The article touches on this, but veganism is not about only eating plants - it's actually an ethical decision to avoid anything that harms animals. As such, figs are definitely vegan since the wasp is living its natural lifecycle.
Well, producing honey is also very much part of the bee’s natural cycle, as is laying eggs for the hen and unfertilised eggs don’t suffer. Of course commercial animal husbandry causes endless suffering, but most vegans would probably object even to naturally produced honey and eggs. Just saying.
bees and hens don't produce "naturally" food for humans, they have their own use of honey and eggs
[addendum to people answering "bees don't produce for bears either" or "plants don't produce food for humans either" : that's a strawman, I merely commented the term "naturally produced honey and eggs"]
Bees don’t survive in the wild where I am in New Zealand and there is no way they can eat all the honey they make, which is an average of 65kg more than they use, per hive.
If they swarm, the swarms will die from varroa.
Having the honey there weakens their hive as it’s too large an area to warm during winter. What’s the ethical thing to do?
The ethical thing is to halt the husbandry of farmed animals and let the bees die out naturally, so there is no longer a source of honey (except for that delicious beech honeydew, but I don't know if those insects can be farmed).
> The ethical thing is to halt the husbandry of farmed animals and let the bees die out naturally
What is it that makes the "natural order of things" better? Aside from our fantasies about not being animals, aren't humans part of the natural order, by definition? It seems like a deforested barren world would be more moral under this sort of reasoning?
I don't particularly agreed with the parent, but the honey bees in most places in the world are non-native species that are introduced to produce honey and pollinate large fields, orchards, etc. For example in the American Midwest we have European honeybees everywhere, and they displace native pollinators (bumble bees, native butterflies and skips, etc). All told it's not a big deal but I can see an argument for removing them where they aren't native.
I don't know the details of honey in NZ but I can imagine it's similar to cows overproducing (and endangering themselves with) milk: they have been bred to do that
My queens pick their mates and so do most - open mating is standard as artificial insemination is hard with bees. Bees are bred for certain traits but it’s a long way from the levels seen in diary for many reasons.
A beekeeper can interfere, and often does if a colony is defensive or has poor brood. Productivity is harder to measure as the situation in a given hive can be markedly different across an apiary. Queen age, disease burden, hive site, equipment differences etc.
Most the control comes from killing the bad and reproducing from the good (and then hoping the queen finds good drones, avoids birds and finds her way home).
But neither do plants produce "naturally" food for humans. The produce it to reproduce and make the fruit delicios so animals eat it and transport the seed somewhere else to spread. Humans are very bad in spreading plants by means of eating and deposing the seed.
Plants that humans eat are literally some of the most widespread plants in the face of the Earth. Apples, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, soy, and rice are all massive successes for the plants in spreading, that doesn't even get into sugar producing plants. This started as humans eating and distributing seeds. Farming just made this process not need to involve eating. It's not just about delicious either. We eat some bitter and spoiled (butter, beer) foods for nutritional value.
Are chickens not the most wide spread birds? Sheep and cows the most widespread 'large' animals.
Even rats are doing as well as they are because of humans.
Yes I suppose you can reduce the meaning of life to successfully creating the next generation, that applies equally to humans and amoeba, but I would contend its too reductive.
The thing is, the plants that exist naturally in the wilderness are not particular tasty, delicious, or even produce apreciable sized fruits/crops.
Almost all that you are eating are plants, taken from the wilderness tens of thousands of years ago, and genetically selected over hundreds of generations.
If you went back to eating the plants in the state they exist naturally in the wilderness, you would have a very hard time feeding yourself.
I think the vegetarian argument is that while hunting may be natural for a lot of animals, including us, we have the possibility not to do it, so we should.
I don’t really agree, but it’s a reasonable stance.
Most vegans I've spoken to believe that hunting is okay. If you have the callousness of killing a baby dear, then you 'deserve' to eat it. The problem comes from how modern meat is produced - in massive factories which provide just enough conditions for the 'meat' to get produced. Animal wellbeing is nowhere near the list of priorities.
Mark my words. Two hundred years from now, if there will anything left of this planet, we will be seen as retarded barbarians for what we are doing now to the animals and environment.
