Daniel Dorado

While many animal advocates emphasize health benefits when they promote veganism, this paper argues that such a strategy rests on shaky foundations. This paper raises three objections to health-based vegan advocacy. First, the health argument faces several epistemic limitations: health is multidimensional, requiring explicit axiological choices about which outcomes matter; and nutritional epidemiology faces severe methodological constraints, including reliance on self-reported data, heterogeneous study designs, and insufficient longitudinal follow-up particularly in randomized controlled trials. Second, health recommendations may inadvertently increase total victim numbers through substitution from cow and pig meat toward chicken meat. Third, the health argument weakens ethical discourse by framing animal advocacy as instrumental to human wellbeing, offering no foundation for addressing non-dietary contexts—including wild animal welfare and harms caused by emerging technologies. A reformulated approach identifying limited situations where health considerations may appropriately supplement ethical arguments is proposed, though significant risks persist even in these cases.

Over the last forty years, numerous authors have started to take account of the issueof moral consideration of non-human animals in a wide array of ethical theory.This article looks at the issue through an annotated bibliography which covers themajor works dedicated to the subject during the last three decades. We see thatthese works fall under three distinct categories, based on whether their objectiveis to question positions which have been determined speciesist, to oppose thisquestioning of these positions for purely anthropocentric motives, or to reject thequestion for ecological reasons.