There’s a difference between eating meat and condoning animal abuse. For most vegetarians this is impossible to comprehend it seems. But they will happily drive cars on liquefied dinosaurs, use plastics and buy phones which were made by exploiting children and poor people. While at the same time claiming fish is not meat.
Of course I can, because I know to use a dictionary. Abuse is not the same as murder. You can call me animal murderer, I’d give you that. But not abuser. I don’t beat or molest animals. I don’t maltreat them or starve them to death. They are kept safer than in wild, away from predators and have a life of luxury with constantly abundant food and no fear, until they fulfill a purpose that is meant for them. If anything am sheltering them far better than nature is.
Unfortunately that is simply not true. If you had to take a guess, how long does a chicken live that is born into the animal agriculture industry and what does its life look like? Go watch Dominion ( https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko ) and learn what modern animal agriculture looks like because I promise you it is not a life free of abuse where they are safer than they would be in the wild with plenty of food to eat. If you are paying for animal products then you are not only paying for the animal to be murdered but are also paying for the abuse that it suffered for its entire short life before that point.
Also I’d definitely argue that murder is a form of abuse. Defined as: “treat (a person or an animal) with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly.” If you wanted to discuss semantics it would be more accurate to say that it is impossible to murder an animal since the most common definition would probably be “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another”. There is a second more loose definition though that uses the language “kill (someone) unlawfully and with premeditation”. I would argue that an animal IS a “someone” as they are an individual with their own unique perception of the world. As such I do believe that it is possible to murder an animal. That being said, it is completely irrelevant to the morality of what is happening whether we call it murder or abuse or we come up with all new words to describe what’s happening. No matter what you call it, we are creating unfathomable amounts of completely unnecessary suffering by forcefully breeding (aka raping) animals and forcing them to live unimaginably awful lives which are ended very very prematurely because money and yummy.
Neither do vegetarians want to face the fact most medications and almost all vaccines you take were tested on animals, if not produced by animals. So if you don’t want to be a hypocrite and don’t want to stop acting smug, I suggest stopping all medication and medicine use. I mean we don’t want to condone animal abuse.
There is a difference between not doing something that is purely done for enjoyment (eating meat, you can live perfectly fine and be healthy without) and not taking medication. Additionally, vegans want to stop exploiting animals for human benefit, so they are in favor of not doing animal testing anyways.
That’s the problem with your assumptions then. You assume people only eat meat because of joy. Not because it’s cheap and highly nutritious part of the diet. It’s significantly easier to be a soy latte sipping hipster in first world country living in temperate climate where due to good economy choice is abundant. Try moving more north where growing seasons as short or non-existent. Or living in a third world country where choice of food is not as rich.
Geography is a very strong influence on local diet. In northern places where farming is limited people breed sheep and mutton is a staple food. Go south and fruits and vegetables become more dominant. You can’t go to Mongolia and tell them not to eat meat when their entire country consists of dirt covered rock barely enough deep to grow grass.
Yeah, where I live, pork and beef are the dominant meats because pigs and cows consume parts of the plants humans don’t eat, be it corn or wheat stalks. It’s cheap way to produce more food without requiring any more land. Without animals, we’d have to burn that remainder and throw it away.
As for stopping exploitation of animals, that will never happen. It’s wishful thinking. Abuse should be abolished and punished by all means, but exploitation is here to stay. You can try and reduce your dependency on it, but never get rid of it. We are higher in the food chain and pretty much everyone, and I literally mean everyone, would rather some animal testing goes on if it means saving their ass sometime in the future. Claiming anything otherwise means being a hypocrite because at the end of the day we all care about ourselves the most.
I am not expecting every person on earth to stop consuming meat immediately. If some people in Mongolia have some cows and sheep on their farm, sure, that is already so much better than factory farming. Factory farming makes up about 90% percent of worldwide meat production, and that is the main thing people are talking about when discussing meat production. Factory farming is responsible for massive ecological damage due to animal waste, ie their shit and cows farting methane, on top of being extremely cruel. And then there is the overabundance of antibiotics used to keep the animals somewhat healthy (“healthy” is really a stretch here), which helps diseases build immunities to those antibiotics.
As for cost, meat is heavily subsidized (at least where I live), so we are all paying part of the cost for it through taxes. It is not as cheap as you might think when seeing it in a supermarket.