Actually many plants “manipulate” animals or insects to do their bidding through their produce. Many (all?) flowers exist to attract bees or birds to carry their pollen to other plants. Some even paste their pollen onto bees after trapping them into a sticky fluid. Fruit of course transmit seeds for plants. Those plants being cultivated in farms may not often have their seeds directly planted for the next generation, but their species is definitely assured to continue by their humans.
Vegan ethics are not based on the innate ethics of animals. It aspires to make the most of our human judgement and adaptability/invention, which few if any animals posses similar power to recognize and realize ideas and effects.
The poet Percy Shelley wrote most idealistically but also intelligently about vegetarianism, this small section of a poem contrasts a human caretakers attention to the behavior of wild animals:
She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,--
In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
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.
"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)
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?
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."
>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).
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)
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.
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.
>> 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:
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".
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.
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
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."
Veganism is seen as a label, but it's actually not a binary trait, it's a spectrum at the very least. What I mean is that there are vegans who would never eat meat under any circumstances, ever. There are vegans who would eat eggs if they know that the chickens laying them are living healthy lives. There are vegans who would also eat meat under some circumstances, but ultimately these things matter very little in the grand scheme of things because, again, it's not black or white.
Most vegans are vegans because they are compassionate and caring people. They see cows as friends, not as a steak machine. Therefore, your argument is, honestly, irrelevant. It's simply a non-starter for most vegans, the same way as you would not eat a dead dog.
Carnist, I believe, is a term used by vegans to refer to those who support ideologically that it is acceptable to use animals for food, rather than someone who eats meat. There are people who do not eat meat, for religious or cultural reasons, and those are generally referred to a vegans, in the same way there are those who eat meat for cultural reasons (my father did it, his father did it, I've never really thought about it) rather than supporting some ideology. For vegans to label meat eaters (more accurately omnivores) as carnist, their ideological/political opponents is, well, not really offensive, but it does rankle.
As social psychologists say, there is no in-group cohesion without out-group hostility, but it is a shame for vegans (for which I have some sympathy) to isolate themselves in this manner, particularly if they want to change the world for the better.
Visit arid Africa: eating an animal before it was /used properly/ (could be as simple as fertilizing the land here in southern Morocco) is considered wasteful.
I wouldn't know about Africa. But I know a thing or two about keeping animals at the edge of the arctic.
If you butcher when the animals are old, you have quite a bit lower risk of losing the meat due to disease, because old animals fall ill more than young ones.
If you butcher, you have some control over the timing, which helps with using the food. You don't have perfect control, but more than random, and you reduce the risk of having to throw anything away.
So if you use the animals both live and dead, it makes sense to optimise for keeping them alive long and die while still healthy (healthy enough to eat/use, if you want to be cynic).
Does my car stop working because its old? Strictly speaking no, there will be a cause of failure, in practice everything wears out, age has increased the chances of things wearing out, so after a certain point age becomes a 'good enough' reason.
I suppose if you want to be pedantic, a common failure mode isn't actually 'correct'. A heart attack isn't the cause of death, its oxygen starvation, so I'm not sure more 'correct' equals more useful.
Cows are manipulated to produce much much more milk than they would naturally. Also the machnines doing the work are harsh and painful. But even when it is from a farmer doing everything by hand on a really happy cow. Being vegan means in the first place avoiding everything produced by or out of animals. The rule "It must not harm any animal to be vegan" is an additional rule for products which are not made by or out of animals.
Standard super market milk violates both rules.
Source: A friend of mine is vegan since almost 20 years (before it was hyped).
Animals only produce milk for their young. In order for humans to take that milk humans forcibly impregnate the animal then kill its young shortly after birth - never giving it any of its mothers milk. That’s why all dairy is not vegan.
Milking a cow requires that you keep the animal producing milk which means numerous pregnancies that produce either another dairy cow that has been born into milk slavery or a meat cow destined for the slaughter house after fattening. I'm not sure where people get the idea that milking hurts the cow as it doesn't. The machines are automated and some are ones the cows voluntarily enter for milking. If the cows don't milk regularly it can be painful for them.