You Are Strange…

For years, people like me were told that we were the strange ones. Vegans were portrayed as unusual, extreme, disconnected from reality, incapable of enjoying life and determined to make everyone else’s life more complicated. We were the awkward guests at dinner parties, the people who asked uncomfortable questions, the ones who refused to participate in traditions that everybody else seemed perfectly happy to accept and for a long time to be fair, I accepted that label.

Not because I believed it to be true, but because I understood that standing apart from the majority often attracts suspicion. Throughout history, those who challenged established habits have frequently been regarded as strange. It is far easier to mock an idea than to check what is behind it. But something has changed, at least to my eyes.

The more I reflect on our relationship with animals, the more convinced I become that the label has been attached to the wrong people.

Because in 2026, knowing what we know about animals, their emotions, their intelligence, their capacity to suffer and their desire to remain alive, I no longer look at vegans and see anything unusual. Instead, I find myself looking at those who continue to eat animals and wonder: what is happening inside them? What is it that I cannot see?

What is the hidden mechanism that allows an otherwise compassionate person to participate in the suffering and death of another sentient being while feeling entirely at peace with that decision?

The reason I find this question so unsettling is because I ain’t talking about people I dislike. I am talking about friends; my family; people I admire for their intelligence or for their kindness; People whose generosity I have witnessed throughout my life.People who care deeply about injustice, who show kindness towards others and who would never consciously choose to inflict suffering on a vulnerable individual.

And yet they continue to support a system that breeds, confines, exploits and kills animals on an unimaginable scale. They know everything I know and they feel everything I feel. But that contradiction is now impossible for me to ignore.

When a person behaves cruelly in every area of their life, there is little mystery involved. The explanation presents itself. But when a person is thoughtful, intelligent and kind, while simultaneously accepting violence towards animals as normal, something far more puzzling emerges.

You begin to wonder whether there is a hidden room inside the human mind where empathy simply does not enter.

You begin to wonder whether there is a part of ourselves capable of looking directly at suffering and deciding that it does not matter if the victim belongs to the wrong race of to the wrong species.

You begin to wonder whether moral blindness can coexist with moral goodness.

Because that is what I find so difficult to understand.

Most people who eat animals do not strike me as evil. Most would be horrified if they were asked to kill the animal themselves. Most would turn away from the slaughterhouse. Most would struggle to watch the final moments of the beings they consume.

And yet the slaughterhouse and the killing exist because of them and that is why I increasingly find the behaviour strange. Not strange because it is uncommon but because it is so profoundly contradictory.

Strange because it requires a level of emotional compartmentalisation that I no longer possess.

Strange because it allows someone to look at a pig, a cow or a chicken, acknowledge that the animal values its life, and nevertheless decide that a fleeting moment of pleasure is worth more than that life itself.

In the past, society has looked at vegans and asked, “What is wrong with you?”

It is time that question changed direction.

Because when someone knowingly continues to benefit from the exploitation and death of conscious individuals despite having every opportunity to choose otherwise, I can no longer convince myself that such behaviour is normal. In fact, I immediately categorise them as monster.

One day, future generations may look back on our treatment of animals with the same horror that we reserve for other moral blind spots of the past. They will struggle to understand how decent people could have known so much and yet done nothing to change.

So vegans have carried the burden of being regarded as the strange ones for years? Then it is time for that label to change sides.