I feel like instead of a giant push for veganism, there should just be a push to eat what’s sustainable.
Beef and dairy? Causes huge amount of greenhouse gasses and with current methods of production, it is not sustainable
Blue fin tuna? These things have been way over fished and are endangered. Not sustainable, just try it once and move one with your life.
Tilapia ? These things grow like weeds and can be fed efficiently. Go ahead, good source of protein for your diet.
Honey? We need bees and they are an important pollinator for crops. Go nuts (just watch your sugar intake}
Almonds? Takes huge amounts of water to grow and exacerbates droughts in the areas they are farmed. Eat less of these.
Potatoes? Grow stupid easily in all sorts of conditions. Go nuts.
I’d already be very happy if everyone took your approach, but it’s not the entire story for veganism. Sustainability is an important factor for myself and many others, but so is animal welfare.
It’s a bummer that animal welfare is pretty much inversely correlated with emissions. Packing chickens together and making their lives miserable is much better for the environment than having them roam free.
Veganism happily aligns with environmental sustainability. But when you believe we shouldn’t exploit animals at all, just pushing to eat what’s sustainable ignores a lot of pain and cruelty.
Potatoes are kinda OP imho.
(I also agree with you btw).
About honey: we do need bees. But taking away their honey which they work really hard for to sustain their colony during the winter and replacing it with sugar water is really bad for them and makes their colony weak. They can get viruses, bacteria and fungi much faster, which they can spread to other colonies or when splitting up when their queen dies.
Next to that, bees we use for honey are a very aggressive territorial species. They claim their territory and all the other bee and whasp species are killed and pushed out. There are many bee and whasp species who do not live in colonies but are very important for the biodiversity. Replacing them with our bees, which will die and get sick faster because we take away their nuteician rich honey, is a bad idea.
We do need our bees, but in reduces quantities to keep the balance. But we shouldn’t take their food.
We do need bees, but that doesn’t mean the honey industry is sustainable.
https://www.greenmatters.com/p/how-honey-industry-affects-environment
Turns out that what’s sustainable is often what is vegan. Vegans are constantly discussing the edges of all this stuff trying to come to a better understanding, its somewhat natural that they would provide some of the most well-reasoned and substantiated arguments.
Honey and tilapia are not sustainable currently. Its a demand issue. Rules and regulations will never prevent an industry from meeting demand. Thats why we currently use practices at large scale we never would at small scale.
I agree for the most part. I would like to point out that fish farms are actually very damaging to the ecosystems that they sit in. The excrement ends up dropping down in single locations, burying the seafloor in it. IIRC, this often leads to the oxygen levels in the water dropping, which further kills off the surrounding aquatic life.
EDIT: more context
Beef and dairy? Causes huge amount of greenhouse gasses and with current methods of production, it is not sustainable
what makes you think this?
Stupid discussion. It does not matter whether something is in the box “vegan”. Ask yourself why you would or would not eat something. If you don’t want to eat(/drink) dairy because of the way the animals that produce the dairy are treated, would you be ok when they are treated differently? Are bees treated in the same way? Does it matter if you treat them in this way? Those should be your questions, not “does it belong in this box?”.
Honey is a by-product of bees, the same way that all human made food is a by-products of humans.
Can you milk a bee? I didn’t think so!
Non vegan here. 🤔
Soooooo honey is not extracted directly from the bees, so that would be an argument to declare honey vegan.
On the other hand, even with modern beekeeping tech and modular hives, one could argue the act of taking honey to be a serious intrusion on the bees’ life, so that could be an argument that honey is not vegan.
One could argue where the line lies with eusocial organisms. Do you consider the individual bees or do you consider the whole hive? Whole hive? Honey may not be vegan. Individual insects? Honey could be vegan.
It really depends on your standards. One vegan friend of mine does drink mead (honey wine, for the uninformed) for instance.
if it needs to be pollinated by bees or wasps, then it’s not vegan (insert troll emoji i guess)
I think that’s actually a very valid point. What level of involvement in producing the food makes it vegan or not vegan? If eating honey is unethical I would think so is eating food produced by the hard work of another person.
What level of involvement in producing the food makes it vegan or not vegan?
It’s about A) exploitation and B) harming the animal.
Pollination is done by all kinds of insects, but they are part of our ecosystem and happen to be pollinating the plants that we eat. We don’t breed them, we don’t kill them (pesticides, sure), we simply coexist.
Honey isn’t vegan because we breed the bees, take their food and often kill the entire hive because they get sick and cannot survive winter without their honey. It’s also not sustainable, because honey bees are being bred en masse and are pushing out native pollinators that are highly specialized in certain kinds of plants, causing them to go extinct.
Because you mentioned killing off entire hives because they’re sick, I was wondering about what a vegans ethical stance on culling would be and what, if any, situations culls might be acceptable from a vegans perspective.
