There are people that will argue that honey is suitable for vegans: http://veganbros.com/1-reason-honey-vegan/
There are even people that will argue that shellfish are suitable for vegans to eat: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/04/consider_the...
"Vegans should eat oysters" is not the same as "oysters are vegan".
Is vaccinating your kids vegan? Are all vegans anti-vax?
Are soaps, cosmetics, detergents, plastics, tires, and lubricants made with stearic acid and other beef products vegan?
Vegans for ethical reasons seem to only not want to consume a single part of the animal, but consume the rest, which is a pretty large portion, by weight.
And if you're eating organic food, isn't it more likely that your spinach was grown in a bath of bone meal, blood meal, fish meal? Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
However many people I know transitioning to vegan/vegetarian lifestyles will continue to use leather products from before the switch, at least until they wear out, to avoid being wasteful.
And not every vegetarian is such based on morality. I wouldn’t be surprised if the “...but i eat fish/chicken” vegetarians wear leather.
I think the argument here is that most of most animals' worth come from eating them or their products. If everybody were to stop eating animals then it would not be economically feasible any more to use the "waste" parts of the animal for all the other products. We would find other more economically feasible ways to produce the same products (via plant matter or synthetics). Thus, by refusing to eat meat and animal products, all the other uses of animal suffering would cease to exist.
So is part of being vegan trying to make everyone else stop eating animals? Or is it enough to just control what you eat yourself? Because if your point is to make all the other uses of animal suffering cease to exist, then it sounds like a hopeless cause unless you try to convert everyone else in the world into vegans.
I have plenty of vegan friends and a small set of them beat the drum constantly.
I’m not going to be vegan and if there was a meat prohibition, I’d be an outlaw.
The thing that particularly drives me nuts about this kind of vegan is that they will bring cookies to a party and after everyone’s has eaten them point out that they were vegan and that everyone enjoyed them.
A. Carrots are vegan. I can eat stuff without meat, too.
B. No shit, Carl. You made them we assumed that.
C. the cookies sucked and people weren’t going to be rude at a dinner party where someone already went out of their way to make you a vegan dish.
D. They dipped them in milk because they were dry AF
E. If I went to a vegan party and made vegan cookies and fed them to everyone and told them in the end there were pig eyeballs in them everyone would get pissed.
I don’t do that because I’m not a self righteous asshole.
</rant>
Also, Carl sucks.
These are the people who possibly annoy you online and at restaurants and who are featured in anti-vegan memes.
The majority are perfectly content with just being vegan themselves, and you probably wouldn't know until you asked.
Do people know we use every part of the proverbial buffalo?
Yes.
Or do vegans often ponder the "ingredients" in everyday objects?
And yes. I'm aware the paint on the walls might not be vegan. I just have to live with that.
Is vaccinating your kids vegan?
I don't know, and I don't care. I'm okay with using animal products for medicine. Maybe that makes me not vegan.
Are all vegans anti-vax?
No.
Are soaps, cosmetics, detergents, plastics, tires, and lubricants made with stearic acid and other beef products vegan?
Strictly, no.
And if you're eating organic food, isn't it more likely that your spinach was grown in a bath of bone meal, blood meal, fish meal?
Maybe. But I'm sure this is better than actually eating the animals, in a calculated sense. I make no effort to eat organic, anyway.
Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
Some do, some don't.
Yes.
> Is vaccinating your kids vegan? Are all vegans anti-vax?
There is certainly a lunatic anti-vax fringe. But no, not all vegans are like that, even though many vaccines contain animal derived products. I find this interesting: http://rvgn.org/2015/05/09/anti-vax-and-veganism/
> Are soaps, cosmetics, detergents, plastics, tires, and lubricants made with stearic acid and other beef products vegan?
No.
> Vegans for ethical reasons seem to only not want to consume a single part of the animal, but consume the rest, which is a pretty large portion, by weight.
No vegan I ever interacted with fit this description.
> And if you're eating organic food, isn't it more likely that your spinach was grown in a bath of bone meal, blood meal, fish meal?
Possible, but if everyone stopped eating those animals, the prices of these products would presumably make their use uneconomical, so promoting veganism would change this.
Though I admit I haven't heard vegans I know ever discuss this particular point. They are probably not aware of how the plants they eat are fertilized.
If everyone stopped eating animals, the prices of a lot of plant agriculture might become uneconomical. My mistake for bringing in the organic/not distinction, since almost all non-organic fertilizers use some amount of animal products too. It's just that organic ones almost certainly use animal products.
(Very) broadly speaking, you can grow grains and legumes at scale without soil amendments from animals, though IDK about cost. You cannot grow fruits and vegetables at scale without soil amendments from animal products.
