Cross reports the Vegan Society’s newly settled object and definition, then explains why veganism is a principle from which practices follow. The article moves from definition to abolition: the relationship of human mastery and animal use must end before a better relationship can be built.
What this text contributes
This is the clearest source for the movement’s object. It shows why a diet cannot define veganism, why every form of animal use falls within its scope, and why liberation is categorically different from making exploitation more bearable.
“The object of the Society shall be to end the exploitation of animals by man.”
Reading guide
The object comes before the checklist
The Society exists to end exploitation. Food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection, and other uses are named as applications of that object, not as separate reasons for being vegan.
Practices flow from a principle
A vegan diet follows when the principle is applied to food. The same principle also governs clothing, labour, entertainment, experimentation, and forms of animal use that do not yet exist.
Liberation requires a changed relationship
Cross distinguishes liberation from welfare. The task is not to make a relationship of mastery and use tolerable. It is to abolish that relationship so something better can replace it.
The vegan world changes what humans can imagine
Cross imagines animals reintegrated into the balance of nature and self-interested animal use becoming almost unthinkable. The deepest change is not a new consumer category but a new moral common sense.
Read the original
This page is an annotated guide, not a replacement for the text. Follow the archive links for the complete writing and page scans.
- Read the archival transcriptionInternational Vegetarian Union history archive
- Open the Leslie Cross archive entryBibliographic record and preserved source material
Suggested citation: Leslie J. Cross, “Veganism Defined,” The Vegetarian World Forum, vol. 5, no. 1 (spring 1951), 6–7.