For example, the beehive which has been infected. Bees don’t understand virology or social isolation or even the concept of “passing it on”. What do you do when a hive of infected bees breaks up and starts infecting other hives? Desieses can be devastating to local domesticated and wild swarms if left unchecked. Would a cull be acceptable in this situation to prevent more death and suffering?
How about in areas where humans have already tinkered with the food chain and wiped out all other apex predators? In some places, controlled culling of heards of deer is necessary to prevent them from overfeeding and wiping out other species further down the food chain and eventually themselves?
As I understand, most vegans would prefer the natural solutions such as reintroducing apex predators but that’s not always possible. Likewise, I don’t think most vegans would advocate for a dawinist solution to infected beehives.
I’m purely asking this from a point of genuine interest and not out of any desire to be proven right or wrong so please don’t take this as any attempt at point scoring.
I don’t think there’s the one vegan stance on culling, but I can try to give you my opinion.
If we are purely talking about the ethics, the question always comes off as somewhat disingenuous to me. The vast majority of culled animals are livestock, and those animals were bred to be killed anyways. Whether a chicken is killed after six weeks to try and contain the outbreak of some disease, or killed after six months when it reaches regular slaughter age is irrelevant, as I consider both deaths to be avoidable and therefore unjust (especially considering that a lot of the diseases that would warrant culling an entire population are only an issue because of the terrible conditions those animals are being held in in the first place).
If we are talking about bees specifically, I’d consider culling a hive infested with e.g. foulbrood to be the correct thing to do - but I also consider it wrong to keep bees in the first place. Not culling the hive will inevitably cause the infection to spread to the native population, that likely already is weakened and has trouble to compete with the bee keepers hives.
[…] controlled culling of herds of deer is necessary […]
There are lots of arguments about whether hunting is truly necessary and studies (e.g. [1]) showing that it might not be, but I’m not a scientist, don’t understand those studies anyway and there am therefore not really qualified to argue either way. My personal issue with hunting (or culling in general) is, that I don’t feel like it’s being done to protect the healthy animals and the surrounding ecosystem, but for personal or monetary gain.
A farmer doesn’t kill his H5N1 infested chickens because he is worried about the well-being of the native bird population, but because the chickens are now economically worthless and he is legally required to do so. The bee keeper similarly doesn’t care about the native insect population, he will burn his hives because it is the only way to get rid of foulbrood. Both will simply turn around after culling their animals, start a new flock/hive and keep going. And hunters aren’t biologists that are able to safely identify and exclusively shoot sick animals either. I suppose it depends on where you live, but if your average Joe is able to buy a hunting license and go kill animals with minimal training, you probably aren’t exactly creating a healthy ecosystem. Instead, you got a monetary incentive for the state to sell hunting licenses and a bunch of people shooting animals for meat, trophies or just for fun, which is then again morally questionable and might, according to the aforementioned studies, counterintuitively even lead to an increase in overall animal population. Trying to get native predators back into the area is then blocked by those same people, because the farmer is worried about a wolf eating his livestock (loosing him money) and the hunter wanting to shoot a wolf. The media™ then runs a campaign about the scary wolves eating your dog and attacking your children, politicians fold over and wolves are being shot at, destroying any chance of the ecosystem recovering on its own.
most vegans would prefer the natural solutions
I’d say most vegans would prefer if animal farming just got banned. Given that 80% of all agricultural land is used to feed and raise animals, a lot of our ecological issues are directly linked to the animal agricultural industry. Giving this insane amount of land back to nature and just leaving it alone would probably do wonders to the general state and resiliency of the ecosystem.
Given that 80% of all agricultural land is used to feed and raise animals
that’s not a given, though. about 93% of all soybeans are used by humans, but about 77% of the cropweight is fed to animals. how can this be reconciled? because we press about 85% of the soybeans for oil, and the byproduct is fed to animals. so we can’t say 77% of the land used to grow soybeans is used for animals. 93% is for humans. this myopic focus on distilling all facets of the industry into discrete datapoints fails to understand the system as a whole.
edit:
and it should come as no surprise that poore-nemecek has also infected this link as well.
Fair enough. The whole world changing their diet in a short time frame is a fictional scenario with many unknowns anyway. We might as well use some of the area and convert it from soy to palm oil or lower our overall food oil usage, if we are changing our diet anyway.
this myopic focus on distilling all facets of the industry into discrete datapoints fails to understand the system as a whole
My focus is more on the ethical side, trying to point out that the system as a whole is abusing and exploiting innocent beings for economical gain. That the way we feed ourselves has a huge ecological impact, however large it may be exactly, is more of a side note.
poore-nemecek has also infected this link as well
Care to elaborate?
Care to elaborate?
poore-nemecek is bad science that misused LCA data and drew wild conclusions by, as i said, myopically distilling disparate studies with disparate methodology into discrete datapoints. we cannot rely on this methodology to understand the industry.
