Before tractors, almost the entire food chain involved animal slavery, since farms used draft animals. For that matter, even transportation was based on animal slavery (horses). Many of the sustainable and high performance fabrics like wool, silk, and leather are now replaced by synthetic fossil-derived plastics. But petroleum is also an animal product.
To be vegan, is to choose fossilized animal products and services over fresh.
there is a lot of weird things about what you’re saying, but for one:
the same amount or more petroleum would be spend on cultivating food for the to-be-slaughtered animals and transporting the meat around.
I’m not a vegan (anymore), but veganism is still the lesser evil here
I always wonder how many people who think eating meat is murder, evil, etc. have actually watched animals die in the wild. If I had to choose between getting knocked out with a stunner or being chased down by a predator, struggling and screaming while being torn apart by teeth and claws until finally losing consciousness from blood loss and pain - which is how wild animals tend to die - I would absolutely pick the slaughterhouse any time. From that standpoint alone I would absolutely call eating meat the lesser evil.
Of course death is only one dimension - many domestic animals live in terrible conditions - but mistreatment isn’t necessary for vegans to condemn using animal products. Even eating honey is frowned on, simply because bees are animals. I don’t think that simple flat rule takes enough information into account.
My issue pertains more to forcibly breeding animals into existence for the sole purpose of exploiting them, and also the often terrible conditions they are kept in. I consider hunting and fishing to be more ethical than industrial animal ag, so long as it is done in a responsible manner (yes, I know this is subjective).
Nature is brutal, but industrial animal ag has absolutely heinous abuses.
I would choose dying in the wilderness. A few solid years in freedom and then a potentially horrid death sounds like a much better deal to me than a few weeks/months in purgatory before a less horrid death.
I am writing “purgatory”, because at this point, I do assume that mistreatment is involved.
Ultimately, I just find that simple rule …simpler.
Is it a capitalistic thing with animals involved? Then the default assumption should be that the animals get mistreated, because treating animals well doesn’t generally pay out.
I just don’t care enough about honey to get into the gritty details of whether this doesn’t involve animal mistreatment.
I would also bet a lot of money that it does involve questionable treatment at some point. For example, I’ve heard that beekeepers get live honeybees in the mail, and not in some fancy transport box.
But you’ve got other moral aspects, too, like honeybees killing local ecosystems by taking food away from better pollinators.
I could think about all that and try to work out the exact details of when eating honey is coolio, or I could just not bother.
I don’t need a perfect moral framework, I just want to steer clear from immoral shit.
The problem with factory farming isn’t the end of the animal’s life, it’s everything that comes before then. Factory animals live absolutely miserable existences.
Not talking about eating meat, that’s vegetarianism. Many animals eat grass or waste products, like chickens and pigs.
Veganism as a rejection of all animal products and services, is a full embrace of petroleum.
But petroleum isn’t just plants, it also includes organic matter from animal corpses. Think before you say these things, Mitch.
Why?
It’s a shower thought not a thesis.
Vegans reject wool and feathers because of animal servitude. The alternative is synthetic polyester fiber.
Vegans reject draft animals and horse riding in favor of internal combustion.
Vegans reject natural local animal trans fats for coconut and palm oil shipped around the world by burning oil, and sometimes harvested by monkey slaves anyway.
bruh
True story bro
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/19/448960760/monkeys-pick-coconuts-in-thailand-are-they-abused-or-working-animals
In SE Asia, you can find fruit or coconut vendors that you give the money to and then they send a monkey up to pick whatever off the tree for you.
I don’t know how well compensated or how well treated the monkey is, but I would hope the monkey feels it has a cushy life.
LOL yes, even from here you can still smell the reddit. Say the sky is blue and somebody will object because it’s not always, and maybe even go down a rabbit hole because the sky includes outer space, which is black, and also glowing stars of many colors. And ur mom!