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Comment by cyphax | Hacker News Reader

I think maybe there are different "kinds" of vegans. As in: maybe not all vegans are vegan because of the same ideology.

One vegan explained his motivations like this: he's against slavery, using animals is like a form of slavery and he's against that. Even if you treat the animal like a king; it's still not free to do its own thing. I really liked his reasoning, it seemed consistent and coming from a good place.

That logic would allow him to eat figs because it's a natural process, as you're no actor in the process of the fig forming itself.

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"Even if you treat the animal like a king; it's still not free to do its own thing"

This person should get out of their gentrified neighborhood flat and go see what "do its own thing" mean in the wild. (There's also a good subreddit for it as well)

It is not pretty, it is not idyllic

Why do you think this vegan wants nothing bad ever happen to an animal? Freedom is valuable on its own, even when that freedom means that life is a struggle. Why do you assume that this person thinks nature is idyllic and pretty?

You can compare it to choosing between a life in prison or living alone on a deserted island. If the person affected makes the choice, that's one thing, and it doesn't really matter which option they choose from a moral standpoint. But choosing for someone else is iffy. How can I decide if it's best for you to be in prison or on a deserted island?

Does she or he have a pet ? Just wondering.

There are obviously many different flavors of vegans, each stopping at different points when it comes to what they consider animal suffering. There are vegans with pets, but they might not agree with the idea that all forms of keeping animals is considered suffering. Other vegans won't keep pets, I'm one of them, because I agree completely with the post you commented on and draw the same conclusion as you that it's incompatible with my beliefs.

There's a middle ground as well, exemplified by Gary Francione (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_L._Francione). He's an animal rights abolitionist, meaning that we should just improve the welfare of animals in the animal industry, but abolish it completely. Yet he keeps pets, by only taking in rescued animals from shelters. He argues that their lives are already ongoing, and we should make the best situation we can for them. But we shouldn't buy animals from breeders, because then we help perpetuate the situation.

I think it's a sympathetic position to take, so yes, it's possible to want to stop people from breeding pets while still caring for the ones that are already here.

I'm genuinely curious about this: are vegans who are against animals suffering in any form universal anti-natalists? From my perspective, if you treat a pet well, or even live-stock well, their lives involve much less suffering than their wild-counterparts, who typically die of disease, starvation, or predation. So the only way to make the view consistent IMO is to be against animal life in general.

Why everything has to be black or white? I'm a vegan and i have rescue pets, if an animal is sick i would help it even if it is a wild one, if a predator has to hunt I wouldn't interfere and i respect that, even hunter humans who have no choice are fine to me but impregnating animals and removing their offspring to get it's milk when there's no need for us to consume it, keeping animals in cages where they can't even move, force feed them to enlarge their livers, grow them so fast that they can't even stand up, and a long list of more "treatments" in the name of what? Need? Or just greed? We all know what is bad or good, I don't care of people who eat meat but they don't need to excuse themselves.

> I'm genuinely curious about this: are vegans who are against animals suffering in any form universal anti-natalists?

When you say "against animals suffering in any form" you make it sound like you mean both in the human-operated animal industry and wild in nature, and also that these vegans would want to prevent wild animals from breaking their legs or something because it induces suffering. I haven't seen vegans argue that we should interfere with nature to limit suffering in that way.

Some vegans are utilitarians (what I've read of Peter Singer comes to mind), and then I guess it comes down to if you think that the benefits of the animal's life outweighs the suffering when considering if they should have been born or not.

Other vegans are into animal rights, where you assign unalienable rights to animals like the right to freedom, but these vegans wouldn't even consider your idea of ending all animal suffering. They would be antinatalist in the sense that being born into captivity and raised just to be slaughtered for meat is wrong, and for that animal it would surely have been better to not have been born at all.

I'm heavy on the animal rights side and extremely suspicious of utilitarianism. I'm sure that hardcore utilitarianism could lead to the bizarre conclusion that you're presenting, but I haven't seen it argued.

