Submitted by Ishkah in Vegan

Vegan Purists

There are 1000s of vegan purists all defining veganism in their own way so as to exclude people who diverge from their niche ideological interests.

Fill in the blank; "if you ever use _____ you're not vegan!":

Anti-Capitalist Purists (Sources)

  • A Fast Food Drive-In - Even if it's for vegan food.
  • Items with Non-Vegan Parent Companies - Even if the research would be never ending.
  • Palm Oil - Even if it's what a friend asked for.
  • Quinoa - Even if the tabloid news story was dumb.
  • Chocolate - Even if it's what a friend asked for.
  • Non-Fair Trade Items - Even if you buy mostly locally.

Anti-Freegan Purists (Sources)

  • Second-Hand Wool - Even from a charity shop skip.
  • Roadkill Deer - Even if you would be fine with animals eating you after you're dead.
  • Dumpster Dived Bread with Whey in it - Even if you use it for animal rights advocacy.

Anti-Natalist Purists (Sources)

  • A Fertility Clinic - Even if an anti-natalist world will never happen.

Organisations Worshipers (Sources)

  • Anti-PETA Talking Points - Even if you just wish they were better animal rights activists.

Militant Purists

  • Solely Legal Activism - Even if you support the ALF.

Anti Companion Animal Purists

  • A rescue dog to get you out on hikes more - Even if you wish no one ever bred them.
  • A Horse - Even if it's a rescue pulling you both to a new field.
  • A Guide Dog - Even a rescued one who likes it.

Pro-Life Purists

  • An Abortion Service Provider - Even if you were raped.

Sparse Healthy Food Deserts Denier

  • Food desert talking points - Even if it's to promote vegan remedies.

Indigenous Rights Denier

  • Indigenous talking points - Even if it's to promote vegan remedies.

Deontological Purists

  • Reducitarian Diet Tips - As a fall back advocacy option.
  • Avocados - Even if it's what a friend asked for.
  • Almonds - Even ones pollinated by DIY built wild bee nests.
  • A non-vegan friend for sex and falling in love despite them never going vegan.

Pseudoscience Cult Purists

  • Cooked Foods - Even if it can help make nutrients more bio-available.
  • Processed Foods - Even if it can help make nutrients more bio-available.
  • GMO Foods - Even responsibly made & grown.

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Pragmatic Veganism

We need vegans to recognize that they can have a philosophical perspective similar to any of the above perspectives and still see themselves as part of a big-tent vegan alliance which allows for a diverse array of philosophical caucuses within it.

But if we want to maintain our coherency and power as a unified force, then we need to be hostile to gatekeepers, ideological purity testers and entryists trying to turn veganism into a niche belief system with a primary goal that is different to trying to end the animal agriculture industry through boycotting it's products.

So for example, we can have caucuses such as all the below and more:

  • Anti-Capitalist Caucus (Sources)
  • Freegan Caucus (Sources)
  • Rewilding Caucus (Sources)
  • Naturist Caucus (Sources)
  • Environmentalist Caucus
  • Health Caucus
  • Direct Action Caucus
  • Anti-Racist Caucus
  • Feminist Caucus
  • LGBT Caucus
  • Mental Health Caucus
  • Pro-Natalist Caucus
  • Anti-Natalist Caucus
  • Liberal Caucus
  • Conservative Caucus
  • Pro-Choice Caucus
  • Personally Pro-Life Caucus

One important way of achieving this big-tent vegan alliance is through using and promoting a simple, practical and historically accurate definition of veganism, in that veganism means 'an animal products boycott' which is primarily a campaign waged against animal agriculture.

The argument I’m going to be making is that if boycotts can be an important element to political movement building and I think boycotts are in the case of animal rights, then the vegan society were irresponsible for trying to come up with various sectarian definitions for a way of life which people already have a colloquial definition for, in that these are people who boycott all animal products, and some of them go further in being animal rights advocates.

Like the word libertarian, the positive original vision has been obscured or run away with entirely. As libertarian used to stand for the democratization of the means of production, so enlightenment liberalism or left-anarchism.

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Veganism As A Boycott Campaign

“An animal products boycott”

Ethical Foundation: First & foremost a behavior, like how 'heroism' means to 'act bravely', so the principle reason why someone is colloquially a vegan would be contained within a separate identity like what it necessarily means to be a legal animal rights advocate.

Pros: Clear & simple implications and historically accurate to why the vegan society came about. Has broader appeal for other liberation causes like anti-racism and anti-sexism to see it as a strategy of action which is useful for their struggles also. Makes explicit it’s a campaign tactic and leaves room for combination behaviours like freeganism.

As for my preferred definition of legal animal rights advocate, it’s...

