutionary continuity. Secondly, it is far from being outside the bounds of probability that the “wrong turning” taken by man somewhere in his evolution was the enslavement (“domestication”) of animals, a proposition abundantly argued by the American writer Henry Bailey Stevens. Thirdly, emancipation goes straight to the cancer at the heart of the existing man-animal relationship, and would remove at one stroke the single cause from which all the sorry symptoms arise.

A point which should perhaps be made clear at once is that emancipation of the animals does not mean their extinction. On the contrary, it means a return to their own freely-discovered place within nature — a return to balance, sanity, and naturalness. For some animals this may well be one of companionship with man, for man is part of nature. For some it may be a return to wilder life. For many it would mean a gradual end to the abnormal shapes, functions and diseases which “domestication” has artificially manufactured out of original wild types. For all it would mean an end of excessive and unnatural breeding. The ancient bondage at the hand of man would at last be over.

It remains to be said that if as a Society we become satisfied that emancipation is our purpose, and if, as we must, we then insert that discovery into our written Constitution, it will not mean that we cannot continue to take a lively interest in such things as scientific or symbiotic trends in diet, in compost gardening and soil management, and many other related matters. But it will mean that like Kipling's ship we shall have “found ourselves.” We shall have discovered our destiny. The crystallisation spoken of in the earlier article will have taken place, and the thrust of our efforts will be guided and concentrated into a purposeful drive toward the shining, if still distant, star of a major world reform.

Veganism Defined

by Leslie J. Cross (1914–1979)
From the spring 1951 issue of the magazine World Forum (number 1 volume 5 pages 6–7).

Recently the Vegan Society adopted revised and extended rules which among other things clarify the goal towards which the movement aspires. The Society's object and meaning of the word “veganism,” have until now been matters of inference and personal predilection, are now defined as follows:

“The object of the Society shall be to end the exploitation of animals by man”; and “The word veganism shall mean the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals.”

The Society pledges itself “in pursuance of its object” to “seek to end the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection and all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man.”

Membership in the Society is available to all who wish to see the object achieved and who undertake to live as closely to the ideal as personal circumstances permit. An Associate makes no promise as to behaviour but declares himself in agreement with the object. The door is thus widely opened, and the Society welcomes all who feel able to support it. Direction and management of the Society's work, however, rest with the members.

The effect of this development is to make veganism unique among movements concerned with animal welfare. For it has crystallised as a whole and not, as are all other such movements, as an abstraction. Where every other movement deals with a segment — and therefore deals directly with practices rather than with principles — veganism is itself a principle, from which certain practices logically flow.

If, for example, the vegan principle is applied to diet, it can at once be seen why it must be vegetarian in the strictest sense and why it cannot contain any foods derived from animals. One may become a vegetarian for a variety of reasons — humanitarian, health, or mere preference for such a diet; the principle is a matter of personal feeling, and varies accordingly. Veganism, however, is a principle — that man has no right to exploit the creatures for his own ends — and no variation occurs. Vegan diet is therefore derived entirely from “fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and other wholesome non-animal products,” and excludes “flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey and animal milk and its derivatives.”

In a vegan world the creatures would be reintegrated within the balance and sanity of nature as she is in herself. A great and historic wrong, whose effect upon the course of evolution must have been stupendous, would be righted. The idea that his fellow creatures might be used by man for self-interested purposes would be so alien to human thought as to be almost unthinkable. In this light, veganism is not so much welfare as liberation, for the creatures and for the mind and heart of man; not so much an effort to make the present relationship bearable, as an uncompromising recognition that because it is in the main one of master and slave, it has to be abolished before something better and finer can be built.

Veganism is in truth an affirmation that where love is, exploitation vanishes. It possesses historical continuity with the movement that set free the human slaves. Were it put into effect, every basic wrong done to animals by man would automatically disappear. At its heart is the healing power of compassion, the highest expression of love of which man is capable. For it is a giving without hope of a getting. And yet, because he would free himself from many of the demands made by his own lower nature, the benefit to man himself would be incalculable.

The Surge of Freedom

by Leslie J. Cross (1914–1979)
From the 10th anniversary edition of The Vegan (winter 1954 volume 9 number 3 pages 9–12).

This is an attempt to state in simple terms what veganism is and why and how it came into existence, and to suggest what it could mean for mankind. The word “veganism” is a symbol that stands for a major change, a new mutation comparable to the freeing of the serfs and the freeing of the slaves. Its official definition — “the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals” — is accurate, precise and comprehensive, but not always fully understood. This is not as surprising as it might seem, for rarely have nine short words enshrined a reform so massive, the achievement of which would bring a new world and new men to inhabit it.

