Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

Seb Alex is an animal and human rights activist, as well as a lecturer, photojournalist and author. He is Founder of the Middle East Vegan Society. Seb has run animal rights advocacy workshops for over 1300+ activists across Europe, the Middle East and Australia. He has given lectures in over 2/3 of universities in The Netherlands and more than 55 universities and schools in Canada, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Portugal, reaching more than 6000 students. In 2020 and 2021, Seb collaborated with Lebanese Vegans in opening the world’s first animal rights and Vegan support centre that still operates today in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips

01:23 Welcome

03:00 Seb’s Intro

– Born and raised in Lebanon, originally Armenian

– Activism (for human and non-human animal rights) since 15-16 years old

– “There’s a very important moral urgency”

– Addressing a regional gap re: animal advocacy in the Middle East “Maybe I shouldn’t complain and I should start doing something”

– “There are grass roots groups within the Middle East”

05:01 What’s Real

– Armenian community and the role of Christianity

– “I was not really raised religious”

– Attending an Armenian school founded by an atheist “but we had some historical religious courses”

– Praying and church “I did feel Christian up until 12-13 years old”

– Asking for a sign “I was really disappointed that no one showed up… you’re a kid and you really believe in these things… then you get slapped in the face”

– Becoming more agnostic over time “leaning more to I believe in what I see… no faith whatsoever”

– Attending 3 Vipassana Buddhist meditation retreats “for 10 days you don’t talk to anyone… you have to meditate for at least 10 hours a day… gives you a lot of back pain… at least my back pain is true!”

– “It wasn’t religious… it was a scientific way of meditating which I really enjoyed”

– Finding a big interest in religion again recently… religious history… watching the  Christspiracy Film documentary

– Launching the Vegan Islam initiative “This is quite powerful… I didn’t expect this from Islam… I straight away bought a Quran”

– “You can make a very strong case for animal rights using religion”

– “How people can go through so much pain and still believe in god…”

– “I’m very well educated in it but I still don’t find any faith in me”

– Dealing with life challenges “I lost my father around four years ago” suddenly due to COVID

– A comment from a friend “I don’t know if god exists, but it’s better for his reputation if he didn’t”

– “Why my father?… Why did he have to suffer so much?”

– Exploring religions “I do find things that I like… I take from here and there and I apply it to my life”

– Interested in the history of religions but… “All I hear is just stories… I can’t buy all of that”

– “I’m walking in parallel with religions… understanding and reading about them, but never feeling ‘this is the complete truth'”

– “The more historical and evidence-based something becomes the more I’m attracted towards it”

– The historical evidence for Jesus and Mohammed

– “If I were to choose I feel closer to Islam than Christianity – even though I was raised Christian”

– The problems of evil and suffering (particularly when we care about non-human animals)

– The Altamush Saeed episode

– The Matthew Halteman episode

– David Clough and Andrew Linzey’s work on vegan Christianity

– JW: “Animal agriculture is humane and sustainable” is a factual claim not an ethical one

– Seb’s book: “When Animal Rights and Logic Meet“

– Animal industry disinformation and social media misinformation

– People returning to Christianity and slaughtering their own animals because they think it brings them closer to god vs. those using Christian compassion to argue for animal rights

– “…animal rights… there is no ‘we might both be right’… one of us is wrong”

– Changing our minds “I change my views because I’m exposed to new information! And I get excited… I just found out I was wrong.”

– People arguing that animal agriculture is halal (permitted) in Islam “It’s true – in the Quran… you are given permission to kill animals”

– “Write down the times that the Quran says you can kill an animal and next to it write down all the times the Quran talks about how important it is to take care of animals… not harm animals… to defend animals even… becoming an animal rights activists… respect nature… not cut down any trees… there’s all these things…”

– “If you’re given the permission and you have the option to harm and not harm and one of the main pillars of Islam is the reduction of harm… you will be in the wrong by choosing to harm”

– “Using the whole ‘god’ approach is a very dangerous area… the second that becomes harmful for others I don’t really care what your god says… and I don’t care about how you’re interpreting that”

– “I can start a religion now and say ‘my god says this’… you’ll never be able to disprove it because it’s about faith”

– “Using religion is fine as long as you’re not harming others”

– Freedom of belief, worldview and religion – but don’t harm others

– JW: The risks of animal advocates falling into conspiracism “We are a tiny minority who know we’re right, the world really is arranged against us. There really are powerful forces hoodwinking the ’sheeple’… we’re the flat earthers who are actually right! 😊”

– JW: “People are so confident they’re right about veganism… that they think they’re right about everything”

– The Christopher Sebastian episode

– Believing and sharing misinformation re: dairy, acid, calcium and osteoporosis “The graphs, they were scientific and research based. The story… it was just a YouTuber saying it.”