Like Diogenes living on handouts in Athens and decrying the materialist way of life, you can enjoy an economical vegan diet only if the world around you is not.
I'm skeptical about the truth of this statement, but open minded. Could you provide a source?
> No.
Tires are rather hard to eat in general, so I guess that alone makes them unsuitable for a vegan diet. But I suspect that's not the real reason. What is the actual rationale then?
Veganism for most is more than just food, it's includes seeking to reduce animal exploitation and suffering in any aspect of your life.
People who eat a vegan diet but ignore animal product consumption in leather, wool, cosmetics are not considered vegan by most vegans, it's usually referred to as "plant-based diet".
Variations of vegetarian? Vegetarianism seems to be solely about diet, whereas veganism is abstaining from animal products in general.
Work animals are usually limited to less industrialized situations, so they're not usually a concern for the same people. I've never known anybody who used a work animal, with the exception of riding horses if you count that.
Most vegans I know are totally OK with pets. Some own dogs, cats, or horses. Some aren't, and some hate cats for the damage they cause (apparently a big problem in Australia). It isn't common, but some vegans tried to make their cat vegetarian or vegan as well (cats are natural carnivores).
Reading my post back my post it is rather generalising, and vague ("most", "some", lacking sources, and anecdotal). Sorry for that, but hey at least I both state it and admit it.
If you already own a leather coat, and you become vegan, not one animal suffered more from you owning that coat.
A lot of vegans think very black and white, but there are also vegans and groups of vegans who are more nuanced such as the Facebook group "Friendly and Pragmatic Vegans".
That's why I used the word "variations". Vegetarians can be "baseline" (no meat), "lacto" (no dairy) and "ovo" (no eggs). A lacto-ovo-vegetarian would eat no meat, dairy or eggs, but it would still only be about diet.
There are others who avoid them for the animals' benefit, to avoid animal suffering. Because there is no rationale for treating humans' lives as of infinite value, and animals as mere meat machines, fish as just 'stock' for humans etc—except that we are humans and they're not. That naturally extends to avoiding use of other animal 'products' besides food.
Racism and slavery are other phenomena in which an 'out-group' is treated as not worthy of ethical consideration, as not really mattering, just because they're defined as 'not us'. In these situations, there's a similar difference of opinion in just who the life forms whose lives and suffering matter in the situation are. And if you're brought up in a racist or slave-owning tradition, you (at best) resent the hell out of anyone suggesting you that you are unethical, inconsiderate for being that way. How dare they! Who do they think they are, thinking they're better than me! etc.
It will one day seem very odd that nowadays if you abuse and kill a dog or cat you can go to jail; abuse and kill a million chickens or cows and you can be a millionaire.
To return to the point, I've come across both ethical vegetarians and dietary vegetarians (to perhaps coin phrases); some tried going vegan but it didn't work for them; some think avoiding meat is doing enough, it being quite hard to avoid all dairy when eating out. But there are many variations. A lot of people seem to avoid meat, but not fish, even calling themselves vegetarian. I'm kind of 'lazy vegan', I try to never eat/use/buy animal products, without going nuts about it—always trying to ascertain that what I eat from cafes or friends is totally vegan would be a huge pain, for myself and others.
But how does animal suffering correlate with the tire production?
People love to think of vegans as naive children but most people don’t think anything about their food and the vegans I know do actual research on what happens and how to live better.
I’ve seen more products labeled as veganic so it seems doable and they weren’t too much more expensive than organic bread or what have you.
But I would like to point out that this argument by analogy is flawed: Honey is food for the bees themselves. Taking it away harms the bees by making them work harder for their survival. (Unless you can prove that you only take a surplus that they would never touch.) In contrast, excrement from animals like cows or horses is not used by the animal itself.
As someone else pointed out in this thread, if necessary, many vegans could probably get behind a world were animals were raised for the use of their excrement but nothing else.
There's a very real way in which a cow, say, feedsback in to the environment. It's less direct than stealing bee vomit, but still a part of the feeding cycle.
The reason I compared them though was primarily that collecting animal faeces of large mammals would probably be an overall negative (cf. bat guano) unless you artificially confined the beasts?
It seemed to me that the necessary interference in the animals natural cycles would be akin to good beekeeping (where an apiarist can prevent hive death, increase food availability, etc.).
I have met many vegans that adhere to various levels of "strictness", (2nd-hand leather goods, isinglass filtered beers, etc. etc.), but even for the very most relaxed, non-adherent vegans, at a very minimum being acutely aware of the non-vegan nature of many/most non-edible products is definitely a consistent theme. This seems like basic 101 of pondering becoming a vegan. Of course they consider the ingredients of soaps, plastics, etc.
