Do Vegans Have A Duty To Be Fit, Healthy and Strong For The Animals?
To find out, I ran a Twitter poll — here’s the results
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Some time ago, I ran a poll on Twitter which asked the following question:
“Do vegans have a duty to the animals to be fit, healthy and strong in order to serve as positive role models? “
Here are the final results:
As you can see, the majority of people said, no, they don’t think it’s a duty. I found it interesting to read the comments that were left, some of which were posted by long-term, committed, veteran vegans.
Even among this demographic, opinion was divided. There were those who think that, whilst we don’t have a duty to be super-fit athletes, we nevertheless have a responsibility not to allow ourselves to get too overweight or unhealthy by living off junk food.
For example, @VeganPoet wrote:
“We have an obligation to try to eat healthy foods & not let ourselves go. We don’t have to be athletes or super fit, but we have a duty to prove to the world that vegans will thrive. Therefore, we can’t live off processed foods. We should eat plenty of healthy, whole foods.”
Others were emphatic in stating that our only obligation as vegans is to refrain from harm as much as we can. For example, @PascotoIndia said:
“No we dont have an obligation to do as you say. We have an obligation to be vegan, and that is all.”
Obviously, not everyone who voted also posted a comment, so it’s impossible to get the full range of thoughts on this one. No-one said in the comments that we have an out-and-out responsibility to train like athletes, and yet the results of the poll indicate there may be a significant number of vegans who feel that this is the case.
One of the comments which expressed a kind of middle-ground view was from @your_vegan, who said:
“This is a path that one can choose. It is a perfectly valid and highly useful path. It is not in any way a duty or obligation. No one is…