I think the point was that many veggies are harvested by farm workers who may also be exploited. The concern about bee exploitation but not focusing on human exploitation is the rub.
The working class gets human rights, is able to unionize, go on strike and rise up against their oppressors.
Animals don’t. They just get fucked.
There is no ethical consumption, afterall. Pick the hill that works best for you, and die on it I suppose.
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Sounds like it’s not the honey it’s the production system, so honey from wild bees would be vegan. Okay.
No, because it comes from an animal. Honey can never be vegan.
Apparently there are conflicting standards.
Honey is an animal product and so is avoided by vegans. Bees produce honey for themselves, not for humans. They are often harmed in the honey gathering process. There are plenty of ways to protect insect populations, support crop pollination, conserve the environment and sweeten our food without farming bees or buying honey, propolis, beeswax or royal jelly. To replace honey in your diet, try golden or maple syrup, date syrup, agave nectar or even dried fruits. For more information read our page on the honey industry.
That’s fine, but this organization isn’t the same as saying “vegans” any more than the Catholic Church is the same as saying “Catholics”. The church disapproves of birth control, extramarital sex and a lot of other things Catholics commonly do. I’m sure there are endless debates about whether individual vegans are vegan enough.
fungi?
Honey can be vegan. I have a friend who keeps endangered bees and as an unintended side effect of fostering their growth has honey that she has to give away because she doesn’t want it
Genuine question, I would like to know if there is a reason. Why doesn’t she just let the bees keep it?
The bees make more than they need. They’ll keep filling up cells till there’s no room for larvae then swarm. That takes a while but in a meantime, the honey sitting there attracts pests and predators that can harm the colony.
And this is where I have problems with strict veganism. Animal husbandry can be ethical and beneficial to the species. Animals do produce excess nutrients that can be reused for other animals (culling chickens to feed carnivores for example) and some byproducts can benefit humans in a non exploitative manner.
The real issue is capitalism. Or the exploitation of others for personal benefits.
I believe it’s to encourage them to increase numbers, but I haven’t discussed that with her. She’s the type of nerd I know probably has a good reason so I never asked
Isn’t that vegetarian, not vegan though?
“It’s complicated”.
It’s the same category of dispute as the “eggs or milk can be vegan under certain circumstances” one. The argument is that rescued farm animals have been so warped by human intervention that it’s actively harmful for you to not use their produce - dairy cows can in rare cases die, and otherwise will just be miserable, if left unmilked. Chickens lay too many eggs, and leaving unf. chicken eggs in the coop can lead to the chickens learning to eat their own eggs, so you have to remove them. (I don’t hold a position on these claims, I’m just reporting what I see come up in the argument.) Bees fall into the same sort of category, they’ve been so selectively bred that they now produce far more honey than they can possibly use, so removing and eating some of it helps to mitigate the negative impact that humans have had on the creatures.
Regardless though: cows, chickens and bees are all still animals. I don’t think any vegans are gonna argue that one.
Seems like a weird thing though. A lot of domesticated animals can’t survive in the wild. And even the ones that can, it would only be in certain parts of the world, and they’d be an invasive species.
So do we want all of those animals to go extinct? If you eliminate all farm related activities with these animals, give them a place to live out the rest of their lives, but then what? But do you not allow them to breed? Or just let them all die off so they go extinct?
Or do you keep some of them in zoos? Given they’ve been bred to live on a farm, does that mean you have zoos that are identical to farms? And if you can get milk, eggs and honey from these animals if they’re technically living in zoo (which is exactly like a farm in every way) what’s been accomplished?
This is a very common argument and it’s a little shortsighted, because the answer is broadly “yes”. Reducing the number of cows/chickens/etc in the world is a net positive, and would only require us to stop force breeding them like it’s some kind of degenerate poultry hentai. Allowing the species to reduce in population is only of benefit to the species (cough humans cough) and is overall desirable. Keeping some in zoos would be fine, maintaining the native wild populations is also a good plan, small scale farms (“family” or “hobby”) farms where they don’t brutalize the animals is also a feature of most vegan utopias. Take india, where most of the population is vegan: there are still cows on farms, cow-derived produce is still available, it’s just the cows aren’t kept in American-style stock farms.
YMMV, and like any ideology there are other opinions with equally valid outlooks, this is just what I see most often. (full disclosure, I am not a vegan (there’s plenty of evidence to that in my post history), I just sleep with a lot of vegans and quite like chana masala)
(There’s also a pretty… sane… subgroup that proposes ‘corrective breeding’; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their ‘natural’ state. “Contentious” is probably the best description.)
Most indian population is definitely not vegan. there have been various surveys that show the percentage of the vegetarian population is between 23% and 37%. That means 63% to 77% are non-vegetarian. It’s a myth, a big one, that India is mainly a vegetarian country.
