ANTI-VEGANS: It’s a question we frequently ask ourselves but has former Top Gear presenter-turned-professional-speciesist, Jeremy Clarkson, finally gone off the deep end in his latest column for the Times? Claire Hamlett ponders the bizarre logic of a conflicted mind.

In his latest column for the Times, Clarkson struggles to square the affection and compassion he feels for some animals with his job as a farmer who sends animals to slaughter and his penchant for eating meat. Basically, he is grappling with his own speciesism, but in typical Clarkson fashion, he goes about it in a brash and histrionic way. Most curiously, in the process of working through his confused emotions, he feels the need to drag vegans into the moral mess of his mind just to make himself feel better.

After explaining some of the distinctions he makes between animals he loves and those he eats, he writes, “I think all of us are similarly conflicted. Even the most hardcore peace ’n’ love vegan will smash a wasp over the head with a copy of the Socialist Worker if it’s being annoying. They will also spray their holiday hotel room with mozzie killer before they go out for dinner. And even if they are so fanatical they don’t do either of these things, I bet they’d be happy for someone to shoot a crocodile if it was eating them at the time.”

Where to even start? How about with the idea that not killing wasps is fanatical? As pollinators and by preying on other bugs that can destroy vegetation when their numbers are not controlled, wasps play a critical role in ecosystems. They are also being wiped out as quickly as bees, though hardly anyone knows or cares because they are so maligned. There are a number of ways to repel them harmlessly if they are bothering you while you’re eating and drinking outside, which everyone, not just vegans, should be more aware of. So Clarkson’s assertion only reveals his ignorance of the importance of wasps, while also inaccurately singling out vegans as potentially being “fanatical” enough not to kill them.

Mosquitoes are more fairly nobody’s favourite creature, and no doubt there are vegans who swat them, it’s rather a stretch for Clarkson to try to equate this with the disparity between his willingness to “stamp repeatedly on the head of a badger” and his aversion to dispatching deer. Mosquitoes may feel pain, but slapping one that is biting you (this is what I would do, rather than spray insect repellant everywhere) is rather less violent than “happily” stamping a badger to death. Mosquito bites can also lead to allergic reactions and infections, and in areas where malaria and other diseases are spread by them, using repellent and other methods to keep mosquitos at bay becomes something of a necessity.

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But what of the crocodile? Again it’s a bad comparison. None of the animals Clarkson says he would be happy to kill (badgers, grey squirrels, pigs, partridge) have actively been trying to kill him first - nor would most be capable of doing more than causing him to require a tetanus shot. In fact, he wants to kill many of them for the purpose of eating them. The crocodile example is clearly not equivalent, and even if a vegan did beg for someone to shoot a croc that was attacking them, their reason (wanting to preserve their own life) is somewhat more understandable than needlessly killing animals for pleasure.

Later in the piece, Clarkson says that vegans would consider it wrong of him to kill pigeons for feeding on his rapeseed. He again justifies this spuriously: “But if I hadn’t, I’d have no rape oil to sell, which would cause many people to use palm oil instead. And that would be very bad news for the world’s orangutans, whose lives, in my book, are more precious than a flock of airborne rats.” It’s perfectly possible to have regard for both a pigeon’s life and an orangutan’s, of course, but what’s stranger here is the causal link Clarkson devises between his killing of pigeons and saving the lives of orangutans. It might be the case that producing rapeseed oil could help to reduce the need for producing palm oil, but rapeseed meal (a byproduct of producing the oil) is used as feed for farmed animals, while the oil is used not just for direct human consumption but also for biodiesel. Growing crops for fuel is a poor use of land that could be used to grow food for people. I don’t know what Clarkson’s rapeseed is used for, but his statement is hardly the ‘gotcha’ he thinks it is.

We can see how Clarkson’s real aim here is again to shift the blame for his own muddled thinking on animals onto vegans. Essentially, he’s saying “I might be bad but vegans are no saints”. For someone who dislikes vegans so much, he does spend an awful lot of time comparing himself to them.

Ultimately, Clarkson goes through all this hand-wringing only to end up where he started: that his speciesism is justified based on his own standards of what makes an animal’s life valuable. Maybe what’s saddest about the piece is how it reveals that Clarkson is actually capable of compassion towards animals, but that it is limited, Clarkson-centric, and undermined by the violence he gladly metes out to those who he deems unworthy.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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