– Industry sharing disinformation “as if they were scientifically proven facts” re: regenerative farming, plant sentience, unhealthy plant-based diets

– “Our movement does attract a more conspiracy-leaning type of people… the best example… COVID and all the vaccine [antivaxx] thing… we can clearly see what was just conspiracy theories…”

– “It was a difficult time for everyone… we were all sensitive to misinformation… we all had a lot of time to spend on the internet… ‘do your own research’ is the most dangerous thing you can tell anyone”

– When conspiracism and misinformation undermines the animal movement “The meat industry loves that!”

– The story of an influencer on an extremely calorie-restricted plant-based diet who died… “They [the animal agriculture industry and their supporters] were all over that story… ‘vegan influencer dies from malnutrition!’… it’s dangerous… tell people that this is about calorie restriction”

– “It is a deadly weapon, misinformation”

– “Laws that make people terrorists if they enter and film what’s happening inside a slaughterhouse… you can literally become under law a domestic terrorist”

– Changing your mind “It’s not the easiest thing… I had a small argument with my wife… half way through I realised she proved me wrong… it took me like a minute to go like ‘…you’re completely right I’m wrong’”

– The joy of changing your mind, because otherwise you could have been wrong “for the rest of your life”

32:08 What Matters?

– “My father was very strict on being good… very outspoken against injustice”

– “He grew up during… 15 years of civil war in Lebanon. They had to finish class in school and then pick up weapons… boys, they were underage… they would stay in school… guard the school in the night… then go home.”

– “He had seen a lot of violence on all sides… that had impacted him a lot… he said ‘I could never bring myself to harm someone’”

– The Armenian genocide and the survivors settling as Armenian communities in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine

– “There is… this strong push… we have to fight for recognition because what happened was wrong… If they don’t admit they were wrong… there’s always a danger of it happening again… It’s not justice.”

– Understanding animal rights “It is really that different from the Armenian genocide… the species are different, the numbers are different of course… and it’s ongoing.”

– “If I’m going to be outspoken about the Armenian genocide – that it was wrong, that it happened, how can I not… also recognise that its wrong, to stop doing it and fight against it”

37:27 Who Matters?

– Adopting a rescue cat “At the time I was 16 years old… I ate a typical diet… I used to go hunting with friends…”

– A friend asked “How can you claim to be an animal lover and you still go hunting and you eat meat…?

– “Everyone knew our cat. He had his own FaceBook page with 100 friends… He was famous in my group of friends.”

– A family conflict over declawing Chichique the cat “he was destroying the couches.” Launching an online campaign to persuade mum not to go ahead with the declawing

– A friend: “’I’m glad you saved your cat from going through that but I also realise you’re a hypocrite’… I hated hearing that”

– Watching the 10 minute “Meet your meat” PETA film narrated by Alex Baldwin

– “I finished watching and all I could think about was ‘I should really find a good argument now’… This was not nice… This is not OK. I either stop… or I should come up with a really good argument. That was 19 years ago and I still haven’t found a good argument nor have I even heard of one”

– Going vegetarian “out of lack of knowledge” and 8 years later “I learned about animal exploitation and speciesism… animal rights… and I became vegan”

– “I found out about veganism by myself – no one told me… I googled ‘why do humans drink breast milk from another mammal?’… It doesn’t make any sense naturally speaking”

– Watching the film Earthlings. “I was alone… ‘no one knows that I know!’… I could just continue this way but I couldn’t… it’s way too horrible… you can’t just go like ‘I’m just going to act like I didn’t see that’”

– The moral sense re: non-human animals “Suffering and compassion… The rights based stuff and the justice based stuff really came 4-5 years ago after reading more”

