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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Every aspect of our globalised and industrialised world is causing harm. Veganism is about reducing the harm we’re responsible for as far as possible and reasonable. Renouncing honey is easy. So it’s possible and reasonable. No vegan thinks they’re responsible for zero suffering or even zero dead animals, we’re simply trying to reduce the number as best as we can without starving ourselves.
isn’t most of modern vegetable agriculture at least equally harmful
I’m a going with far more harmful.
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…
We do need bees, but that doesn’t mean the honey industry is sustainable.
https://www.greenmatters.com/p/how-honey-industry-affects-environment
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
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.
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?”.
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.
The “what about plants” argument is such a thoroughly debunked joke argument that it’s amazing anyone would continue to make it. Eating animals and their secretions requires harming significantly more plants than eating the plants directly because animals need to be fed too, and animals as food is by far the least efficient and most environmentally destructive way to have a food system.
Don’t we help bee populations by building homes for them?
Also, and I did wonder about this, what do homestock want out of life more than food, getting laid, and taking a walk or run? I think even the smarter ones like octopuses just want to get food and live until making kids.
Unfortunately, honey bees aren’t the bees we need to bee helping
Honey, the food of the gods by ancient opinion, is suddenly weird?
I will never like vegans.
Context matters. In the ancient world starvation was a constant threat, so a source of concentrated calories like honey could in some cases be a matter of life and death despite the dangers of getting that honey. In industrial society we have in many cases the opposite problem - the majority of the top causes of death are lifestyle diseases which ultimately come down to overconsumption and sedentary lifestyles. Too much dietary fat, especially too much saturated fats, too much sugar, too much refined foods, too much concentrated calories, too much easily consumed liquid calories.
By contrast vegans by far have the easiest time maintaining balanced bodyweight levels.
If you all could learn to let go of your prejudice you might learn to recognize that doing the right things for animal’s rights is also some of the best things you could do for yourself. These “vegans” you hate so much are just trying to get you to stop self-harming.
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”
Sorry, is this post satire or are you talking about satire you did not recognize? NEVER seen a vegan call breast milk non-vegan and have in fact actually seen more discussion about whether vegans should be breastfeeding children at all, I.e. is it healthy to do so with their diet.
You’ve put the word debate in quotation marks flippantly like there’s an obvious answer, but I’m pretty sure you just misunderstood a conversation rife with sarcasm or taken out of context (or straight up made it up).
I think the point was that some numbskulls try to pull a “checkmate vegans” claiming that. You probably know the type, obnoxiously trying to butt in on vegan discussions and go “but if you’re fine with breastfeeding, you’re not really vegan”, misunderstanding (or misconstruing) the motivations in the same vein as mentioned before.
Yeah, I’ve never seen a vegan say that either. Didn’t say I did. It’s always carnists trying to catch vegans on some imagined technicality so they can pretend they’re hypocrites. I put the word “debate” in quotation marks because there isn’t one—it’s not a debate if one side is founded entirely on ignorance of the other’s position
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.
No he’s implying that eating something just because it is “Vegan” is not understanding the point. Vegans usually don’t eat stuff because it’s bad for the environment or because they see animals as equal lifeforms and don’t want to cause them harm. If you don’t eat most animal products because of the environment then you might be ok with eating oysters on occasion. They have a similar co2 footprint as most vegetables. Similarly honey has an even smaller footprint.
That would make them an environmentalist then.
Veganism is about reducing the harm our actions cause. You can’t pick and choose pieces of it you like and say you are a vegan.
My point is that there is no real way to explain what “vegan” really is, since it means different things to different people and all of these people have the best intentions. And actually there is no real need to define “vegan” either. Instead of focussing on what to call “vegan” and what not, the discussion should be about bees.
For instance, do they care if you take their honey? Are they harmed? And should I care about whether they are harmed?
I’ve had an unreasonable number of arguments against people who seemed to think animal was a synonym for mammal. Thankfully, we’re now in an era where you can look it up and show them now mobile data is cheap, so it’s become a winnable argument.
Except they still don’t care, and resent you for edumacating them. Whatever you say, they “win”. Welcome to the post -information age.
Or they don’t care because they’re using it in a colloquial sense and 90+% of people they talk to would understand their intended usage, so they resent being lectured on semantics rather than responding to the meaning behind their words.
That’s a launching point for a really interesting discussion, which I doubt you wanted so I’ll cut it short. The gist is: do words have any meaning at all, and if so, is there such a thing as objective truth, and then shouldn’t the former be reflective of the latter?
“Mammal” means something, and all the Reddit-esque “acktwually” aside, it means something different from “animal”. But rather than say “thank you for the correction, yes that is what I meant, what you said”, the implication being that we all stand together side-by-side in front of Truth, with those closer to it being the ones considered “correct”, many instead would hold onto pride and say like “nuh-uh, I know you are but what am I?” One fosters a sense of community, while the other divides it into those who enjoy shitting onto others and those who (surely) enjoy being shat upon.
There is a saying that pride goes before a fall. And with planes having parts falling off of them inside the US, and literally falling from the sky into the ocean (that one off the coast of Africa, in at least one case), I’d say that we could definitely use more of the former where we consider 1+1=2 as a more worthwhile goal than “everyone is always correct, bc even if not, they surely meant to be and that’s enough”.