A person who seeks to gain collective legal rights for non-human animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty. With the few exceptions where the law is overridden by right to self-defence or special dispensation from the government for example to practice some scientific testing, as well as breed and keep guide dogs for the blind.

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How to explain what veganism is

I define veganism as simply “an animal products boycott.”

I make the point of saying it’s one campaign tactic among many, aimed primarily at achieving the end of animal agriculture.

And that personally I see the principle behind the action as being grounded in the animal rights movement, seeking collective legal rights for animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren't subject to human cruelty. In a similar way to how the act of boycotting South African products or the act of boycotting the Montgomery bus company was grounded in a larger civil rights movement.

Other boycotts didn’t have a specific name for the identity one took on when boycotting, the principle for why they boycotted was contained in what it meant to be part of a larger movement e.g. being a civil rights advocate. So I would just encourage people to think of themselves as animal rights advocates first, fighting for the legal protection of animals. Though you could also call yourself an animal liberation advocate fighting to free non-human animals to be able to express their capabilities in managed wildlife habitat or a sanctuary.

As for why someone would arrive at the ethical conclusion to boycott, it could be a million ways. The person advocating just needs to tailor their arguments to the person they’re standing in front of. So, two examples for the principle that got you into veganism could be:

Preference Consequentialism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world to kill when you know they will have interests to go on living longer than would be profitable.

Nihilist Meta-Ethics: The principle that you should be wary of in-authentically acting in a way you don't believe due to outside social pressures, like that acting uncaringly is necessary to what it means to be a man.

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Why not use other definitions?

The reason I would encourage people to use the definition "an animal products boycott" and not other definitions is it gets at the root motivation people have for being vegan without being divisive about which ethical system is best.

In 1944 those members of the vegetarian society who were avoiding all use of animal products, created their own vegan society and came up with the word vegan. They did this after a series of debates in which they voiced their concern that we should also be advocating the boycott of the dairy and egg industries.

Now I acknowledge that one problem with defining veganism as an “animal products boycott” is people saying “well would you be okay with hunting wild animals yourself then?” But to that I would answer “implicit in the word boycott is an ethical judgement on the activity that creates the product.”

So, for 99% of people protesting animal farming, it’s going to be hypocritical to go hunting, because you’re desiring to prevent the incentives for the killing from ever happening so you couldn't then go out and do it yourself. It’s a positive that we get to really easy conceptually tie this to other boycotts where someone boycotting South African products during apartheid wouldn't feel comfortable with flying over their and joining the police force themselves, more so than in other definitions where you’re just saying you’re abstaining from using the end animal products.

But I am actually fine with my definition being softer on for example subsistence hunters, which my opponents definition doesn’t do. I’ve got a video on my channel of Penan tribes people in Indonesia explaining how it would be repulsive to them to keep animals in captivity to farm, and I think this is great animal rights advocacy, so again a positive distinction.

So the idea that some tiny 0.001% of people might boycott animal products, may also feel fine with going out hunting themselves would just be one of a number of fringe groups you already have under many definitions, like neo-nazis desiring to boycott animal products and wanting to commit harms against humans. Which we simply have to denounce or distance ourselves from in our animal rights advocacy anyway.

Another concern people may have is that boycotting sounds like you're primarily negatively opposed to a thing and trying to reduce your reliance on that thing. But I would argue you have that with every definition and that by creating a distance between the behaviour (veganism) and the principle (animal rights) you allow people to see the action as part of a big tent animal rights movement, where you're hoping through boycotting, lobbying, starting vegan cafes, food not bombs stalls and foraging groups to create the breathing room necessary for legislation and rewilding where you can get to enjoy a more compassionate local community and see more animals flourishing in wildlife habitat.

To draw attention away from veganism as a political act is to make veganism look simply like an identity one takes on to look cool or be part of a subculture. Whereas people can relate boycott's to other real world events as great positive coming together moments under a liberation politics. For example car-sharing during the Montgomery bus boycott, students leading the call to stop subsidising Israel and before that South Africa, the widespread boycotting of a reactionary tabloid newspaper in the UK that ran stories saying mass suffocation at a football stadium due to overcrowding and fences were the fans fault. So boycotting to show your real felt ties to the land you stand on. The first boycott was people simply withdrawing their labour from an imperialist landlord in Ireland in a desire to build something greater once he'd left, so I think it is very flexible to positive intention [1]

Now, does this definition leave room for any exceptions to the rule? Well yes in a way, but I would say a positive one, in that it allows for waste animal products to be used if no profit finds its way back to the person who caused the harm. If you can get a supermarket to redirect its 1000 loaves of bread containing whey from going in the dumpster to a food bank, that can only be a benefit to the world.