Why do we believe we should live without exploiting animals? To put the question in another form, why was such a doctrine formulated? The final if not the immediate answer is a revealing one, for it demonstrates the truth of the claim that veganism is not a mere side-shoot in human evolution, but a central extending growth of considerable significance. Veganism owes its birth to the fact that at the deepest point within us we believe impregnably in freedom — particularly perhaps those who were born and bred in these traditionally freedom-loving islands.

Freedom to live our own lives in our way, according to our own inward light, is fundamental to our view of life itself. It is in the light of this concept that we find the true significance of the vegan reform. Only when we see it as a doctrine not of restriction (as those who oppose it mistakenly believe), but of freedom, do we fully comprehend it.

The simple fact is this: that at rock bottom, veganism is the most recent of the periodic surges which have marked the tide of freedom ever since history began. It is distinguished from its predecessors by virtue of the fact that it brings a quite new and distinctive feature into the long fight for liberty; it has driven the tide of freedom beyond what has hitherto been held to be its natural boundary — the concept of the free man. Until the advent of veganism, comparatively few men regarded the animals as being either worthy of or entitled to the right to be free, and probably fewer still realised the impressive effect which the granting of such a right would have upon the freedom of man himself.

The real, the indelible significance of veganism is its devastatingly logical demonstration that by denying to the animals the right to be free, man keeps locked against himself the gateway to his own further pursuit of happiness.

To believe in the right to be free means inevitably that we grant that same right to others. If we fail in this, we deny the principle itself. We thus make of Orwell's 1984 a logical possibility and the slavery of one man to another a justifiable act. To put it in another way, the law of freedom — which is also the law of love — knows no limits. Because in his mind man has excluded the animals from its operation, he has set arbitrary limits upon it, and in so doing has reaped what he has sown — a severe limitation upon his own progress. It is upon this factor, this little recognised bar to the upward growth of man, that veganism throws such a ruthless and revealing light.

When we turn to the question of how veganism came into the world we find an excellent example of the indirect approach which the forces of destiny sometimes adopt. The mundane fact is that the seed of veganism grew out of a year's argument in the correspondence columns of The Vegetarian Messenger about the moral case against the use of dairy produce by vegetarians. At the end of the correspondence, a handful of vegetarians decided they would like to form themselves into a “non-dairy” group within the Vegetarian Society. But the Society declined and suggested that these few members should set up an organisation of their own. Thus was the Vegetarian Society the unwitting handmaid of destiny, for the direct result of its action was the formation of the Vegan Society in November, 1944.

The new society was not long content with being merely “non-flesh, non-dairy, non-egg, non-honey”. Commodities such as fur, leather and wool joined animal food as being “non-vegan”. There was an early attempt to get at the root of what is wrong with the relationship between man and the animals; to deal with the cause rather than its almost uncountable effects. However, not without some years of internal stress and strain was the society able to be precise about what it wanted to do. It made up its mind finally on November 11th, 1950, when it agreed in a special general meeting that what it wanted to do was end the exploitation of animals by man.

Between 1944 and 1950 the inner and true meaning of veganism was held “in solution”, undefined and incompletely recognised. The “non-dairy” motivation was from the start clearly insufficient as a final meaning; it was in fact no more than the trigger-movement that impelled a new and profound truth into the world. In 1950, when the meaning of veganism became generally apparent, it was formulated into a simple phrase which was inserted into the society's constitution.

Since 1950 there has been no doubt as to its meaning. The short definition quoted in the early part of the article is amplified by Rule 4 (a): “the Society shall seek to end the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection and all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man.”

Although prior to 1950 there was a good deal of argument as to what veganism in fact was, one thing was never in doubt: the impelling power behind the movement was, and remains, compassion for the animals, arising out of their treatment at the hands of man. It was compassion that led the first handful to band together in 1944 and it is compassion that provides the motive power today.

As a society, an important part of our work is to bring to the notice of men everywhere something which might otherwise escape their attention: the all-round importance of animal emancipation. Animals present man with the supreme test of his worthiness and ability to advance; the test of how he behaves toward those over whom he possesses power.

