**Released on International Human Rights Day – 10 December 2025**
https://www.un.org/en/observances/human-rights-day
** Title: Ethicalism = Humanism + Veganism **
A Decolonised, Non-Violent Food Ethics for the 21st Century
#### What is Ethicalism?
Ethicalism is the conscious choice to extend universal human rights – dignity, bodily autonomy, and freedom from exploitation – to all sentient beings and to the living Earth that sustains us.
It unites:
– Humanism (every human deserves justice, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography)
– Veganism (no sentient being deserves to be turned into a commodity)
Ethicalism recognises that the industrial animal system is not only cruel to animals – it is one of the last legally sanctioned forms of mass exploitation and colonisation of bodies, land, and labour.
#### The Hidden Human Cost of the “Cheap Meat & Dairy” Industry
– 80 % of the world’s soy (mostly GM) is grown to feed factory-farmed animals, driving Amazon and Cerrado deforestation and the violent displacement of Indigenous communities in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.
– Slaughterhouse workers (mostly migrants and people of colour) suffer the highest rates of workplace injury and PTSD of any legal industry – called “the most dangerous factory job in America” (Human Rights Watch, 2023–2025).
– In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and North Africa, leather tanneries poison rivers and workers with chromium VI (carcinogenic) while paying poverty wages.
– Fishing fleets rely on modern slavery – over 128 000 fishers trapped on boats in forced-labour conditions (Global Slavery Index 2025).
– Dairy and egg industries in the Global South routinely use debt-bonded labour and child labour.
The same system that cages and kills 90 billion land animals and 2–3 trillion marine animals every year also cages, exhausts, and poisons human beings – especially Brown, Black, and Indigenous bodies.
#### Decolonising Our Plates
Colonialism turned living beings and fertile land into “resources” to be extracted.
Ethicalism is an act of decolonisation:
– Rejects the mindset that any body (human or non-human) can be owned, bred, or killed for profit
– Restores seed sovereignty and agroecology led by Indigenous and peasant farmers
– Refuses to fund industries built on stolen land and stolen lives
#### Health & Planet Benefits Remain (and are even stronger when justice-centred)
– Certified organic + plant-based or 100 % pasture-raised (never factory-farmed) eliminates glyphosate, rBGH, and antibiotic residues
– Ends your personal contribution to deforestation, modern slavery, and worker trauma
– Dramatically lowers diet-related disease while uplifting rural communities through fair-trade plant crops
#### Ethicalism Pledge – Start Today
I choose food that does not require:
– cages
– deforestation
– slavery
– displacement
– slaughter
I choose Ethicalism because human rights that stop at the species border are not universal – they are conditional.
On Human Rights Day 2025 and every day after,
Let your plate be an act of solidarity with all beings who can suffer.
**Ethicalism = Humanism + Veganism**
Because no one is free until all bodies – human and non-human – are free from commodification.
Share • Print • Live it
#Ethicalism #HumanRightsDay2025 #DecoloniseYourPlate
(References & further reading: tinyurl.com/Ethicalism2025 – includes UN reports, Global Slavery Index, Land Matrix, and peer-reviewed studies)
Designed to fit one printed page. Print, fold, and distribute freely.
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