Also, it doesn’t attempt to include animal entertainment boycotts in what it means to be vegan, and simply leaves that to be included in what it means to be an animal rights advocate. Although it’s so similar one could raise an eyebrow about why someone would boycott animal agriculture and not animal cruelty as entertainment. People already view veganism as simply abstaining from the use of animal products, so we just do have to contend with why awful people like some eco-fascists desire to be vegans and denounce them. To try and pretend that someone boycotting animal products can’t also be an awful person in other ways is wilfully ignorant. In the same way, claiming that ex-vegans could never have been vegan for not having understood the ethical arguments is fallacious and off-putting.

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History of the Term

In 1944 those members of the vegetarian society who were avoiding all use of animal products created their own society and came up with the word vegan. They did this after a series of debates in which they voiced their concern that we should also be advocating the boycott of the dairy and egg industries. The word they almost came up with was 'dairyban'. And the colloquial understanding of vegan is the closest to this today.

The various definitions some vegans have attempted to come up with later was never historically accurate to why the vegan society came about as it didn’t represent all the members’ reasons for creating the society, and neither did it represent the 100 year old anarchist history that founded the very vegetarian society in London which the vegan society grew out of, and finally neither did it represent the diversity of philosophies over the 1000 or more year old history going all the way back to ancient India for why people desired to live that way of life.

Trying to make the definition of vegan as "the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals" was equivalent to defining vegans as people who wear pink hats, it was never going to come into popular usage and would have been detrimental if it had.

So right there you have two diametrically opposed belief-isms consequentialism and deontology at the outset of the society which couldn’t survive together as one coherent idea without the behaviour-ism. Take the belief-isms away and you still have a behavioural preference for one group of products over another.

And the principle behind the boycott only splinters further as time goes on, today you have anti-natalists, vegans who are anti-pragmatically rescuing animals, anti-capitalists, pro-capitalists who think paying taxes isn’t vegan, the only thing uniting all of them being the behaviour of doing an animal products boycott.

But, vegans shouldn’t revolve their whole identity around a behavior either, we should ideally see ourselves as part of a larger animal rights movement, otherwise you get purism like that seen in 1975 of vegan shops who refused to stock the first mock-meat veggie burger because they were so attached to the behaviour that they worried if they sold mock-meats they would lose the coherency of veganism as a distinct behaviour.

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Utilitarians definitely lead up to and were part of the creation of the vegan movement

The American Vegetarian Society poured its energies into utilitarian, anti-slavery vegetarian settlements in the Wild West. And its founder, Englishman Henry Clubb, ultimately took a bullet for the union in the Civil War.

Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford, a member of the Vegetarian Society in 1944 argued for a total boycott of animal products, saying “[the dairy industry] must involve some slaughter I think and some suffering to the cows and calves.”

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As were far-leftists

Végétarien in France, Insurrectionary anarchists robbing banks to build up their working class communities.

There was a Tolstoyan (christian anarchist) congregation in Croydon in South London that set up a vegetarian society, and that vegetarian society was still around in 44 and one of the pivotal events that played a pivotal role in the launch of a proper vegan movement.

Walter Fliess (1901-1985) was the owner of ‘Vega’ restaurant with his wife Jenny. Born in Germany. In 1920, Walter Fliess joined the IJB (Internationaler Jugenbund or International Youth Group), a small educational group led by the philosopher Leonard Nelson, which evolved into the ISK (Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund or Militant Socialist International) in 1926. Walter Fleiss was head of the Cologne branch and, following persecution by the Nazis, moved to England in 1934 (preceded by his wife, Jenny, in 1933.) In London, the couple opened a vegetarian restaurant, Vega, based on previous restaurants they had run in Germany which gave financial support to the ISK.

“The vegetarian society has reason to be grateful to Walter and his late wife, Jenny, for services rendered in the early days of veganism. Thank you for leading so many to a healthier and more humane way of life.” - Serene Coles. President of the Vegan Society

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Etymology

How did the term come about? Why is the syllable ‘veg’ like vegetable being attached to an ‘-ism’ to mean an ideology, wouldn’t it make more sense for the ethical principle to be contained in what it means to be a ‘legal animal rights advocate’?

I understand a secondary definition has come into popular usage about it being a belief-ism also, but considering we already have the words animal rights, I’m arguing we should use the primary definition of veganism as an animal products boycott for more coherence.

Like I accept literally has come to take on a secondary definition of figuratively because it rolls off the tongue so nicely, but in veganism’s case, I don’t think we have any benefits at this point in time to using a secondary definition of veganism, and so should stick to using the primary definition in all circumstances, and just acknowledge that of course there are people who go a lot further than an animal products boycott and so hold a commitment to animal rights that means a lot more to them than just veganism.

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Various clarifications to my argument

‘An animal products boycott’ or ‘a person who boycotts industries which produce animal products’?

