Acharya Prashant in Dialogue with PETA Foundation President Mimi Bekhechi: “One Who Is Violent Towards Animals Will Be Violent Towards All”

PETA, the world’s largest animal rights organisation, invited noted philosopher and author Acharya Prashant for a special dialogue at PETA’s London office on Thursday. The fireside conversation with PETA Foundation President Mimi Bekhechi, held before a packed audience, explored the philosophical foundations of animal consciousness, veganism, and non-violence. Acharya Prashant said that compassion is not a virtue to be taught but the very nature of the human being, and the real question is who taught us violence.

This was Acharya Prashant’s fourth dialogue with PETA’s senior leadership. He has earlier been in conversation with PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk and PETA’s international president Poorva Joshipura. Notably, PETA had honoured Acharya Prashant with its Most Influential Vegan of the Year award in 2022.

Opening the conversation, Bekhechi praised Acharya Prashant’s book ‘Is She Just Food to You’, saying it addresses the central challenge of the animal rights movement: helping people see animals not as objects of consumption but as thinking, feeling beings.

Acharya Prashant said that a small child, on seeing a rabbit or a lamb, wants to play with it, not kill it. He asked, “Does the human being have to be taught compassion, or does he have to be freed of the violence he has been taught? Then one must see who spoiled the child, who planted in the child’s mind that a living being is food.” He cautioned that a child conditioned into violence towards one creature does not remain violent in one direction alone. “Now you simply have a violent child. We are raising a violent society.”

Explaining the title of his book, he said the violence mankind has inflicted on animals and on women are not two different things. He said the exploited could be anyone, a forest, a river, a woman, or a cow, but the exploiter remains the same: the conditioned human ego. “The human being is not the killer. The ego is the killer. The body gains nothing from meat; the ego entertains its inner incompleteness for thirty seconds. Our behaviour towards animals is only a mirror that shows how we are within.”

On the physical difference between humans and animals, he said the human being is 99.9 percent animal, and the 0.1 percent extra is not humanity’s superiority but its disease: the social and cultural ego. Responding to questions from the audience, he emphasised individual responsibility, saying every gram of flesh that leaves the slaughterhouse is ultimately consumed by a solitary individual, so demand begins with the individual and change too will begin with the individual.

Asked about viral videos of animal cruelty on social media, he said, “Violence is never taught as violence. Violence is taught as tradition, as ambition, as responsibility, even as love. If violence were taught as violence, it would never succeed.” During the dialogue, he also shared a moving account of an injured rabbit he had rescued, who lived with him in his study for years and breathed her last in his arms.

Acharya Prashant is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad and the founder of the PrashantAdvait Foundation. His work, rooted in Indian and global philosophy, reaches more than 100 million subscribers across social media.

“The human being is not the killer. The ego is the killer. Our behaviour towards animals is only a mirror that shows how we are within.”

Acharya Prashant, at PETA’s London office