As for stopping exploitation of animals, that will never happen. It’s wishful thinking.
That’s just baseless conjecture, just because you lack the imagination to think of a world without or at the very least way less exploitation does not mean it cannot be achieved. And I’d rather have little exploitation than a lot, it’s not a binary choice between “changing nothing” and “completely removing exploitation, which is impossible, so let’s just do nothing”.
Again you’re being factually incorrect about agriculture. The plants and plant parts that humans can’t eat are important sources of nutrients for composting and building soil fertility. And animals do have a place in agriculture, and that place is a free-living association where humans and animals mutually benefit from each other.
What would I know, being born in a family who works in agriculture, especially compared to someone who probably never held farm utensil in their hands. Ever heard of bales of hay? You think those are left on the land for composting? Haha.
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”
Emphasis added. Your argument is valid, in that modern medicine, vaccines, and animal testing are all challenges vegans need to address. This is something that’s a lot harder and less clear cut than diet or not wearing certain clothing. Not every vegan agrees on what the best course of action is either, but most lean toward at least not being anti-vaccine. Self-preservation pretty clearly counts under the possible and practical part of the definition.
But that does not invalidate the very real differences and good that does come from going vegan, for ourselves, for the animals who are spared a life of hell, and for the planet.
I don’t see how you can not see the correlation of keeping animals trapped and in shitty situations to inevitably kill them when they’re literally still children as not being animal abuse.
Liquified dinosaurs :')
In seriousness, veganism is about making the best changes you can. Nobody is perfect but you try to do the least damage you can do. Plus it’s a spectrum, there of course will be some vegans that don’t care/know much about how certain commodities are built on the suffering of others. Plus some “vegans” are just plant based and are just in it for personal health so they wouldn’t care about the ethics in it all and the hypocrisy you talk about.
Also extra note. Don’t look at them focusing on the suffering of animals meaning they don’t care for human suffering. They do. When those at the bottom get brought up it will bring the others above them higher too. It’s a two birds one stone kind of situation (pardon the hypocritical pun ;p)
I’ve never ever heard of a vegan say fish isn’t meat. If a vegan is eating fish, they’re not vegan (same goes for honey, but that’s a different topic). They’re a pescatarian that eats a lot of plant based foods.
The meat industry is organized animal abuse, there is no doubt about it. It doesn’t have to be that way but by all accounts it is. If you can eat meat procured separately from these industrialized processes that is great, but that cannot be scaled to meet all current demands for meat.
I can source meat separately from industrialized processes, as can many others, if not all. The reason why they don’t has nothing to do with condoning animal abuse it’s pure convenience and price. But it’s disingenuous to lump everyone together.
As far as sustainability is concerned, neither can everyone switching to plant diet be scaled up to meet the demand. People just assume animals are taking up arable land that can be used for human food production, which is not true. Huge amounts of pastures can’t be used for anything else. More to the point animal feed is made from discard products of plant based foods, things like corn and wheat stalks. If you take animals out of the equation, something has to be done with that as well.
In the end you can down-vote all you like it doesn’t change the fact our current food production is extremely optimized. You can’t alter it easily without disturbing the balance. You want to reduce animal abuse don’t buy cheap shit. Go to farmers market. But no, people are willing to come and preach here about morals while they happily ignore all the other things they don’t want to make sacrifice on because they are too precious to them, but are happily telling the rest of us which sacrifices we need to make. If you want to get rid of something, get rid of whole “organic” movement. That growing method is extremely unsustainable and unaffordable for most people.
I don’t eat vegetables. Even raw carrots taste like bitter hell to me. Even with a nearly anti-vegan diet I can confidently say we have an ethical imperative to move away from animal products, with factory farming being the most fucked.
There’s a difference between eating meat and condoning animal abuse. For most vegetarians this is impossible to comprehend it seems. But they will happily drive cars on liquefied dinosaurs, use plastics and buy phones which were made by exploiting children and poor people. While at the same time claiming fish is not meat.
You cannot pay for an animal to be murdered and In the same breath say you against animal abuse.
Exactly. People who believe this are believing a fairy tale.
You cannot be vaccinated and believe you are not harming animals.
I think you misunderstand what veganism is. It’s not absolute perfection. It’s reducing harm to animals as much as possible.
No vegan believes they are “not harming animals”. But it’d be hard to argue that they’re harming just as many as omnivores.
