The Swiss organisation Animal Rights Switzerland has launched a project that outlines how the country could become vegan in the future. Motivated by an independent Swiss think tank recommending that people in the country should no longer eat meat by 2050, and that the meat consumption per capita has already fallen from 64.4 kilograms in 1980 to 47.3 kilograms in 2020, the organisation has specified what changes would need to happen to completely veganise the country.
The group describes how alternative proteins could be produced through fermentation, slaughterhouses could then be repurposed or turned into museums, and recreational fishermen could remove litter from rivers rather than catching fish, or focus on monitoring and photographing aquatic life. They say that leather and petroleum-derived materials would be replaced with alternatives such as mushroom or apple leather, and plant-based alternatives to wool would also be used. In such a new paradigm, harming and killing any animal would be illegal.
Céline Schlegel, Deputy Executive Director of Animal Rights Switzerland, told Nau.ch, “With our project, we want to stimulate a discussion about what an animal-friendly and thus vegan future could look like… Implementing the vision will not happen overnight. A lot has already been achieved if we admit to ourselves how far we still are from living together with animals without violence.” Speculation about how the vegan world would look like is something that many vegans do, but it is interesting to see organisations spelling out how their vision of such a future would look like and engage the media to talk about it. After all, many of the technological advances needed already exist. What is also needed is political will, and persuading the general public, something that would be difficult in Switzerland right now as in a referendum held last September, 62.86% of people voted against making Switzerland the first country to ban factory farming.