– “It doesn’t have to be about compassion… If you do it with compassion that’s amazing but you don’t have to love someone to not harm them…”

– JW: “They’re not worried about our motivation… empathic, emotional… or more intellectual or rational… they don’t really care. What they care about is are their rights, their interests, being respected”

– The challenges and risks of linking human and non-human forms of oppression

– The term “Senticide” as a sentient being-focused analogue to the genocide of humans

– Animal agriculture as a repeated, forced extermination where you re-breed the victims so you can do it all over again

– “It’s as if you took all the Armenians at the time in 1915, killed the majority and made the others breed… and then killed them… this cycle… it’s psychopathic”

– “Regardless of what your intentions are… financial… economy… ‘we can make resources out of their bodies’… the excuses you’re trying to find at the end don’t matter”

– “They say… ‘we shouldn’t be comparing what’s happening to other animals to what has happened to humans’… but… that is the whole point of comparing. What we shouldn’t do is equate. And we’re not equating, because we can’t equate human experience to animal experience. We can’t even equate my experiences to your experiences.”

– The whole point of comparing is to recognise both the similarities and the differences

– “When we say what we’re doing to animals is similar to what we’ve done to a specific human population during a genocide – you are comparing and that is the whole point… Equating… it’s also just false. You can’t equate these experiences.”

– JW: “People recognise that dehumanisation is a bad thing because… once you’re not seen as human we do terrible things to you… and that has been done to many members of homo sapiens who didn’t get to count as canonical, model, ‘ideal’ humans so they were also excluded.”

– “The first thing that you would have to do to a population before genociding them or exterminating them is actually comparing them to non-human animals. That is the first point. Once you strip away the human status… you can convince people that ‘OK this not that that bad’”

– “There is a vary fair point at us looking at atrocities and looking at what’s happening now… ‘is there some link here?’… there definitely is”

– Attitudes towards non-human animals in the Middle East and North Africa “They are not treated in any way worse or better than any other part of the world”

– “In some countries it may be more visible to the everyday eye. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worse than what’s going on at the pig slaughterhouse in Manchester that I’ve been at where you can hear them in the gas chambers from outside”

– “In Lebanon there’s a lot of racism… specifically towards South East Asian migrants or African migrants, and specifically the darker the skin. Now somehow, if they’re European or American of African descent that racism goes away – because it’s a westerner…”

– “I see sometimes online people saying ‘people of colour can’t be racist because they themselves are victims of oppression’”

– “You can be a victim of oppression and also oppress others… both can be true at the same time… I don’t like playing identity politics… when I see something wrong I’m going to say it’s wrong”

– “There’s two extremes… either human life barely having any value to human life having so much value, even animal life”

– October 2024 in Lebanon. Distributing plant-based food during the war to help ~1 million Lebanese refugees within in the country (~25% of the population)

– Working in a Southern suburb of Beirut “everyone had evacuated… everyone left everything behind, including animals”

– Thinking “Maybe we shouldn’t be here… maybe there’s a reason this is a ghost town” but “we wanted to give out food to the cats and the dogs”

– “Immediately some security people came… armed civilians… ‘what are you doing here?’… ‘you have 20 minutes to feed as many animals as you can… there’s going to be an air strike’”

– “I thought they were going to be angry with us… there’s dead bodies under the rubble… bombed left and right… you can smell it in the air… animal corpses rotting, human corpses… shops and supermarkets left open the fruits and vegetables, everything rotting inside… chemical bombs… you get a migrane within 10-15 minutes”

– “The amount of times that they showed up… on motorcycles carrying AK47s… giving us a look… then pulling up a plastic bag and saying ‘I have a few cats at home can you give me some food as well’”

– “These are the last people I expected to care about animals right now… I’m going back home… they are staying here… Twice it happened they came with motorcycles they said ‘I know a place with more cats if you want to follow us’…”

– “Even when human life is in danger some people can still think ‘yes but let’s help the animals as well’”

– “I’m an animal rights activist and the people that were with me were animal rights activists as well… so I’m not shocked that they care… but to get to these locations and realise that people there care as well? I think it’s amazing… It’s beautiful actually.”

– “At the same time it’s also war… Human life has no value in war… I don’t know how to explain it.”

