I feel like instead of a giant push for veganism, there should just be a push to eat what’s sustainable.
Beef and dairy? Causes huge amount of greenhouse gasses and with current methods of production, it is not sustainable
Blue fin tuna? These things have been way over fished and are endangered. Not sustainable, just try it once and move one with your life.
Tilapia ? These things grow like weeds and can be fed efficiently. Go ahead, good source of protein for your diet.
Honey? We need bees and they are an important pollinator for crops. Go nuts (just watch your sugar intake}
Almonds? Takes huge amounts of water to grow and exacerbates droughts in the areas they are farmed. Eat less of these.
Potatoes? Grow stupid easily in all sorts of conditions. Go nuts.
I’d already be very happy if everyone took your approach, but it’s not the entire story for veganism. Sustainability is an important factor for myself and many others, but so is animal welfare.
It’s a bummer that animal welfare is pretty much inversely correlated with emissions. Packing chickens together and making their lives miserable is much better for the environment than having them roam free.
Veganism happily aligns with environmental sustainability. But when you believe we shouldn’t exploit animals at all, just pushing to eat what’s sustainable ignores a lot of pain and cruelty.
I think “exploitation” is the wrong word to be used. I’m not vegan, so I really have no bearing on this, but exploitation doesn’t equal harm.
This post for example is about bees. They’re being exploited (in that we’re using them to get resources), but is it harmful? I have trouble saying yes. It seems somewhat ideal for them. They get to go about their lives like normal, though usually in a place with a lot of flowering plants, and they get taken care of. Occasionally honey is gathered from them, but this doesn’t actually harm any bees.
I think vegans follow dogma too much. They should consider their reasons for themselves, and consider what food sources fall into that. The dogma is useful for quick communication and sharing of information, but I would suspect honey farming is a lot better for the living things involved than even a lot of plant farming, which requires large swathes of land to be dedicated to farming, which certainly isn’t good for native species and arguably plants can feel too.
The harm side comes in multiple forms:
Harm to the animals; by removing their nutrient dense food source, and feeding them sugar water in its place, impacting colony health
Harm to the ecosystem; by mass producing honey bees we are choking out other pollinators, and the selective breeding for honey bees prioritizes output and makes colonies more susceptible to disease and collapse.
Even if you feel like the bees we’re farming lead a good life, that life comes at a cost of other species - we are choosing a winner in the food web in a way that could be done less harmful for similar end result (i.e., plant sugars / syrups). Much of veganism is about harm reduction.
Knowing the importance of pollinators to our food supply, as a vegan I would probably not have much of an issue with pollinator farming if there goal was maintaining biodiversity, instead of min-maxing profit.
Big nutrient profile difference for what you’re proposing and frankly supporting a significantly worse industry considering just environmental damage
This is probably a hot take but I have the opinion that nature isn’t any more merciful than we are. Existence is suffering and every animal ends up as feed for another.
Is it better to be raised in horrid conditions in a farm, or to spend every moment of your life scavenging for food, running for your life, while probably infested with parasites just to be torn to pieces, alive, by a wolf or other predator?
Humans at least have the decency to sedate or knock unconscious our food. Wild animals have to experience being eaten alive.
This is a false equivalence; the answer is “neither”.
Veganism doesn’t seek to end all animal suffering, but not to exploit animals for humans’ sake. We don’t need animal products to survive, so we shouldn’t add to whatever misery already exists naturally.
In the case of livestock, we should just stop breeding them. No vegan is arguing for dumping all cattle in the savannah to be hunted by lions.
False equivalence is the anthropomorphism, animal farming misinformation agendas and generalisations being thrown like it has meaning…
This guy would own slaves
“But I rationalize it so well!”
This is pure bullshit. Pigs, cows, chickens all if left to their devices form societies, display complex emotions, and have just as unique of personalities as humans do.
Humans don’t even permit most of those animals to live past “teenage” years. Its not decent treatment, I recommend the documentary Pignorant if you want to see first hand what a gas chamber is like.
Potatoes are kinda OP imho.
(I also agree with you btw).
Yeah exactly, people arguing whether dragon fruit or some shit is a “super food”. The super food is right in front of us, potatoes (and onions).