I'm not sure what you mean by "there are different kinds of vegans". The term vegan was coined by the Vegan Society.

They have the following definition: "Veganism is a way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing and any other purpose."

But not all people who avoid more foods than a vegetarian do so because of that ideology. If those people's diets exclude all animal products it's useful to use the term vegan as most English speakers will understand what you mean.

Language is defined by usage, not organisations.

I think my only really problem with this is that it creates confusion because of people using the term wrong. I've known too many people who say they are vegetarians but still eat meat frequently, or they eat fish, which is meat regardless of what Catholics claim.

Vegetarians are people who eat no meat intentionally but may consume milk, eggs, and some other animal byproducts like honey so long as nothing had to directly die or suffer.

Veganism is a higher level where the attempt is to remove all products and foods that are not plant based it that require some other creature too perform outside of it's natural life cycle.

Pescatarians are people who are vegetarians other than the eating of fish.

Raw food advocates do not cook their food.

Jainism has a religious element to their food intake and behavior regarding other creatures.

In any case it's either done for dietary or ethical reasons. The standard diet is to eat what's comfortable or easy with little thought to what you're eating. That's pretty much the only constant as there's numerous other non-veg diets out there that people eat for a variety of reasons religious, dietary, and personal.

Me personally, I'm of the opinion that you should case about what you're eating and as long as you're comfortable with what that means regarding how it's procured, eat up

Presumably that there are many people who call themselves vegan despite having different opinions on what they should eat and why, and that those people do not necessarily care about or align with the cure definition from the vegan society. Indeed if I look at the vegan society on Wikipedia, it claims vegan originally meant “non-dairy vegetarian”.

From Wikipedia: "Watson coined the word "vegan" to stand for "non-dairy vegetarians" who also ate no eggs."

You shouldn't leave out the egg part.

But yes, terms change. I've read early Vegan Society texts where they talk about "fruitarians" as those vegetarians that only eat the fruits produced by animals, i.e. milk, egg, honey. Today a fruitarian is a vegetarian that only eats fruits (and sometimes nuts and seeds) that you can pick without killing the plant.

There are also different opinions on the term vegetarian. In Sweden, it commonly includes milk and egg, and if you order a vegetarian pizza you get cheese from cow milk. But the Swedish National Food Agency, and other agencies like the Consumer Agency, define a product marked "vegetarian" as being strictly vegetable based. The last couple of years, soy hot dog manufacturers have been forced to add "lacto vegetarian" or "ovo vegetarian" to their packages.

So it's nothing strange to have different points of view of what exactly is denoted by the terms vegetarian and vegan.

>> There are also different opinions on the term vegetarian. In Sweden, it commonly includes milk and egg, and if you order a vegetarian pizza you get cheese from cow milk.

In My Big Fat Greek Wedding there's a scene were the mother-in-law learns the groom is vegetarian and (after exclaiming embarrassingly loudly) she says she'll cook him lamb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFemw_6a-Tg

The way I understand this is that it says that Greeks think that lamb is vegetarian as in "not really meat". I always found that a little weird, because in Greece lamb is absolutely "meat". Traditionally, you're only supposed to eat it on Easter sunday, or on religious feasts (the "panygiria") so it's really something special, unlike pulses, legumes and fish (which would be eaten much more commonly traditionally). I can imagine a Greek yiayia saying "You're vegetarian? That's OK, I'll cook you chicken!", or adding feta to the salad, etc. But- lamb? I don't quite see that.

Maybe it's a Greek US diaspora thing, but I'm guessing that was translated for the American audience whom the authors considered might be confused by "I'll cook you chicken", because they actually don't consider chicken to be "meat".

> You shouldn't leave out the egg part.

