 Yes, the house should go vegan, and as a matter of urgency. You might wonder why on earth I'd be so concerned with people being vegan. People often say, stop forcing your views onto me. Why are you trying to force your lifestyle onto us? Well, I can assure you I don't have some narcissistic goal of wanting you to be like me or to join my cult. The motivation is connected simply to the concept of supply and demand. When you go to the store, you take flesh or milk off of the shelves. They replace it with more, subsequently subjecting more animals to a life of abject suffering and a brutal killing. So the motivation is not to force my lifestyle onto you, but rather I want you to stop forcing your lifestyle onto other animals. For you, it costs just a few quid for a pound of chicken. For the animals, they pay the ultimate price. The vast majority of animals in the UK and the world are farmed in filthy factories. But you might find that hard to believe because of the lie you've been sold. What humans do to animals in order to obtain their flesh, milk, eggs and skin is in numbers, unequivocally the largest moral atrocity humanity has ever committed. Only 110 billion human beings have ever existed in our world's history. We kill more feeling sentient beings than that in a mere six weeks by the most conservative of estimates. And all for trivial and needless products. In fact, since my talk started, we've already slaughtered over 2.5 million animals. And after just these few words, another 32,000. And just like that, minute after minute, hour after hour, millions of animals massacred. And for what? A burger, a ham sandwich, a chicken wing. I bet you probably couldn't remember what you ate for lunch last week. That's how little it meant to you. But for the animals, it was all they had. Now these numbers are unfathomable. We're talking between one and three trillion land and marine animals every year. That even if you were to believe that a human life is worth a thousand animal lives, a million animal lives, when we crunch the numbers, we surely should have reached a threshold to which you would consider our treatment of animals up there with the worst of moral crimes. If you don't, I'm sure the animals would see it that way. You see, it's easy to look at an issue from our perspective and say it just doesn't matter. But as famous animal rights lecturer Gary Rofsky once said, when you're the victim, things look a lot differently from that angle. If an atrocity like this were taking place to humans on such a scale, it would be the new holocaust on steroids. But the animal holocaust isn't new. The systematic domination, enslavement and mass killing of animals has taken place at least since the dawn of agriculture. And we've become more efficient at confining and terrorising animals with the rise of factory farming in the 1920s. Animals were the first to be enslaved, the first to be systematically slaughtered and the only victims to ever be served in a modern university cafeteria with no one batting an eye. For as long as non-human animals have been oppressed, they still are to this day persecuted, treated like nothing, their charred bodies chewed up, digested and flushed down the toilet. The utter disregard and contempt for these sentient beings is unmatched. But why are their lives disregarded? Well, just like racism or any other form of discrimination, it all starts in the mind first. Species-ism, you might have heard this term before, similar to racism, it's essentially discrimination based on species alone. It's the reason we love and care for dogs, but destined pigs to hellhole factory farms and a horrifying CO2 gas chamber to suffer and die. Species-ism is a form of human supremacy. We matter the most, so we choose who lives and who dies. Where have we heard that before? A quote attributed to Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno rings true here. Ask which begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks they're only animals. A testament to the dangerous mentality that stems from species-ism. You see, the species that sees animals is so far below us that it becomes morally permissible to treat them like their lives don't matter. And throughout history, we've heard different oppressors lowering humans to the status of animals in order to justify killing them too. This species-ist language tends to precede many mass atrocities and war crimes. But in a world where we respected animals to begin with, this dehumanization could never be used to justify the unjustifiable. In the words of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? And I'm in the room with intellectuals and the world educated and we all know the animals, we continuously subject to sickening farming practices for nothing more than taste pleasure, can suffer and suffer on an unthinkable scale they do. I've been an investigator for the last few years and I'm gonna tell you some of the things I've witnessed in this time and also some of the cruel and vile things humans do to animals in the name of our own selfish desires. I've seen mother pigs imprisoned in cages so small they can't turn around with their dead piglets sprawled on the ground around