What other food has been so vital to our survival that its disappearance could ravage a population (Irish potato famine)
No offense to dragon fruit, blue berries or whatever exotic fruit, but if they went extinct, not that much could change.
Obligatory Irish potato famine was a result of British policy. But I agree with your sentiment
Potatoes OP must nerf
The last time it was nerfed, the Irish were pissed to say the least
Why you wanna starve Captain Blond Beard Mark Watney? Uncool.
About honey: we do need bees. But taking away their honey which they work really hard for to sustain their colony during the winter and replacing it with sugar water is really bad for them and makes their colony weak. They can get viruses, bacteria and fungi much faster, which they can spread to other colonies or when splitting up when their queen dies.
Next to that, bees we use for honey are a very aggressive territorial species. They claim their territory and all the other bee and whasp species are killed and pushed out. There are many bee and whasp species who do not live in colonies but are very important for the biodiversity. Replacing them with our bees, which will die and get sick faster because we take away their nuteician rich honey, is a bad idea.
We do need our bees, but in reduces quantities to keep the balance. But we shouldn’t take their food.
I’d say the issue is that if honey isn’t vegan because you’re causing harm to bees, isn’t most of modern vegetable agriculture at least equally harmful to bees & other insects due to all the pesticides being used?
Or is it just if we directly involve bees, it’s bad, but if we inflict greater harm in a less direct way, it’s acceptable?
isn’t most of modern vegetable agriculture at least equally harmful
I’m a going with far more harmful.
Yeah. The modern method of acres and acres of one species being farmed, with or without pesticides and other performance enhancing drugs is terrible for the environment.
For many animals, you might as well build an asphalt parking lot for each acre of corn or soy you plant. Same goes for Western grass lawns.
The critters that can’t adapt starve or move away.
Not just insects. Vermin control is critical and often not very ethical. Here in Australia, rabbits and kangaroos can be a big issue for farmers too and are often killed to protect crops when they become too numerous. Ducks can be a big issue for rice farmers here and permits are issued to shoot ducks on crops.
I mean bees are producing way more than they are using. We just shouldn’t take it all.
It’s a buffer for when the climate is different then normal so they will need more food…
That’s not true, bees really do produce more than one colony needs. The thing is that when they have no more room to store honey some bees will take a large portion of it and leave to start a new colony which is bad for you as a beekeeper and other insect species. The way I see it you definitely should take the honey. Just leave some for the winter.
Bees weren’t made by humans. They can survive on their own. They work until they die out of exhaustion due to the hard work, they work because of need, not of joy. Whenever they split up when there is enough honey, they spread around. That’s how bees work. By limiting them to one colony by partially starving them, we endanger the species. It’s already going bad for bees, due to urbanization, perticides, climate change but also colony starvation for honey production.
No one is talking about starving the bees. Someone already pointed out that bees are territorial and not great for the local insect population. You can let bees spread but there are better ways to do it. Bees do work because they think they need to, the thing is you can help them and have leftover honey that they don’t need to use. You don’t even need to limit the to one colony.
But to be fair our bees are nowhere near any urban areas nor pesticides so it might be different elsewhere.
So far, trying to control nature isn’t going that well. The more we do, the more we fuck it up. Maybe we should give nature some time to recover from our destruction without intervention.
Turns out that what’s sustainable is often what is vegan. Vegans are constantly discussing the edges of all this stuff trying to come to a better understanding, its somewhat natural that they would provide some of the most well-reasoned and substantiated arguments.
Honey and tilapia are not sustainable currently. Its a demand issue. Rules and regulations will never prevent an industry from meeting demand. Thats why we currently use practices at large scale we never would at small scale.
I agree for the most part. I would like to point out that fish farms are actually very damaging to the ecosystems that they sit in. The excrement ends up dropping down in single locations, burying the seafloor in it. IIRC, this often leads to the oxygen levels in the water dropping, which further kills off the surrounding aquatic life.
EDIT: more context
We do need bees, but that doesn’t mean the honey industry is sustainable.
https://www.greenmatters.com/p/how-honey-industry-affects-environment
Beef and dairy? Causes huge amount of greenhouse gasses and with current methods of production, it is not sustainable
what makes you think this?