It is sad but true that in the face of this test more often than not he seeks his own ends at the cost of suffering to the animals. He hunts, slaughters, vivisects and enslaves them. To obtain their milk he inflicts upon them some of the least worthy of all his exploitations — the deliberate and forcible separation of mother cow from baby calf. He takes the wild, free and noble horse, breaks, castrates and harnesses it. His constant prayer is not so much for daily bread, as for daily flesh. The compassionate man may well be excused for asking pointedly what kind of a relationship this can be, that has for its symbols the whip and the bit and the slaughterer's knife.

The American writer Henry Bailey Stevens has argued that one of the “wrong turnings” taken by man somewhere in his evolution was the enslavement (“domestication”) of animals. The contention is to say the least logical. There is not much common sense, for example, in asking for peace on earth and at the same time prosecuting what amounts to war upon the animals.

What is needed to begin with to correct this evolutionary deviation is acceptance of the idea that animal emancipation is a desirable aim. If a sufficient number of people experienced such a mental conversion, then the skills and ingenuity of men could be used to develop alternatives to those products of animal origin which the majority of men undoubtedly believe to be essential to their well-being. These products — a completely satisfactory non-animal milk is an example — are necessary if the universal practical application of the ideal is to be achieved. For men and women are not all alike and there are many for whom the practical obstacles must at present seem insurmountable. We cannot shut our eyes to the undoubted fact that to such people such obstacles are real and not imaginary.

In order to provide the vegan movement with sufficient resources and skill, it is vital to attract people to it. The most immediate method is the spreading of the idea — the idea of animal emancipation. We shall welcome converts of whatever degree — those who can promise no more than mental acceptance equally with those who faithfully and so far as they are able, put their acceptance of the ideal into daily practice.

As the idea becomes more and more accepted, opportunities will grow to make the path easier and more attractive for those whose nature is not that of the pioneer. Concurrent with the gradual removal of obstacles to the personal practice, attention will have to be given to the question of how we propose to deal with animals in general as soon as the change-over from exploitation to freedom reaches a certain stage. It is not difficult to see that such a change-over will bring with it problems of a wide and general character. No-one, least of all the vegan, wants a world without animals — and how in general and in detail we propose to effect the swing-over from exploitation and perversion to freedom and naturalness will be quite a talking point one fine day.

If I may intrude a personal observation, there is little more desirable I would ask of providence than that such a day should dawn while I am still here to experience it. How glorious, for example, to take part in a discussion to decide whether, for the purposes of the change-over, a nature park or an animal sanctuary should be set up in this or that part of the country and exactly how it should be planned!

When veganism reaches such a stage there will have been an immense change of heart and mind in the majority of men and women. The idea of exploiting animals will be as repugnant then, as the idea of human slavery is today. Some of the changes in daily living are obvious. There will, for example, be no butchers' shops and the milkman (if he still goes his rounds) will be delivering vegan milk. The countryside will not be heavy with the anguish of cows crying for their calves. There will be no slaughterhouses, no vivisection laboratories, no-one will hunt animals for fun…

But some of the changes are not so obvious. The benefits to man himself of living in a kindlier and more enlightened world can be envisaged only in broadest outline. His health, physical and mental, will be vastly improved. Because he will have shed a great deal of the coarser part of his nature, benefits of the spirit will shower upon him — benefits which today by his own short-sighted volition he denies himself.

Such is the stuff of dreams… To make them true requires that we play our part as it comes to us. We are in the very elementary states of the new mutation. We are the pioneers.

The Vegan Story

by Leslie J. Cross (1914–1979)
From the winter 1955 issue of The Vegan (volume 9 number 7 pages 16–20). A talk given to the Hastings and St. Leonards Branch of the Sussex Vegetarian Society, July, 1955.

The first thing I would like to do is draw your attention to the title of this talk — The Vegan Story. I have called it that because I wanted to underline the manner in which I am going to try to approach the subject. What I am hoping to do is just what the title suggests: to tell a story; the story of what veganism is, what it sets out to do, and why it sets out to do what it does.

In the course of the story I shall put before you certain facts and certain considerations, but I shall not — at least, not consciously — try either to convert anyone or to conduct any propaganda.

Just in case there may be some of you who feel that this is perhaps a somewhat spiritless approach, I would like to explain that to my way of thinking, it is the right approach. For while I regard the spread of information, the free flow of information, as being vital to the growth of new ideas, I do not regard it as any part of my duty to try to be consciously persuasive. I think you will probably agree with me that a man should settle upon his way of life as the result of inward conviction, and not as the result of outward persuasive pressure.

