Welcome to Small Bites, Sound Bites, a midweek segment of food for thought podcast where I share short, succinct, thoughtful responses to typical questions, myths, and misconceptions related to plant-based eating, veganism, and animal protection.

You can support this podcast today by going to joyfulvegan.com slash donate.

When I hear people say animals eat other animals so it's natural for us to do so as well, my first question is which animals are you referring to?

Carnivorous animals kill other animals and eat them, and that is indeed natural, but there are hundreds of species of animals who don't eat other animals as part of their nature.

In fact, there are more herbivores in the animal kingdom than there are carnivores. Why don't we use them as the model for our behavior?

You never hear people say animals don't eat other animals so it's natural for us to do so as well.

Instead, we align ourselves with the carnivorous lion rather than the vegetarian elephant.

There are always ways to justify our behavior, especially when it's about pleasure rather than necessity as Benjamin Franklin knew so well when he said,

so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

But we don't live our lives by reason alone, we live our lives by our values and our ethics and our compassion.

And we have the opportunity to do that every single day and may it be so.

For the animals this is Colleen Petrick-Gadro, you can find me at joyfulvegan.com