Stupid discussion. It does not matter whether something is in the box “vegan”. Ask yourself why you would or would not eat something. If you don’t want to eat(/drink) dairy because of the way the animals that produce the dairy are treated, would you be ok when they are treated differently? Are bees treated in the same way? Does it matter if you treat them in this way? Those should be your questions, not “does it belong in this box?”.
But it will ruin the achievement badge I want to show in my profile!
Animal ethics isn’t just about whether other animals are being harmed or killed, it’s also about being against exploitation. They might not be able to think in quite the same way that we do, but it’s still clear that they have their own wills and lives of their own that they want to live. It’s worth asking ourselves if we really want a society that’s willing to exploit and turn other thinking beings into commodities, even the ones whose thinking appears to be so much more rudimentary than our own.
It’s easy to dismiss them because they’re “just bugs”, but presently bugs of all species are facing radical population declines with all the ecological instability - maybe even looming collapse - that brings. Maybe we collectively might be more willing to protect bug populations and do more to protect our environments if more of us stopped to analyze our anti-bug bias and considered that they have a natural right to life like we do. The planet does not exist solely for us.
Also, honey is essentially a refined sugar that’s no better healthwise than table sugar. Date sugar/powder is a sweetener made of whole fruit and is a much better choice. Plus, it’s just weird to want to eat the vomit of other species anyway.
As for the exploitation, all living things have their own lives. Even plants seem to be able to communicate to some degree and can be stressed and stuff. Either you’re OK exploiting living things to some degree or you die. The level of exploitation is what should be discussed. Is beekeeping harmful to bees? I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like it.
As for it being sugar, sure. Sugar isn’t bad though. Sugar is bad when consumed in the quantities the average American consumes it. It also has other properties that make it pretty good for your health. For example, I think it’s good for preventing allergies because it contains pollen (I might be making this up, but it seems like I’ve read that somewhere).
Plus, it’s just weird to want to eat the vomit of other species anyway.
Do you realize that fruit is the ovary of a plant? Life is weird. Get over it. Weird is not a word that should come into a discussion of ethics.
Entirely true. My favorite stupid argument is about lab-grown meat. People don’t seem to understand that veganism is practiced for a variety of reasons. Is lab-grown meat vegan? It depends on the vegan.
My rule of thumb is that I’ll eat it as long as nothing was permanently injured or killed to make it. Factory farmed eggs? Nah, I’ve seen videos of macerators. My neighbor’s chickens’ eggs? Hell yeah, I’m friends with those chickens
ETA: then there’s the breast milk “debate.” Can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen numbskulls try to argue that breastfeeding isn’t vegan because “milk is an animal product”
I’m no vegan, but I think a large incentive for veganism or at least being vegetarian is the carbon footprint as well. A plant-based diet is much more sustainable than with meat, as in vertebrates. I think invertebrates would be great alternatives but the west-influenced culture is not very fond of eating invertebrates except for crustaceans.
This question is still valid from a marketing standpoint. If you’re selling honey, are you able to advertise it as vegan?
If you can explain a vegan way to get milk, meat, or honey then I’m all ears. You seem to be implying there is some gray area here.
Some folks believe that fish aren’t animals, either.
The state of California consider bees as fish.
I thought you were kidding but no, they do and the reason is otherwise they wouldn’t fit under environmental protection laws.
Northern Cardinals are protected by the Migratory Birds Act even though cardinals are not migratory.
And that eating fish doesn’t count as eating meat…
fish is merely a menu description
Honey is a by-product of bees, the same way that all human made food is a by-products of humans.
Non vegan here. 🤔
Soooooo honey is not extracted directly from the bees, so that would be an argument to declare honey vegan.
On the other hand, even with modern beekeeping tech and modular hives, one could argue the act of taking honey to be a serious intrusion on the bees’ life, so that could be an argument that honey is not vegan.
One could argue where the line lies with eusocial organisms. Do you consider the individual bees or do you consider the whole hive? Whole hive? Honey may not be vegan. Individual insects? Honey could be vegan.
It really depends on your standards. One vegan friend of mine does drink mead (honey wine, for the uninformed) for instance.
if it needs to be pollinated by bees or wasps, then it’s not vegan (insert troll emoji i guess)
I think that’s actually a very valid point. What level of involvement in producing the food makes it vegan or not vegan? If eating honey is unethical I would think so is eating food produced by the hard work of another person.