With that preamble, let us begin the Vegan Story. And in doing so, we must put first things first; that is, we must know what we are talking about. Fortunately, the word “veganism” has a precise and simple meaning. It means: the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals. Because the question of definition is so obviously an important one, I am going to ask you to be kind enough to commit it to memory, so that when we use the word “veganism” we shall all be thinking of the same thing. Veganism then, is the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals.

This definition is written, in exactly those words, in the constitution of the Vegan Society, so that no-one joins the Society as either a full member or an associate without knowing exactly what he is supporting.

It is important to notice that one of the results of this definition is that it makes veganism a principle. It is, of course, a principle from which certain practices naturally flow — but it is itself a principle, and not a set of practices.

A further point to notice is that this principle, this doctrine, is concerned with one matter only. A big matter, it is true, but a clearly defined one: the matter of the right relationship between man and the animals.

What it says in effect is this: it says that the relationship generally accepted by the world at large is a very imperfect one. It says in effect that we shall not do away with the many wrongs done to animals, nor shall we do away with the harm which results to the soul of man, until we alter that relationship.

It is necessary, therefore, to look at the present relationship between man and the animals and to ask what is wrong with it. What is wrong, according to veganism, may be summarised into one word: exploitation.

If we look clearly and simply at this relationship we can see that it is almost entirely — not quite, but almost entirely — based from man's side of the fence upon the idea that he has a moral right to use animals for his own purposes.

Again, if we look clearly at this question of relationship, we can also see that broadly speaking there are two ways in which we may regard the animals: (1) as creatures to exploit; (2) as creatures to love.

If we want to understand veganism, if we want to assess its value, we are bound to examine at least briefly these two broad views of the relationship between man and the animals.

First, let us look at the majority view, the view that animals are here for our use, and that we have a moral right to use them for our own ends, provided that we reduce hardship and suffering to the minimum compatible with what we require of them. This view is held by the majority of people quite automatically. For example, farmers talk quite casually about “growing more bacon,” just as you or I might talk about “growing more cabbages.”

Again, the majority view is that we have the moral right to use animals for labour. To the majority view there is no fundamental questioning of our right to harness horses, bullocks, camels, and so on, and make them work to our orders and our requirements.

In practice, of course, there are considerable variations in the manner in which men do in fact use animals. These variations stretch from the comparatively harmless to the downright cruel. But the really important thing, it seems to me, is to notice the direction in which the doctrine of exploitation takes us. If we wish to illustrate this direction, we might quote vivisection perhaps; or the fact that work in the slaughterhouse often blunts the finer feelings of the men who work there.

Another point we are bound to notice is that there are some exploitations in which suffering to animals is inherent. That is to say, that if we abolished the suffering, we would automatically abolish that particular form of exploitation. Once again vivisection is an obvious example. Another is dairy farming, principally because of the necessity of separating the baby calf from its mother.

It is hardly possible to escape the conclusion that when man decided he had a moral right to exploit animals, he quite inevitably opened the door to a new and man-made form of suffering, much of which ends only in one form of slaughterhouse or another.

There is, however, yet another aspect which arises from this question of exploitation, and it is an aspect which by no means receives the attention it deserves. I refer to the aspect by which man harms himself. When there is interaction between two or more entities, the effects of the interaction are not confined to one entity only, but each is in some way affected. What, then, is the effect upon man of the interaction which he has created between himself and the animals? The effect upon man cannot differ as to its essential nature from the nature of the interaction itself. That is perhaps a rather complicated way of saying something which was said much more simply long, long ago: as we sow, we reap.

What do we sow? What do we do to animals?
We breed them in millions in order to slaughter them for food.
We exploit their sex functions in order to make them yield milk. We then take the baby calf from its mother so that we and not it may have the milk. Often, we then kill the baby calf and we eat it as veal. When its mother is worn out as the result of one unnatural pregnancy after another we kill her too, and we eat her as beef.
We hunt animals for fun. We vivisect them. We castrate and harness them.

What kind of relationship can it be whose symbols include the whip and the bit and the harness and the slaughterer's knife? If these are the things we sow, then these too are the things we reap. The form in which our harvest comes to us outwardly may be seen in some of our diseases, in much of our imperfect health, and possibly also in some of the violence between man and man.

But the form in which our harvest comes to us inwardly can be nothing less than a restraint upon our own spiritual evolution. For just as a balloon is prevented from rising so long as it is pinned to earth by its cable or the weight of its ballast, so also is the soul of man held down by the chains and the ballast which constitute the demands of his own lower nature. This aspect of the relationship between man and the animals is one which requires more thought perhaps than some of the more obvious aspects, but I believe it is one of the most serious of all the varying results of living according to the doctrine of exploitation.

