Crossposted from the EA Forum

Today, I became vegan.

Just 24 hours ago, I couldn’t have imagined this would be the case — at least not so soon.

Reading Óscar Horta’s Making A Stand For Animals^[1] (MASFA, from now on) hit me like a freight train as I turned page after page, chapter after chapter. Now there was something I could no longer unsee — something that compelled me to act in accordance.

Internally, this feels like the first major moral decision I’ve made in my life. I had made important decisions before to align with my values. Volunteering, joining Effective Altruism, committing to upskilling in AI Safety rather than pursuing a Master’s or a conventional job, taking the 10% Pledge, saying “yes” to helping run an EA university group.

It’s not that these weren’t hard decisions, but they didn’t feel like hard moral decisions. They involved practical challenges, but they simply felt like what I had to do.

With becoming vegan, the moral struggle to reach this decision has been much more arduous, even if deep inside I already knew it was right.

In this article, I want to guide you through that struggle via 5 obstacles I’ve had to overcome to become vegan. Not literal obstacles, but self-imposed or imaginary ones — which are sometimes the hardest to overcome.

This article might be relevant to my past self, and to others who also face, knowingly or not, these or similar hurdles.

I

The first obstacle was ignorance.

We love dogs. We eat pigs. We wear cows^[2].

The first step was noticing this moral inconsistency — that something didn’t feel right.

We would not willingly harm or kill an animal, yet we choose to participate in this intricate system where we reap the benefits of doing so without having to feel guilty.

Seeing the reality of factory farms (I thank Pablo Rosado in particular for his video) can lift the curtain on the tragedy that plays out every day on a massive scale. An estimated 83 billion farmed land animals and 124 billion farmed fishes are killed for food each year, according to Animal Charity Evaluators. But this knowledge alone isn’t enough to dispel ignorance. You then have to make the connection.

As the pieces of the puzzle come together, you start seeing the contradictions, and you can no longer unsee them.

In 2011, a cow named Teresa made headlines in Italy after escaping a farm in Sicily and swimming toward C...

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