They aren’t paying for animals to be murdered, they are paying for a product at the Wallymart.
Of course I can, because I know to use a dictionary. Abuse is not the same as murder. You can call me animal murderer, I’d give you that. But not abuser. I don’t beat or molest animals. I don’t maltreat them or starve them to death. They are kept safer than in wild, away from predators and have a life of luxury with constantly abundant food and no fear, until they fulfill a purpose that is meant for them. If anything am sheltering them far better than nature is.
Unfortunately that is simply not true. If you had to take a guess, how long does a chicken live that is born into the animal agriculture industry and what does its life look like? Go watch Dominion ( https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko ) and learn what modern animal agriculture looks like because I promise you it is not a life free of abuse where they are safer than they would be in the wild with plenty of food to eat. If you are paying for animal products then you are not only paying for the animal to be murdered but are also paying for the abuse that it suffered for its entire short life before that point.
Also I’d definitely argue that murder is a form of abuse. Defined as: “treat (a person or an animal) with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly.” If you wanted to discuss semantics it would be more accurate to say that it is impossible to murder an animal since the most common definition would probably be “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another”. There is a second more loose definition though that uses the language “kill (someone) unlawfully and with premeditation”. I would argue that an animal IS a “someone” as they are an individual with their own unique perception of the world. As such I do believe that it is possible to murder an animal. That being said, it is completely irrelevant to the morality of what is happening whether we call it murder or abuse or we come up with all new words to describe what’s happening. No matter what you call it, we are creating unfathomable amounts of completely unnecessary suffering by forcefully breeding (aka raping) animals and forcing them to live unimaginably awful lives which are ended very very prematurely because money and yummy.
it’s definitely abuse, as you are harming something for your own pleasure.
No, there isn’t. But people don’t want to be confronted with this fact.
Neither do vegetarians want to face the fact most medications and almost all vaccines you take were tested on animals, if not produced by animals. So if you don’t want to be a hypocrite and don’t want to stop acting smug, I suggest stopping all medication and medicine use. I mean we don’t want to condone animal abuse.
There is a difference between not doing something that is purely done for enjoyment (eating meat, you can live perfectly fine and be healthy without) and not taking medication. Additionally, vegans want to stop exploiting animals for human benefit, so they are in favor of not doing animal testing anyways.
That’s the problem with your assumptions then. You assume people only eat meat because of joy. Not because it’s cheap and highly nutritious part of the diet. It’s significantly easier to be a soy latte sipping hipster in first world country living in temperate climate where due to good economy choice is abundant. Try moving more north where growing seasons as short or non-existent. Or living in a third world country where choice of food is not as rich.
Geography is a very strong influence on local diet. In northern places where farming is limited people breed sheep and mutton is a staple food. Go south and fruits and vegetables become more dominant. You can’t go to Mongolia and tell them not to eat meat when their entire country consists of dirt covered rock barely enough deep to grow grass.
Yeah, where I live, pork and beef are the dominant meats because pigs and cows consume parts of the plants humans don’t eat, be it corn or wheat stalks. It’s cheap way to produce more food without requiring any more land. Without animals, we’d have to burn that remainder and throw it away.
As for stopping exploitation of animals, that will never happen. It’s wishful thinking. Abuse should be abolished and punished by all means, but exploitation is here to stay. You can try and reduce your dependency on it, but never get rid of it. We are higher in the food chain and pretty much everyone, and I literally mean everyone, would rather some animal testing goes on if it means saving their ass sometime in the future. Claiming anything otherwise means being a hypocrite because at the end of the day we all care about ourselves the most.
I am not expecting every person on earth to stop consuming meat immediately. If some people in Mongolia have some cows and sheep on their farm, sure, that is already so much better than factory farming. Factory farming makes up about 90% percent of worldwide meat production, and that is the main thing people are talking about when discussing meat production. Factory farming is responsible for massive ecological damage due to animal waste, ie their shit and cows farting methane, on top of being extremely cruel. And then there is the overabundance of antibiotics used to keep the animals somewhat healthy (“healthy” is really a stretch here), which helps diseases build immunities to those antibiotics.
As for cost, meat is heavily subsidized (at least where I live), so we are all paying part of the cost for it through taxes. It is not as cheap as you might think when seeing it in a supermarket.