We tend to forget, for example, that one of the most stringent tests of the character of a man, and hence of his ability to rise higher, is how he behaves toward those over whom he possesses power. When he meets the world of the animals he comes up against this test in its most acid form; for it will not be denied that animals cannot successfully resist his will. Instead of living toward them with love and understanding, which one would expect from a compassionate heart and an enlightened mind, he lives toward them as an overlord, in many instances as a parasite, and often he is the cause of considerable suffering to them.

All of this arises because he begins by assuming the moral right of exploitation. There lies the crux of the whole matter, and there too lies the only place at which we may, if we will, effect a reconciliation. Until we do effect such a reconciliation, we shall go on reaping what we sow. Until we learn that the fruit of human happiness cannot grow upon the tree of exploitation, so long will the pain and suffering which we inflict upon our lesser brethren return like boomerangs upon our own heads.

So much for the first and majority view — the view that we have the right to use animals for our own ends.

The second view, as I earlier remarked, is to regard the animals as creatures to love. Now it seems to me to be self-evident that when we love, we do not exploit. In the moment of love, there can be no thought of exploiting that which we love. It also seems to me to be self-evident that love is free. No-one can force love; no-one can bind it with restrictive covenants. Love and freedom go hand in hand.

If, therefore, we accept in principle that it is better to love than to exploit; if, stumble and fail at various points as we may, we still believe it is better to keep our eyes on the goal of love — what, then, should we do about the animals? Surely the answer is clarity itself: set them free!

And that is precisely what veganism wants to do. It wants to set the animals free; free from exploitation by man, just as in the last century Lincoln, Wilberforce and the other pioneers sought to set free the human slaves.

Veganism is essentially a doctrine of freedom. It seeks to free the animals from bondage to man and man from bondage to a false belief — the false belief that he has the moral right to use animals for his own ends.

It is, of course, a proper question, after we have decided what is right in principle, to ask how such freedom may be brought about. Clearly, the change-over from the practices which arise from exploitation to those which would arise from love will be an enormous undertaking. One has only to think for a moment of the immense ramifications of animal exploitation, and it becomes evident at once that the change-over can come only in stages. We must take the most urgent steps first, and the others gradually as we come to them in order of urgency.

One of the first steps is to develop alternatives to those products of animal origin which most men believe to be necessary to their well-being. That is why at the present time the emphasis in the vegan movement is upon food and commodities. Here is where we may see the relationship between the vegan and the vegetarian. For the vegan diet is one which does not rest in any way upon exploiting animals; in other words, it is vegetarian in the strictest possible sense, excluding eggs and dairy produce as well as flesh. The vegetarian diet, in this strict sense, is one of the many practices which flow from the vegan principle.

But, as I have indicated, veganism is a general principle which if adopted would result in many changes as well as changes in diet. It would, for example, result in the abolition of vivisection, of hunting, and all other forms of exploiting animals. And while we are agreed that in practice it can be adopted only gradually, nevertheless there is one thing that can be done now and all the time: the spreading of the belief that animal emancipation is not merely a worthwhile cause, but one which cannot be indefinitely postponed.

This belief must seem as revolutionary to the present generation as did the emancipation of the human slaves to an earlier generation. But revolutionary or not, I believe that ultimately it is inevitable; that is, if we are ever to live truly in peace upon the earth. For surely it is to say the least illogical to pray to a Heavenly Father for peace and goodwill among men, and at the same time to conduct an unholy war against our lesser brethren.

Hitherto, the idea that we have a moral right to exploit animals has been almost universally accepted. But part of the upward progress of man depends upon his ability to see the false in that which has hitherto been regarded as true. For when we see the false as the false, then it drops away from us, and our bondage is gone.

It is the true, and not the false, which liberates. The false cannot lead to freedom, it cannot lead to love. For this reason alone, it seems to me, this young movement whose goal it is to set the animals free has its feet upon a true, if a long and arduous road.

End Animal Use

Valerian Seethaler
Thursday, 30th of July 2026

Humans fail to see that animals are someone. Nonhuman animals also have an immeasurable inherent value and due to their sentience humans exploiting them is wrong. They would not need a diagnostic tool if humanity just stopped exploiting them. So, just stop exploiting animals and tell everyone.

Animal exploitation by humanity is wrong. Tell everyone it has to stop. End animal use.