> Vegans for ethical reasons seem to only not want to consume a single part of the animal, but consume the rest, which is a pretty large portion, by weight.
Everything is anecdotal, so perhaps vegans you've met do think like this, but in my experience the opposite has been true. Some have been lovely people, some have been a little closer to the negative stereotype of vegans that's propagated on the internet, but they have been at least universally well-versed in the ingredients of their own consumption.
> Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
Yes.
Imagine something you don't want to be part of. Imagine yourself making a kind of a stand in that situation.
Today I ate at that nasty sausage place - they had a collection box, asking for donations for animals in need, right next to the grill. Insanity's all over the place...
That said, I mostly agree with both of you. But my casting vote says - yup, 1000% insane hehe. That would seem pretty crazy to me if I witnessed that. (Disclosure: vegan for decades, would never buy anything leather)
There are always edge-cases. I've not met vegans actively addressing that, for instance (1) any vehicle seems to kill some bug at some point and (2) most plant farming needs some kind of animal-pest control.
Edge-cases aside, it is a fact that a vegan lifestyle vastly reduces animal suffering and death, and is is in most cases less taxing on our environment.
> Do vegans know how we produce organic fertilizers?
Yes there are plenty discussions on that topic and related topic in the vegan movement.
There are definitely clueless people who eat chicken and call themselves vegan and such, but anyone whose done the research, or at least knows what an animal actually is, agrees on the base set and may have personal exclusions like honey.
Considering honey to be vegan sounds a bit fringe, to be honest.
I see both sides of the debate; at the very least it's not as black-and-white as most other animal products.
Seriously? Beekeeping can be quite stressful for the bees, in some cases colonies are pruned. And the keeper gets to make money selling the honey that the bees did happily give up (the try to sting anyone taking their honey).
This is exploitation by definition. Calling it a symbiosis is euphemistic.
Maybe on a "percentage of vegans" level, but on a logical level, why? Humans provide housing, (supplemental) food, protection, medical attention to bees in exchange for some of their honey production.
The bees don't really get to consciously choose, sure, but you could make an argument that the Whole Foods employees selling you tofu don't get much choice in whether or not to work, either.
That's also true of animals raised for meat: most of them are raised on farms and would not have lived, at least in those numbers, in the wild. Many species / breeds exist specifically because of farming, and benefit from the shelter, resources, and medical attention that humans give.
See also https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3105
(I would be curious to see if there are people who only eat farm-raised animals and refuse to eat wild animals; there is some logical consistency there, but I've seen a lot of people with the opposite preference.)
I guess with cows, it's a little beyond what they'd normally do (constantly lactating is not the natural state of the cow), so there's that distinction.
I'm not a vegan, so I haven't spent any serious time considering this, but I bet there's an argument to be made that bees would "rather" not have their food store pilfered :)
Sort of, but with an important distinction - we have to keep the dairy cows having babies so they're making milk. The female calves have to be separated and fed formula (so we can get the milk; likely traumatic for the babies). The male calves are either killed or raised for veal, which is going to present... issues for vegans.
Not mentioned in this guide to prepping for winter at all: https://pollinator.cals.cornell.edu/sites/pollinator.cals.co...
I'm not vegan or vegetarian, but if you prioritise not harming animals in order to get food or other products from them then this doesn't seem compatible.
generally most vegans (including myself) are adopting the diet for health as well as compassion, although many use it just as well as a cudgel to denigrate people over social media.
If I am cooking the food, it is vegan. If I am eating out with friends, I will make every effort to find a vegan option, however I will acquiesce to a vegetarian option if none are available as I understand the nature of the diet ive chosen. Most vegans refer to this as 'the paris exception' coined by peter singer.
Having been in a relationship with a wonderful German woman for a while now, I've found out that Germany has a very solid history of vegetarian cooking. Not necessarily for ethical reasons, but because of the periods in history where meat was too expensive or simply unavailable for most people. So they had to come up with a bunch of great (primarily) vegetarian dishes.
You'll probably never get me to give up my lemon chicken or shawarma completely, but you would have just as much trouble getting me to give up my portobellos or brussel sprouts.
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-honey-not-vegan
> There are even people that will argue that shellfish are suitable for vegans to eat
You can find people that will argue all kinds of absurd things, like you can create peace by starting a war.
We should embrace the fact that in our societies, perfect veganism is a very extreme idealistic endpoint. Its the travel towards it which is already good. Heck, everyone who's not even vegetarian but reducetarian is doing a lot of good for both our environment as well as animal welfare.
I suggest people moooooove on out of town if they want to be militant about their veganism.