Can you milk a bee? I didn’t think so!
fungi?
Honey can be vegan. I have a friend who keeps endangered bees and as an unintended side effect of fostering their growth has honey that she has to give away because she doesn’t want it
Genuine question, I would like to know if there is a reason. Why doesn’t she just let the bees keep it?
The bees make more than they need. They’ll keep filling up cells till there’s no room for larvae then swarm. That takes a while but in a meantime, the honey sitting there attracts pests and predators that can harm the colony.
And this is where I have problems with strict veganism. Animal husbandry can be ethical and beneficial to the species. Animals do produce excess nutrients that can be reused for other animals (culling chickens to feed carnivores for example) and some byproducts can benefit humans in a non exploitative manner.
The real issue is capitalism. Or the exploitation of others for personal benefits.
I believe it’s to encourage them to increase numbers, but I haven’t discussed that with her. She’s the type of nerd I know probably has a good reason so I never asked
Isn’t that vegetarian, not vegan though?
“It’s complicated”.
It’s the same category of dispute as the “eggs or milk can be vegan under certain circumstances” one. The argument is that rescued farm animals have been so warped by human intervention that it’s actively harmful for you to not use their produce - dairy cows can in rare cases die, and otherwise will just be miserable, if left unmilked. Chickens lay too many eggs, and leaving unf. chicken eggs in the coop can lead to the chickens learning to eat their own eggs, so you have to remove them. (I don’t hold a position on these claims, I’m just reporting what I see come up in the argument.) Bees fall into the same sort of category, they’ve been so selectively bred that they now produce far more honey than they can possibly use, so removing and eating some of it helps to mitigate the negative impact that humans have had on the creatures.
Regardless though: cows, chickens and bees are all still animals. I don’t think any vegans are gonna argue that one.
Seems like a weird thing though. A lot of domesticated animals can’t survive in the wild. And even the ones that can, it would only be in certain parts of the world, and they’d be an invasive species.
So do we want all of those animals to go extinct? If you eliminate all farm related activities with these animals, give them a place to live out the rest of their lives, but then what? But do you not allow them to breed? Or just let them all die off so they go extinct?
Or do you keep some of them in zoos? Given they’ve been bred to live on a farm, does that mean you have zoos that are identical to farms? And if you can get milk, eggs and honey from these animals if they’re technically living in zoo (which is exactly like a farm in every way) what’s been accomplished?
This is a very common argument and it’s a little shortsighted, because the answer is broadly “yes”. Reducing the number of cows/chickens/etc in the world is a net positive, and would only require us to stop force breeding them like it’s some kind of degenerate poultry hentai. Allowing the species to reduce in population is only of benefit to the species (cough humans cough) and is overall desirable. Keeping some in zoos would be fine, maintaining the native wild populations is also a good plan, small scale farms (“family” or “hobby”) farms where they don’t brutalize the animals is also a feature of most vegan utopias. Take india, where most of the population is vegan: there are still cows on farms, cow-derived produce is still available, it’s just the cows aren’t kept in American-style stock farms.
YMMV, and like any ideology there are other opinions with equally valid outlooks, this is just what I see most often. (full disclosure, I am not a vegan (there’s plenty of evidence to that in my post history), I just sleep with a lot of vegans and quite like chana masala)
(There’s also a pretty… sane… subgroup that proposes ‘corrective breeding’; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their ‘natural’ state. “Contentious” is probably the best description.)
Most indian population is definitely not vegan. there have been various surveys that show the percentage of the vegetarian population is between 23% and 37%. That means 63% to 77% are non-vegetarian. It’s a myth, a big one, that India is mainly a vegetarian country.
Not even the majority of Indians are vegetarians, much less vegans.
Very poor word choice on my part, I will freely admit that. The veg population of inda in is roughly larger than the entire US population, which is the much more useful statistic. I’m also aware that the vast majority of people who eat a vegan diet do so for economic reasons. Sorry about that.
Many Indians I’ve worked with are sort of semi-vegetarian, eating meat but only on certain days. I think that’s specific religious doctrine rather than a general attitude about animals - like Catholics eating fish on Friday.