Not even the majority of Indians are vegetarians, much less vegans.
Very poor word choice on my part, I will freely admit that. The veg population of inda in is roughly larger than the entire US population, which is the much more useful statistic. I’m also aware that the vast majority of people who eat a vegan diet do so for economic reasons. Sorry about that.
Many Indians I’ve worked with are sort of semi-vegetarian, eating meat but only on certain days. I think that’s specific religious doctrine rather than a general attitude about animals - like Catholics eating fish on Friday.
Degenerate poultry hentai
Excuse me sir/madam, but I’d request that you respect the preferred literary sub-genre of some without resorting to terms such as “degenerate”. Poultry Hentai may not be overly popular and only have a niche following, but it truly is an art form in and of itself. Whether it’s “2 hens, 1 cob” or the better-known “Lady Chookerlee’s Lover” it truly does represent a formidable contribution to the art.
Don’t even get me started on Bawk-kake…
Damn. That’s a good one!
I cherish you.
But probably from a distance. Chickeboos aren’t the best for, you know, close-up cherishing.
You know why.
There’s also a pretty… sane… subgroup that proposes ‘corrective breeding’; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their ‘natural’ state
Yeah I feel like that is just forcing animals to live in the way humans want them to live under a weird assumption that we know what they want.
I could live out in the wild if I really wanted to, but I don’t because living in a heated home, having access to healthcare, and having a grocery store nearby is way better than starving to death, getting frostbite, dying of a disease, or getting eaten by wolves. I don’t know how an animal wants to live their lives, so who knows, maybe they’d rather die of disease over being poked by a few needles by a veterinarian, starving because there’s no mangers filled by humans, or getting eaten alive by a pack of wolves. Maybe animals want that, but there’s no way of knowing and it’s a really weird thing to assume given humans don’t want to live that way. We live happy an fulfilling lives without having to constantly worry about being eaten by wolves, why would that be a requirement for an animal to be happy?
I think people see nature from a Disney cartoon perspective where the only danger is a human hunter. But the reality is nature is extremely brutal.
I don’t think a perfect ethical solution to domesticated animals really exists. Best we can do is just treat animals better. If they seem like they’re happy enough, then that’s probably alright.
Indian economics and laws regarding dairy produce their own sort of hell. If the unwanted non producing animals aren’t smuggled across the border for slaughter, they’re abandoned and left to starve due to laws about culling. Nobody’s really feeding unproductive animals except for the goshalas and there’s nowhere near enough of those for India’s dairy cattle production.
Yeahhhh… I was drunk and I probably could have thought that example through better. My apologies.
The response I’ve heard for that one is that domesticated animals are dependent on us because we’ve bred their survival capabilities out of them. People originally just captured wild animals and put a fence around them. Selectively breeding only the more docile ones has turned them into something they wouldn’t have been without our interference. To me that part makes sense, but the present reality is still what it is, and what you’re saying is still true.
Playing devil’s advocate, this could be sidestepping the issue, because the honey is only an unintended side effect from your friend’s POV, not the bee’s.
So, if they were endangered cows and your friend didn’t like milk, the milk would be vegan…?
Well veganism is about reducing suffering. If the cows didnt suffer to produce that milk, like no forced insemination, calfs aren’t separated from their mother, male calfs aren’t slaughtered, the cows don’t have unnaturally large udders, you only take the over production and not steal the food from the calf and the cows live a good life then you could argue that the milk is vegan. But milk is not produced like that so milk is not vegan.
I appeal to the Director of Veganism!
How is there 4 posts but one reply? Who said something first, the “bees, not animals” thing?
Well since we’re constantly digesting our own dead microfauna, I’d say that it’s literally impossible to be fully vegan, so they might as well stop trying and spare us their obnoxious bullshit.
excuse me I need to eat meat in front of vegans again.
Any that’s the hypocrisy of Vegans. Milk and honey are the only two animal-based food sources that don’t involve the killing of animals. And in the case of most cow breeds, milking is actually needed as they have been bred to produce far more milk than their calves drink. And with careful management of the hive, you can harvest a lot of honey from a mature hive without negatively affecting the hive itself - it just delays/defers new queen production and swarming, which is desirable anyhow - no beekeeper who has hives primarily for crop pollination wants to have hives swarming each and every year.
I want to learn Latin. I need better time management and less distration.
The whole “Vegans against Honey” thing is so stupid… like… brah, Bees are the one critter that has already unionized.
Not like there’s much sense to begin with in a diet where you need a thousand supplements in order to not go insane from a Vitamin B-12 Deficiency and start blaming Carnist Voodoo for your Anemia… Ya know instead of going “Oh wait, I was getting my iron from chicken…”
Edit: On that note, I actually do need to take Iron for a defiency, this post reminded me… Not a vegan though.