I think this is part of the same definition issue. The sentence I quoted as an example doesn’t make it clear whether or not Watson intended for their choice of not eating eggs to be a personal one or one included in the definition of veganism. Certainly if someone told me they were non-dairy vegetarian I think I wouldn’t assume that they eat eggs (or assume that they definitely don’t eat eggs). I think I would err on the side of non-eggs despite that that would be the sameish as veganism. Perhaps everyone else disagrees with me and the phrase has a clear definition, but otherwise I think it shows that a lot of these terms are not fully defined and different people take them to mean different things when describing themselves.

Rereading the sentence again I think perhaps I parsed it wrong, in which case I agree with you.

>I'm not sure what you mean by "there are different kinds of vegans". The term vegan was coined by the vegan society.

Etymology is not use. Use defines language.

The "Vegan society" of mid-20th century is an insignificant part of the history of vegan ideas. It's just where the term originated in the US as a standalone term.

Millions of peoples call themselves vegans, and have adopted this or that part of veganism (or even just vegeterianism) without having ever heard about the Vegan Society and its founders.

The definition of the term doesn't belong, copyright style, to those that coined them, but to how it evolved in language by those that use it.

The dictionary itself captures that use, and doesn't care about how people originally defined the term in some office:

"vegan: a strict vegetarian who consumes no food (such as meat, eggs, or dairy products) that comes from animals"

Like how surrealism as a term is not defined by what Andre Breton wrote in some official documents the 20s and 30s.

I highly doubt that there are millions of people who call themselves vegan without having heard of this definition. People don't just wake up one day and stop eating animal products.

It's kind of like the term hacker. The general public understands it to mean one thing, but vast majority of people who apply the term to themselves understand it to mean another thing.

>I highly doubt that there are millions of people who call themselves vegan without having heard of this definition.

You can doubt it, but you'd be wrong. At best they'd chanced about some historical background piece that contained the definition. But the huge majority wont tie it to some 19th century "Vegan Society" or know/remember anything about some "original definition".

>It's kind of like the term hacker. The general public understands it to mean one thing, but vast majority of people who apply the term to themselves understand it to mean another thing.

Well, the latter are wrong in your sense (etymology, history) too. There are references to the term "hacker" to mean intruder on other systems from decades before people self-identified and pushed for the supposedly benign-only definition. (E.g. there are reports of "hackers" messing with telephone services and bringing them down as far back as the early sixties (literally mentioned as "hackers", not phreakers).

But the huge majority wont tie it to some 19th century "Vegan Society" or know/remember anything about some "original definition".

Do you have any evidence for that claim? All the vegans I know use this definition.

Also, the vegan society was started in the 20th century.

>Do you have any evidence for that claim?

No, but you can check it empirically and statistically.

>All the vegans I know use this definition.

Well, I know several people that self-identify as vegan (annoyingly so), who have no idea about the origins and just seen a few videos or read some articles and were convinced to try that diet.

(And of course they don't belong to any society either).

>Also, the vegan society was started in the 20th century.

Yes, confused it with the vegetarian society.

Actually that’s pretty close to how I decided to go vegan. I came to it from many different angles and I’m sure others do as well. Only later did I realize the close relationship between non-cruelty to veganism. (Was in a pretty libertarian area)

Once you release a word into the wild, weird world of a living language, it's going to mean what people want. Including people who've never heard of the "vegan society" (which I presume is a registered society, in which country? NZ?).

The word vegan was explained to me, decades ago, by an swissair employee: "VGML is vegan, which is vegetarian, but also without eggs and other animal foods that leave the animal alive, and almost unspiced. If you want spices, you want AVML."

I’ve never heard that definition of vegan. Too funny. It’s almost a linguistic attack on veganism to define it as bland.

I may not eat meat, or byproducts for environmental reasons. That has nothing to do with animal cruelty. I'm still a vegan though.

Plus vegans draw the line at different things. Some evidently wont eat figs, some potentially may eat meat if the animal had died naturally.

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