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Bleeding Cows for Profit

A vegan objection to “cultivated meat”

Pax Ahimsa Gethen
4 min readAug 31, 2023
A dark brown cow standing in a field, looking towards the camera.
Vishnu, a bovine resident at PreetiRang Sanctuary, in June 2016. Photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

As most of my regular readers know, I am vegan for ethical reasons. I am convinced that my fellow animals are sentient beings who feel pain and fear, and cannot consent to being exploited for human use. I therefore avoid consuming or otherwise using animal products to the best of my ability, in order to minimize avoidable harm.

I do recognize that it is not practical or possible for everyone on Earth to go vegan. However, I feel that many of the reasons US-Americans give for consuming animal flesh, eggs, and dairy products boil down to excuses or virtue signaling rather than genuine need or hardship.

In that regard, I am dismayed to see some vegan entrepreneurs promoting the exploitation of cows for human profit. The company they’re promoting, Omeat, hooks cows up to blood apheresis machines and extracts plasma from their bodies on a weekly basis. (Omeat refers to this non-consensual process as “donating”.) They then use this plasma to make so-called “humane” and “slaughter-free” meat.

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Pax Ahimsa Gethen
Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Written by Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Queer agender trans male. Black vegan atheist, pacifist. funcrunch.org, patreon.com/funcrunch

Responses (2)

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The money invested in this product would be better spent on sanctuaries, who literally save animals, or on making ordinary vegan foods — grains, legumes, tubers, fruits, vegetables, nut...

100% agree. Never heard of OMeat but it is like sanctioning a little bit of cruelty and a small dose of harm. Either way is keeping a door ajar on animal use and abuse when this door needs to be slammed shut and bolted.
I understand there are people…

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Thank you for writing this.

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