Of course if not, then surely you agree with me anyway, since I am responding to the meaning behind your words? ;-)
Or if still not, then you may want to block me, since I have a feeling you may not enjoy much of what I will have to say across the Fediverse.
I rarely judge someone for ignorance unless it is wilful. I pretty harshly judge people who cannot assimilate new information. Over time I think I might be evolving from INTP->INTJ as I age. I used to have more patience and would try to encourage people to learn and adjust.
I was very on board with your comment until the Meyers-Briggs pseudoscience BS and then you lost me
I get you - and am the same. I hold little to nothing against someone unable to learn… but that’s not what I am talking about. Imagine someone with an IQ of 50, who decides to pass themselves off as a doctor - you go in for brain surgery and, whoopsie, you get your event taken care of “at a reduced price”. Nobody blames someone who is authentically stupid - and if that sounds bad, note that I include myself first among that category:-) - until and unless they step up and decide to become a LEADER. The latter carries with it a societal obligation to do better, than us mere peasants.
Put another way, if you are going to perform literal and actual and fully physical violence against an establishment such as the government of the United States of America (i.e. becoming one who acts rather than being acted upon), then you might want to start with actually reading the document that you are about to overthrow. It does no good to sleep with it under your pillow - you need to pull it out and actually READ it for it to do any good! Although many who were there have self-admitted that they have not in fact read it, even so much as once.
Likewise, more people died in the USA from the recent pandemic than all wars combined. Much of that was preventable, and quite frankly we don’t even (nor will ever) know precisely how many are directly attributable to that, b/c those stats were deliberately fudged and forbidden to be counted. The same with school shootings - we counted at one point that there were more “mass events” (involving 5+ people) than there were calendar years, but the government is specifically prohibited from collecting this data, so once again we’ll never truly know the extent, only lower-bound estimates (which are already shockingly high). Also people have already died from the ham-handed prevention of “abortion”, that somehow includes cancerous masses, dead fetuses (from natural miscarriages) with necrotic tissue rotting away (but can’t remove either b/c that could be considered an “abortion”), ectopic “pregnancies”, and other life-threatening situations, which are nowhere close to the medical definition of “abortion”, yet to the lawmakers (some of whom claim that babies cannot be produced from a rape - I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP - b/c “God has a way of shutting that whole thing down there in the case of rape”) are too unintelligent to understand anything at all about what is going on.
However, nobody is that stupid, as to e.g. see Trump wear a mask, then turn around and claim to others that he does not wear masks. We have long ago crossed that line, from “stupidity” to “obstinacy”. This is cognitive dissonance, yes likely imposed upon people from others (e.g. Putin), but also willfully held onto by many.
And here is proof: a video by Kurzegatcht that is only 11-minutes long that explains why people should take the vaccine. This is VERY understandable. Anyone who watches this would INSTANTLY understand the situation fully - and it’s only 11-minutes long, so for something that could save a life, and possibly that of every one of your family members - is not too much to ask. And yet… people did not do it.
Moreover, much of the subject matters involved in all of what I mentioned above don’t even need a video of even 1 minute to explain - e.g. to say that “kids getting shot in schools all across the nation” is… what is is again? good? no wait, bad, yeah, that’s it, that’s a bad thing!.. right?!
That’s not stupidity - that’s stubbornness.
Historically I still “lose” these types of arguments as my willfully ignorant interlocutor spams potential strawman and ad hominem “arguments” until they feel sufficiently convinced that my pesky facts and I are safe to ignore.
In my experience there are very few people worth arguing with, as there are very few people willing to argue in good faith. Most people see arguing as a battle to be won or lost rather than a mechanism by which to vet assumptions. How can you expect to argue with a person who is unable to argue with themselves?
First, let me agree that everything in the kingdom Animalia is, in fact, an animal.
But now let me point out that many of the people who say shit like this might not speak english as their first language. Many languages have different words for animal for different types of animals. I tried to find out what I’m half remembering but I can’t find it quickly and I have to get to work. But I vaguely remember that some word that’s usually translated as animal into english actually doesn’t include insects. Just like the english “deer” at one point in time refered to all wild beasts (but not fish or fowl) and now only refers to Cervidae.
I feel like a lot of these posts are people just “poking the bear” and others end up taking them seriously. I understood this concept fairly early because of my family’s heavy use of sarcasm and seeing Calvin’s dad (of Calvin and Hobbes) explain things. Sometimes your best bet is to just not give the lesson and leave it alone so it doesn’t get unnecessary attention.
I’ve deleted so many half written comments thinking “If this is what they think, do I really want to deal with the absolute garbage response I’ll inevitably get back?”
Honey is a by-product of bees, the same way that all human made food is a by-products of humans.
I think it’s more accurate to think of you trapping humans in your basement and leaving them a bag of groceries every once in a while. Then you go down there and take whatever they cooked with the produce. They get to eat what they make, you just get the leftovers. They also can’t leave.
Actually if bees don’t like the hive you put them in, they absolutely will leave. I haven’t had happen to me personally but I have heard of it happening to others; you put the package in and come back to find that 200$+ worth of bees just upped and flew away.
Seems more akin to letting them milk themselves and collecting it from the fridge.
Can you milk a bee? I didn’t think so!