Degenerate poultry hentai
Excuse me sir/madam, but I’d request that you respect the preferred literary sub-genre of some without resorting to terms such as “degenerate”. Poultry Hentai may not be overly popular and only have a niche following, but it truly is an art form in and of itself. Whether it’s “2 hens, 1 cob” or the better-known “Lady Chookerlee’s Lover” it truly does represent a formidable contribution to the art.
Don’t even get me started on Bawk-kake…
Damn. That’s a good one!
I cherish you.
But probably from a distance. Chickeboos aren’t the best for, you know, close-up cherishing.
You know why.
There’s also a pretty… sane… subgroup that proposes ‘corrective breeding’; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their ‘natural’ state
Yeah I feel like that is just forcing animals to live in the way humans want them to live under a weird assumption that we know what they want.
I could live out in the wild if I really wanted to, but I don’t because living in a heated home, having access to healthcare, and having a grocery store nearby is way better than starving to death, getting frostbite, dying of a disease, or getting eaten by wolves. I don’t know how an animal wants to live their lives, so who knows, maybe they’d rather die of disease over being poked by a few needles by a veterinarian, starving because there’s no mangers filled by humans, or getting eaten alive by a pack of wolves. Maybe animals want that, but there’s no way of knowing and it’s a really weird thing to assume given humans don’t want to live that way. We live happy an fulfilling lives without having to constantly worry about being eaten by wolves, why would that be a requirement for an animal to be happy?
I think people see nature from a Disney cartoon perspective where the only danger is a human hunter. But the reality is nature is extremely brutal.
I don’t think a perfect ethical solution to domesticated animals really exists. Best we can do is just treat animals better. If they seem like they’re happy enough, then that’s probably alright.
Indian economics and laws regarding dairy produce their own sort of hell. If the unwanted non producing animals aren’t smuggled across the border for slaughter, they’re abandoned and left to starve due to laws about culling. Nobody’s really feeding unproductive animals except for the goshalas and there’s nowhere near enough of those for India’s dairy cattle production.
Yeahhhh… I was drunk and I probably could have thought that example through better. My apologies.
The response I’ve heard for that one is that domesticated animals are dependent on us because we’ve bred their survival capabilities out of them. People originally just captured wild animals and put a fence around them. Selectively breeding only the more docile ones has turned them into something they wouldn’t have been without our interference. To me that part makes sense, but the present reality is still what it is, and what you’re saying is still true.
Playing devil’s advocate, this could be sidestepping the issue, because the honey is only an unintended side effect from your friend’s POV, not the bee’s.
So, if they were endangered cows and your friend didn’t like milk, the milk would be vegan…?
Well veganism is about reducing suffering. If the cows didnt suffer to produce that milk, like no forced insemination, calfs aren’t separated from their mother, male calfs aren’t slaughtered, the cows don’t have unnaturally large udders, you only take the over production and not steal the food from the calf and the cows live a good life then you could argue that the milk is vegan. But milk is not produced like that so milk is not vegan.
That shit went dumb REAL fast
Not as fast as an ape turning into a human being.
That was rough.
Yeah, but, did you ever see an ape turn into a human being?
Jesse Lee Peterson always cracks me up. I feel like his whole thing has to just be an act, but he never cracks it’s amazing really
The fact that he thought he won this “debate” and uploaded it is so embarrassing…
I appeal to the Director of Veganism!
How is there 4 posts but one reply? Who said something first, the “bees, not animals” thing?
Well since we’re constantly digesting our own dead microfauna, I’d say that it’s literally impossible to be fully vegan, so they might as well stop trying and spare us their obnoxious bullshit.
excuse me I need to eat meat in front of vegans again.
Any that’s the hypocrisy of Vegans. Milk and honey are the only two animal-based food sources that don’t involve the killing of animals. And in the case of most cow breeds, milking is actually needed as they have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves drink. And with careful management of the hive, you can harvest a lot of honey from a mature hive without negatively affecting the hive itself - it just delays/defers new queen production and swarming, which is desirable anyhow - no beekeeper who has hives primarily for crop pollination wants to have hives swarming each and every year.