them. I've heard the chilling screams of six-month-old pigs as they beg for mercy in dungeons filled with CO2 gas. I've seen chickens with their bodies half eaten fighting for their last breath on the cold, damp, factory farm floor, as the other birds continue to peck them to death. I've watched cows struggle to escape the knockbox, ripping their own horns off in desperation before being shot in the head, hung and decapitated. I've seen calves stolen at birth while their mother bellows for their young. Also, we can take the milk that was meant for her baby. I've seen featherless hens with painful bleeding prolapses forced to continuously lay eggs for someone else's breakfast omelet. I've witnessed full-grown pigs being beaten to death with an iron bar as they convolve for close to a minute before being thrown in a bin like trash. The majority of these despicable acts took place on UK higher welfare farms and abattoirs. RSPCA assured, red tractor, free range, grass fed, are just marketing ploys to ease the conscience of the unaware consumer. It's trickery, a smoke screen that covers the true horrors of animal farming so that basic human compassion does not get in the way of meat industry profit. After hearing about the horrors of animal farming, the first thing that might come to your mind is, well, I don't agree with going vegan. That's a bit extreme, but it definitely should be done better. Let's treat these animals a little nicer before we kill them en masse. You will often hear the phrase humane slaughter being thrown around, as if putting the word humane in front of the word slaughter absolves us of any moral wrongdoing. Could you imagine someone using the phrase humane rape? Humane slavery. What about a humane genocide? Any decent person would scoff at the thought. Yet when it comes to the killing of animals, all of a sudden, it's no problem. In principle, humane slaughter is a myth, a fairy tale. It only serves to make the killer feel more comfortable about killing and has nothing to do with the rights of the victim. If the animals' rights were truly being respected, then so would their right to continue living. Put yourself in the victim's position. Would you still consider slaughter humane if it were you walking down the kill line? You see, animals are always left dead last. Whether humans are at war or at peace, the animals are still oppressed. Even after war's end, peace is declared and the economy covers and is robust. The animal killing machine is functioning at its peak. The animals are always left out of any peace deals. For them, the war never ends. We have waged an eternal war on the most innocent, defenseless beings that have no way of escape or retribution. Well, I guess war's the wrong word. It's more like a perpetual genocide because in this case, the victims cannot fight back. They are truly gentle, fragile, and helpless beings and humans capitalise in every twisted, conceivable way off of their helplessness. And their only crime is being born into the wrong species. During his pursuit for non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi said, the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. What does that say about our moral progress as a human nation? I argue that although we're technologically advanced, we are sadly morally stone-aged. We need to stop looking at this injustice through a human lens and start viewing this through the eyes of an animal, born into hell, the day of their execution, already planned, born with no rights, not even to their own bodies. Yet humans have the superseding right to kill animals to satisfy their meat cravings. Justice and fairness are sentiments that we hold dear as a society, but do we practise them consistently? Do we extend that justice to those who look and act differently to us? We need to stop focusing on the differences between humans and animals and instead focus on the qualities we share. Sentience, emotions, the wish to live free from suffering and persecution, the desire for freedom. We will only reach this point when we stop viewing animals as worthless products and start viewing them as individuals whose interests matter morally. Famous author and vegetarian Leo Tolstoy wrote, as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields. And I too believe that we can never truly be at peace while we continue to otherise, belittle, terrorise, subjugate and mass slaughter based on a morally irrelevant trait like species. You see the human oppression of other animals not only hurts the animals, but also harms our collective moral fibre and our supremacist attitude towards our fellow creatures of earth emanates out into the way we treat each other. It's time to live in alignment with the moral beings I know we can be and it all starts with our treatment of the most vulnerable. When you are not vegan, you are facilitating through the supply and demand system the most horrific moral crimes, crimes that one day will look back on the same way we now look back on slavery, apartheid and the Holocaust with complete and utter shame. It's for these reasons that I truly believe and I hope you do too that the house and the world should go vegan. Thank you. Thank you.