58:10 A Better World?

– Caring about non-human sentient beings as an ancient theme in human cultures

– Suspected Sentientist, the ascetic, blind Arab philosopher poet Al-Ma’arri (from modern day Syria)

– “He even refused to sell his poems because it had no meaning for him to make money”

– “He spent the last years of his life taking care of his mum… a very caring and loving man who refused to wear leather sandals almost a thousand years ago”

– “For anyone trying to make excuses to buy leather shoes… If a blind man in the middle of the middle east refused leather sandals and used wooden sandals instead I’m sure you can all make a bit of a sacrifice – if it can even be considered a sacrifice”

– “He was very outspoken against the use of animals… and the consumption of any animal product from meat to chicken to honey to milk…”

– His poem “I now longer steal from nature”… “oppression is the worst of crimes… or injustice”

– Al-Ma’arri’s arguments with an Egyptian poet about animal rights, written in rhyming poems “Technically it’s the oldest rap battle in history”

– Threats to assassinate Al-Ma’arri because of his subversive worldview

– Porphyry, a philosopher born in South Lebanon “was very outspoken about consuming animal meat and also sacrificing animals”

– “I’ll start with something that’s going to take people’s hope away… I found a letter that Porphyry had written to a friend who had went back to eating meat… an ‘ex vegan’ let’s say… ‘surely you’re not using stupid arguments like it’s better for your health?!”

– “Oh my god… we are still dealing with people who go back to eating meat… since then people have been fighting about this issue”

– “It really felt like someone arguing on FaceBook or Instagram”

– “I really hope I’m wrong… but I don’t really believe that we’re going to have a world where everyone is  going to be eating a plant-based diet and all animals are going to have basic moral rights by law, and [be] respected”

– “We don’t even have that with human rights yet”

– “Just because I don’t think we’re going to get to 100% doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try as much as we can… I don’t think we’re ever going to have a world free of racism. That doesn’t mean that we should stop fighting against racism.”

– “The pragmatic approach… through education… corporate education… governments taking responsibility… making plant-based eating more affordable… using subsidies… eliminating subsidies from animal products.”

– “Ideally we’d wake up tomorrow and all governments would realise that everything we’re doing is wrong…”

– “What gives me hope… more people are taking human rights seriously…”

– We can’t perfectly prove others are sentient but through logic and reasoning “We are 99.9999…% sure that they like us suffer…”

– The struggle to get others to agree “I wish people would be more simple and reason-based”

– “But there is one thing we all agree on which is human rights. If someone doesn’t agree with human rights then they’re a lost cause. I wouldn’t deal with them. What’s the point?”

– “The more there are human rights violations… the more people are being outspoken about human rights… recognising that all humans are different from each other… languages… skin colour, eye colour, religions… IQ levels, creativity, talent… we all also agree that these are morally irrelevant traits… we all deserve the same basic moral rights.”

– “I’m just going to ask them ‘do you believe in human rights?’… If they say yes there is not a single way they can disagree with animal rights…Can you think of a single trait that these animals have that is morally relevant that justifies not giving them moral rights? There is not a single trait.”

– “Any trait you give, if I apply it to a human, you’re not going to agree that this human no longer deserves basic moral rights”

– “If you can’t think of any trait, it means that in the ways that morally matter, we are the same.”

– “If you do believe in human rights, I don’t care what your religion is, where you come from, what your tradition and habits are… you have no argument whatsoever against animal rights…”

– “…A matter of logical consistency… not of convincing someone of some new idea. This actually gives me hope”

– Do human and animal rights mean we have to be perfectly egalitarian? (flipping a coin to decide whether to save a mosquito or a human child)

– “You’re saving your kid because it’s your kid… it’s not a matter of speciesism it’s a matter of human emotions”

– “If I’m going to save my brother from a fire instead of a stranger that doesn’t mean I would no longer respect human rights… It’s a difficult question but it doesn’t mean that I can’t respect human rights.”

– JW: “These thought experiments and challenges feel very different when they come from a fellow vegan than from someone who doesn’t even stand against exploitation and oppression in the first place… where are you standing when you make this argument?”