Boycotting can sometimes be confused for only temporarily removing yourself as a customer until some minor business practice has been changed, but the history of boycotting is far more radical. The term has it’s origin in rent and labor strikes against a colonial landlord in Ireland aimed at forcing him to leave. And the dictionary definition of a boycott is “withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest.”

The South African apartheid boycott for example was promoted as ‘boycotting the products of apartheid’, so protesting apartheid until it was gotten rid of as a style of government. Similarly, the reason for the creation of the vegan society was over debates that we should be promoting the boycott of the animal agriculture industry, so protesting animals kept in captivity unjustifiably, which is a call to eliminate the industry.

Veganism is 'an animal products boycott' in the same way the boycott against South Africa was 'a South African products boycott'. It's a boycott primarily against animal farming. The same way people didn't do a 'South African products boycott' because they were inherently against tropical fruits, they did it because of the method used to obtain the fruits through predominantly black labourers living under apartheid.

My definition of veganism is "an animal products boycott", for the word to work as a noun, it has to have have descriptive utility about a person, that person has to be said to be desiring to do it themselves, so 'a vegan', is "a person who desires to do an animal products boycott." What does it mean to do a specific products boycott? To protest something specific to the manufacture &/or distribution of that group of products.

So you wouldn’t introduce your anti-capitalist friend to a room of people as someone who’s primarily protesting against the manufacture &/or distribution of specifically animal products, if they’re primarily protesting against all products.

Their desire is more broad than animal products, it's just a technicality that the former is included, not a desire that has any utility on it’s own as a descriptive tool for the person.

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Grey areas

With every definition there are a 1000 grey areas like oysters or backyard eggs. I would just direct the conversation back to the core of getting consensus first on the ethical issue of where the majority of people get their meat from. What's important is this definition focus's the conversation and is easily accessible.

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Easily comprehensible and accessible

A really important positive attribute to acknowledge about this lifestyle is it's a broad food category that in its wholefood form is easy to distinguish on the shelf. Therefore experimenting with the diet doesn't need to feel like a burden to take on board in the same way researching and seeking out conflict-free minerals in everything you buy can be for example.

All that appeal is lost if you try to include researching to boycott non-vegan parent companies in the same animal products boycott.

As well as it having a cast iron meaning in not using any products which have an origin in the body of an animal.

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It focuses the conversation on it being a political tactic, not all or nothing

It's not the case that we need to win over everyone to veganism in order to make massive change, if a large enough minority can create breathing room for legislation and food co-ops on the way to a vegan world, it will make the transition easier saving humans and wildlife. As well as driving less, buying second hand, etc.

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Comments

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subrosa wrote

Fill in the blank; "if you ever use _____ you're not vegan!":

animals as food

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moonlune wrote (edited )

[vegan people's goal is] to end the animal agriculture industry through boycotting it's products.

Not quite. I'm vegan because I can't stand to not be vegan. And I do vegan proselytism because I can't stand to not do it. this discussion on raddle goes deeper on the subject iirc. The discussion in our vegan forum is pretty high quality in general imo, even thought the discussions from a few years ago have been drowned out :)

However, I too am annoyed by the people who define veganism only as a dogmatic checklist of things you can do, things you can eat, things you can't. If you don't think about consequences of what you do and never adjust yourself to different situation, you're not practicing veganism but just following a new-age religion.

Arguably, and this is a hot take, only animal right activists are truely vegan, the rest of us are just plant based and do not do enough for the animals to claim ourselves vegan.

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Ishkah OP wrote

Close, but I'd say if you ever use 'animals as commercial products' you're not vegan, to include activists doing great work such as Food not Bombs Houston:

We, participants in Food Not Bombs Houston (FNBH), agree;

to use sharing of free food, exchange of information, and dialogue as a means of promoting social justice, cultural exchange, horizontal organizing, and mutual aid ...

to bring only vegan (containing no animal products) or ovo-lacto freegan (may contain dairy or egg, but obtained for free) food that is safe for consumption, and to indicate any non-vegan ingredients ...

not to sell food or otherwise profit from any kind of donations given to FNBH

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Ishkah OP wrote (edited )

Fair enough. And coolio will have to look around more, I liked the top comment on that linked thread.

I would really push back against the hot take though, it would just be incredibly counter productive having people be shy about whether they can identify as vegan or not just because they haven't yet done activism. It would reduce our ability to find people who may go onto being dedicated enough to organize to make changes to our communities and institutions. And plant based doesn't cut it because you can be plant-based for simply health reasons.

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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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elell wrote

purists here, purists there, purists goddam everywhere!!!

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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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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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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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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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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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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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SveetPickle wrote

I don’t have time to read all that right this second, but I like self describing as a intersectional vegan

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