If you’re vegan, chances are you’ve heard someone say “you care more about animals than people”, but that’s simply not true.

As a way to ignore the issue at hand, some people like to spin things around and accuse animal advocates of being the uncaring ones.

The reality is that you care deeply about humans too, and that’s probably one of the main draws that led you to this compassionate lifestyle in the first place. Perhaps you stopped eating animals for health, maybe you were shocked when you learned about the environmental damage that the agricultural industries cause, or it could be because you discovered the injustice of feeding 40% of the world’s grain to livestock when millions of people are starving to death. Whatever your reasons, being vegan comes hand in hand with caring about people.

Most animal advocates are also extremely passionate about humanitarian and social justice causes. In fact, brain scans show that vegans and vegetarians have more of an empathetic response to both human and animal suffering than omnivores.

FMRI brain scans revealed that the areas of the brain associated with empathy were much more active in vegans and vegetarians in comparison to omnivores when all three groups of people were shown pictures of human and animal suffering. Written questionnaires on the subject also demonstrated higher empathy levels in vegans and vegetarians.