– “If someone is not vegan they don’t really believe in animal rights… The actual question is ‘there’s an animal inside the building… do  you want to burn the building?’… I’m not asking you to choose animals over humans, I’m asking you not to burn the building.”

– JW: Good faith exploration of thought experiments vs. them being used as distractions or excuses from the core question: “’Do you want to cause egregious, horrific harm and exploitation for a trivial reason or not?’ That’s the actual question.”

– Different animal agriculture transition paths around the world, particularly places where many more people are personally involved in animal agriculture

– “Thankfully most Middle Eastern countries don’t have a big animal agriculture industry… you can’t really mass farm animals there… most of the meat is imported from Brazil, Australia and other countries”

– “Middle Eastern countries have an interest in going for plant-based alternatives because of food security reasons.” E.g. Saudi Arabia investing in and promoting plant-based alternatives

– “They realised the population was not consuming enough fibre… [and] food security… you need to have something locally made”

– Lebanon’s economic crisis, hyperinflation and the collapse of the local currency “you would see imported soy milk for £80”

– “People couldn’t afford meat any more. You can only afford what’s made locally because anything produced from outside is purchased by currency exchange where your money’s value is very low… A kilo of meat would be £200-250.”

– “A lot of local companies popped up… in Lebanon… making plant-based cheese with very healthy ingredients… because it’s the cheapest natural products they can make locally… plant-based meat, plant-based chicken…”

– “The same thing happened in Syria during the war… a lot of restaurants that replaced chicken shawarmas with soy shawarma and they didn’t even talk about it. It wasn’t a vegan thing. It was like ‘we need protein and we need cheap food and we don’t have chicken’”

– “The financial crisis… is not as bad now… these products are still on the shelves… people are still consuming them.”

– “The Middle East is not going to be very heavily affected if we switch to a plant-based food system. If anything it’s going to be easier when it comes to food security and it’s going to be better for the economy because you can consume what is locally made.”

– Quatar’s government investments in cellular agriculture.

– Emirates Airlines producing food from vertical farms

– The Beirut port explosion “300,000 people became homeless in a matter of seconds”

– “A lot of the businesses that were affected had to close down… some of them were vegan restaurants… they sent their chefs… to this… animal rights centre that we have in Beirut… preparing all the food there then going out and distributing them…”

– “We also put a few fliers about plant-based nutrition. We wanted to be careful for people not to think we’re taking advantage of their vulnerable situation… ‘here’s some information on nutrition’.”

– Distributing food to Kenyan migrants “A lot of the NGOs… we do have a racism problem in Lebanon… were only taking care of Lebanese people who were affected…”

– “At the same time we were taking care of the bills of animals that were injured”

– “It wasn’t in a way where we could talk about animal rights but we were helping humans while making sure we’re not harming animals at the same time and we were also helping animals”

– JW: Could humanitarianism move to sentientitarianism? “There are many really important humanitarian interventions that do actually cause harm to non-human animals”#

– Seb’s education work in schools and universities “It’s definitely one of the most rewarding things… people are at an age where people are like a sponge… take in as much information as they can.”

– “Education is one of the most important things.”

– “One of my biggest frustrations with the Effective Altruism movement… since you can’t put numbers on the impact of education… they very easily dismiss it as a powerful weapon we can use to make this world a better place.”

– Sharing anonymous surveys after lectures “The amount of beautiful results that I’ve seen… it makes me happy”

– “You have valuable information that the industry does not want to know about… what better place to share that than in universities and schools… these are the people of the future.”

– “Some of those people will become law-makers… politicians… doctors and scientists… if they don’t have a clear ethical view of what’s right and wrong then  we’re doomed.”

– JW: Children’s rights: “they deserve this from us. They deserve to know the truth… not to be indoctrinated.”

– JW: “You can have a better conversation about philosophy with a class of 6 year old’s than you can on Twitter with adults… that is a low bar… do not underestimate the amazing, brilliant, fresh, open minds of young people… another source of hope.”

01:28:50 Follow Seb:

– Sebalex.org (reach out for lectures!)

– @seb.alex

– Middle East Vegan Society

– VeganIslam

Thanks to Graham for the post-production and to Tarabella, Steven, Roy and Denise for helping to fund this episode via our Sentientism Patreon and our Ko-Fi page. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop.