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catachresis wrote

I’d rather view veganism as the things that people do, rather than the things people don’t do and that leads to a pretty standard definition: a person who avoids supporting animal exploitation and cruelty. A boycott doesn’t cover enough ground to satisfy me.

In your comment it seems like you’re alluding that FnB Houston fits your definition of vegan, and I would disagree. FnB does amazing work, but ovo-lacto freegan is not vegan. There is an important psychological shift in denouncing animal products and becoming vegan that freeganism doesn’t usually give way for.

I also want to concur with moonlune’s post and I agree with their hot take, I want to try and cool it down by saying that activism can look different to different people. Have a pragmatic definition to activism. Vegan activism doesn’t have to end at ALF or anonymous for the voiceless. A boycott can be considered activism, too. I remember how excited and outspoken I was the first year I went vegan and being nearly the only vegan I knew in my conservative-ass town felt pretty radical and I would consider it activism for others acting alone in challenging carnism as a social norm.

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

In your comment it seems like you’re alluding that FnB Houston fits your definition of vegan, and I would disagree.

Telling a person they're not vegan because of a grey area ethical issue like whether farmed animals can have an opinion on ways they'd like their body to be treated after they're dead that affects their quality of life in the present (which they can't) would I think be unproductive. The core ethical issue is buying animal products and funding it to perpetuate the cycle of breeding and buying to infinity and beyond. Beyond that I'm delighted when people take up activism, I just think we need to preserve this historically accurate term for it's utility in being a base to find activists among.

There is an important psychological shift in denouncing animal products and becoming vegan that freeganism doesn’t usually give way for.

I found the opposite, I went vegan at 15, then my life really opened up at 19 on collecting food to feed an army at a land squat to try to challenge an open cast coal mine planning application. In fact it opens up avenues to be useful in explicitly animal rights advocating settings like a food not bombs protest.

Here’s a bunch of topics that come up on on a lot of food not bombs stalls which make it a positive form of animal rights advocacy:

  • We cooked vegan soup, so no profits needed to go to an industry which breeds and kills animals.
  • Here’s some freegan bread with milk powder in it which was rescued, so no harm to animals and it’s carbon negative.
  • Isn’t it amazing they kept those cows captive and milked them only for it to go in the trash. So that’s one sign farming animals isn’t necessary to feed the population, if so very much meat, milk and eggs end up rotting in supermarket skips instead.
  • Isn’t it sad that politicians subsidize such an energy intensive product like meat to just become food waste, while people are starving around the world.

As well, therapists empty bags full of cigarettes into the centre of group therapy circle, to show them the abundance, so that that stress about scarcity is dulled. if someone is really into cheese because cheese has monosodium glutamate crystals, which is like opium, and yet they wanted to become vegan, and they have no aversion to eating rescued cheese, then it could be a helping hand in encouraging them to stay strong in their decision to go vegan, by just slowly tapering it off. I know I was completely stripped of the value of baked goods, like croissants and doughnuts when they existed as this mountain in the kitchen of a squat I lived in. Knowing it was this sugar crash I could have whenever I wanted, I stopped seeing it as such a hot option. Like some people on diets have a set time where they can eat one treat a day that they can look forward to, whereas before they would eat sweets whenever they wanted.

I understand the basic intuition among anti-freegan vegans that you wouldn’t like to be gaining sustenance or pleasure from a domesticated animals remains where you would have liked to consider that animal a kind of citizen of your community who you would like to give funerary rights to. But, I think it’s more respectful to think of them like their wild ancestors, where it would be normal for other animals to eat them after they’re dead.

Any legal rights we fight to afford domesticated animals should be shaped by a long-term vision of letting them go extinct in habitat where they can best express their capabilities, choose their social relationships and are protected from predators because we were the cause of their hereditary deformities that make them more vulnerable to predators.

To this end, if a person desired to eat rescued non-human animal flesh and it was healthy for them to do so, then it would be a positive character virtue on their part to do so because if it had gotten eaten by less intelligent animals like maggots which can survive on any food like rotting vegetables or even just composted, then:

  1. It would be much less dignity than you could show the animal by putting that energy to use in the value of the happy flourishing you could achieve yourself and in how you would be setting an example for others. And…
  2. It would be treating the animals’ final remains more similar to the way the animals’ wild ancestors would have been treated after death. So, with more dignity than the way we bred infantile traits into them and with more dignity than the toxic relationship we would be perpetuating by anthropomorphically infantilising them as infant humans who could have grown up to be people who could suffer a worse quality of life worrying about how other people might intend to treat their body after their death.
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crapshoot wrote (edited )

Freegan here, but it seems inconsistent to say not to base arguments around 'whether farmed animals can have an opinion on ways they'd like their body to be treated after they're dead', but then talking about the most 'dignified' way to treat animals' bodies after they die.

Good point on the abundance mentality though. I suspect the other person is also right wrt the psychological shift wrt denouncing animal products altogether; I feel like a part of me would feel disappointed when people stop producing animal products and throwing them in dumpsters for me to take, even if I rationally recognise it as a good thing. But I'd rather that shift happen naturally; I don't think cold-turkeying it is going to work for me :'D

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

The argument for not basing your decision to eat animal products on the belief that the common animals people farm can have an opinion on ways they'd like their body to be treated after they're dead is that factually we know they can't.

The argument about there being ways of acting towards animal material with more or less dignity is simply cultural and about setting an example for other people of the positive intention for the way I would like to see us interacting with other animals and even the memories of animals. Like a way to treat the memory of fish in a stream from your childhood with dignity could be to not kill fish unnecessarily today.

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elell wrote

a long-term vision of letting them go extinct in habitat where they can best express their capabilities, choose their social relationships and are protected from predators

fucking hell. my father grew up on a farm with half a dozen cows. the cows were named after the children. they were all milked by hand, the milk shared with the calves. my father would sing to them while he milked them. when the cows were aging (my father said you could spot it because 'their hind legs started to go') they'd be killed for meat, leather etc. the day a cow was killed was a day of mourning on the farm.

jaw-dropping to me that you think extinction is preferable to the above.

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zoom_zip wrote

my father grew up on a farm with half a dozen cows. the cows were named after the children. they were all milked by hand, the milk shared with the calves. my father would sing to them while he milked them. when the cows were aging (my father said you could spot it because 'their hind legs started to go') they'd be killed for meat, leather etc. the day a cow was killed was a day of mourning on the farm.

you are literally the “i only buy my meat from my uncle’s local humane farm where he sings to the animals and gives them sweet kisses while he tucks them into bed” meme.

meanwhile more than 70% of all meat worldwide is from factory farms

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elell wrote

i've been vegan all of my adult life thx

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zoom_zip wrote

so what?

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elell wrote

how can i be a 'i only buy my meat from blah blah' meme if i don't buy meat

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zoom_zip wrote

did you read your own post?

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elell wrote

i reread it and you're absolutely right, extinction is absolutely preferable to the scenario i described

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lettuceLeafer wrote

Oh fuck off. Fucking cowardly snowflakes who have to construct baby cage fiction to make them accept and be happy with life. So pathetic

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Ishkah OP wrote

The above is how I'd like to see them go out because of the way we bred cows to have painfully large udders they're more likely to get mastitis infection and die, so sometimes milking will be necessary.

I just dislike that we bred infantile traits into them to make them easier to herd, and accidently easier to be attacked and killed by predators. So we can't even let them roam far in fully wild habitat with wolves around without having to train dogs to save most of them with big spikes round their neck, so some calves, wolves and dogs would still be getting killed for dumb reasons.

When instead you could just give them birth control at the end, let them get old like you said, then with the less land area it takes to grow veggies, you can give more land back to wild habitat for animals with close common wild ancestors to come back like byson that can actually fully enjoy wild habitat with all the physical capabilities we bred out of them.

But I think even if we realised a vegan world there would be some foolish groups of people funding to keep enough domesticated animals to fill a few semi-wild safaris in every country and enough to allow for a healthy breeding stock like zoos and safaris today. And there won't be enough political will to outlaw this.

Short Term

Farmers will breed less animals as it becomes less profitable, less animals will exist.

Long Term

Towards the very end there will be a burden put on animal sanctuaries to take in lots of animals and for governments to write laws to say the farmer has to turn their farm into a sanctuary to save the few remaining animals, like how there is a burden put on rescuers today with some battery farmed chickens allowed to be rescued after their egg laying numbers drop, while others get killed for pet food, to save the farmer the bother of transporting them to slaughter and sometimes not cutting even.

Forever Outcome

What should happen ideally: They should be allowed to go extinct to make room for wild animals with the closest common ancestors to be able to express their non-deformed physical capabilities and choose their own social relationships.

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lettuceLeafer wrote

The above is how I'd like to see them go out because of the way we bred cows to have painfully large udders they're more likely to get mastitis infection and die, so sometimes milking will be necessary.

U can't b vegan and want to milk cows. This is just wanting to own cows and ur slaves but in an uwu nice way. They don't need to be milked bc one the milk comes out even if u don't milk the and the fucking caves drink it dipshit.

So we can't even let them roam far in fully wild habitat with wolves around without having to train dogs to save most of them with big spikes round their neck, so some calves, wolves and dogs would still be getting killed for dumb reasons.

Oh fuck off. The criticism I gave above is even more true and this is an even more bullshit argument. Fucking uwu I'm so nice snowflakes who pretend to be anti oppression but in reality just Wana be oppressors in a uwu nice may. Own the fuck up shit u wanna do or don't advocate slavery. At least u won't be a fucking coward who can't even admit to themself their I tentions. Fucking snowflakes who can't accept reality I swear.

Towards the very end there will be a burden put on animal sanctuaries to take in lots of animals and for governments to write laws to say the farmer has to turn their farm into a sanctuary to save the few remaining animals, like how there is a burden put on rescuers today with some battery farmed chickens allowed to be rescued after their egg laying numbers drop, while others get killed for pet food, to save the farmer the bother of transporting them to slaughter and sometimes not cutting even.

Animals sanctuaries fucking make me sick. U don't like the consequences of animals not being humans property but u also don't want the consequences of them being free so u gotta create an elaborate plot to keep them ur slaves and deprive them of their freedom to follow their dreams. Fucking nasty liberals I swear

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

They don't need to be milked bc one the milk comes out even if u don't milk the and the fucking caves drink it dipshit.

Metabolic pressure from high milk yield is found to be a causative factor in Mastitis, Lameness, Metritis and other reproductive disorders. One recommended solution is to select and feed for lower yield.

Cows haven't gotten any bigger and yet we've selected for massive udders and massive milk yields. I couldn't parse if you thought cow milk would just spring forth from the udder even if there was no-one there to pull on the teat, cow or human, but if so, no that doesn't happen. And even if you thought calves could happily drink all this extra high yield milk despite not being bred to need it, what if all the calves died or not enough calves survived to feed from multiple cows, what then? I think humans can play a positive healthcare role in the same way First Nations people used to go out and mercy kill injured bears despite risk to themselves, we can rehabilitate and release wild animals, and we can look after domesticated animals health care needs because we were the ones that gave them these deformities.

Fucking snowflakes who can't accept reality I swear.

If you shot a bison with a magic domesticating and infantilising dart out in the wild, and made it easier prey for predators, I think the character virtuous decision would be to protect them from predators and attend to their healthcare needs.

Further reading:

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lettuceLeafer wrote

Dog, I've spent hundred of hours with cattle. Its not critical thinking to rule out what u have been taught, what I have done and experienced and red bc some Redditor told me I was wrong with no sources.

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