That’s just baseless conjecture, just because you lack the imagination to think of a world without or at the very least way less exploitation does not mean it cannot be achieved. And I’d rather have little exploitation than a lot, it’s not a binary choice between “changing nothing” and “completely removing exploitation, which is impossible, so let’s just do nothing”.
Again you’re being factually incorrect about agriculture. The plants and plant parts that humans can’t eat are important sources of nutrients for composting and building soil fertility. And animals do have a place in agriculture, and that place is a free-living association where humans and animals mutually benefit from each other.
https://goveganic.net/
What would I know, being born in a family who works in agriculture, especially compared to someone who probably never held farm utensil in their hands. Ever heard of bales of hay? You think those are left on the land for composting? Haha.
https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Permaculture/The_One_Straw_Revolution.pdf
The most accepted definition of veganism goes:
Emphasis added. Your argument is valid, in that modern medicine, vaccines, and animal testing are all challenges vegans need to address. This is something that’s a lot harder and less clear cut than diet or not wearing certain clothing. Not every vegan agrees on what the best course of action is either, but most lean toward at least not being anti-vaccine. Self-preservation pretty clearly counts under the possible and practical part of the definition.
But that does not invalidate the very real differences and good that does come from going vegan, for ourselves, for the animals who are spared a life of hell, and for the planet.
must be tiring be you. with the sensibilities of an angry 14 year old
Yes, call me names because of lacking arguments to my comment, very mature thing to do.
All I see in this comment section are arguments to your comment.
Wouldn’t want to beat a dead horse. That’s unvegan.
Oh and the house you live in was built on land which was home to animals.
Give it back to them.
There’s a lot to unpack here…
I don’t see how you can not see the correlation of keeping animals trapped and in shitty situations to inevitably kill them when they’re literally still children as not being animal abuse.
Liquified dinosaurs :')
In seriousness, veganism is about making the best changes you can. Nobody is perfect but you try to do the least damage you can do. Plus it’s a spectrum, there of course will be some vegans that don’t care/know much about how certain commodities are built on the suffering of others. Plus some “vegans” are just plant based and are just in it for personal health so they wouldn’t care about the ethics in it all and the hypocrisy you talk about.
Also extra note. Don’t look at them focusing on the suffering of animals meaning they don’t care for human suffering. They do. When those at the bottom get brought up it will bring the others above them higher too. It’s a two birds one stone kind of situation (pardon the hypocritical pun ;p)
I’ve never ever heard of a vegan say fish isn’t meat. If a vegan is eating fish, they’re not vegan (same goes for honey, but that’s a different topic). They’re a pescatarian that eats a lot of plant based foods.
Veganizing bad idioms can be hard. I’ve taken to saying, “feeding two birds with one scone,” for that one.
Getting two birds stoned at once.
Sounds weird with my accent where scone is more like sconn rather than rhyming with cone haha
Also vegans don’t eat fish or any animal products.
Yup. Made a mistake.
The meat industry is organized animal abuse, there is no doubt about it. It doesn’t have to be that way but by all accounts it is. If you can eat meat procured separately from these industrialized processes that is great, but that cannot be scaled to meet all current demands for meat.
I can source meat separately from industrialized processes, as can many others, if not all. The reason why they don’t has nothing to do with condoning animal abuse it’s pure convenience and price. But it’s disingenuous to lump everyone together.
As far as sustainability is concerned, neither can everyone switching to plant diet be scaled up to meet the demand. People just assume animals are taking up arable land that can be used for human food production, which is not true. Huge amounts of pastures can’t be used for anything else. More to the point animal feed is made from discard products of plant based foods, things like corn and wheat stalks. If you take animals out of the equation, something has to be done with that as well.
In the end you can down-vote all you like it doesn’t change the fact our current food production is extremely optimized. You can’t alter it easily without disturbing the balance. You want to reduce animal abuse don’t buy cheap shit. Go to farmers market. But no, people are willing to come and preach here about morals while they happily ignore all the other things they don’t want to make sacrifice on because they are too precious to them, but are happily telling the rest of us which sacrifices we need to make. If you want to get rid of something, get rid of whole “organic” movement. That growing method is extremely unsustainable and unaffordable for most people.
I don’t eat vegetables. Even raw carrots taste like bitter hell to me. Even with a nearly anti-vegan diet I can confidently say we have an ethical imperative to move away from animal products, with factory farming being the most fucked.
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