Humans are physiologically omnivores. Not herbivores. Not frugivores. We evolved with cooking and tool use allowing us to not have to use teeth and claws, but we are omnivores.
Dogs and cats should not be vegan. Not even if they can technically “survive”.
Farmers can love their animals and eat them. Anyone can love animals and eat them. People are complex, their perspectives are complex, their feelings are complex. Eating meat does not mean someone is void of compassion. If you go around claiming this you’re wrong. Every time I see this I roll my eyes and stop listening because I absolutely love my cows.
Exposè videos and animal rights websites are not reputable sources. They’re highly manipulative, often staged, and they severely anthromorphosize animals. Many of their points are false. Things are never that bad or dramatic. The most reputable sources are from actual scientific studies, vets, and people in the field. Not everyone involved with farm animals professionally is a liar.
Cowspiracy is false. Only 9% of US ghg emissions come from agriculture, and the majority of those emissions are from nitrous oxide from fertilizers for plants. I think 18% is from livestock. Sustainable animal agriculture is both possible and necessary. Around the world energy is the worst culprit. Agriculture apparently accounts for 24% including deforestation, crops, and animals but not including carbon sequestering.
Animals are not cognitively the same as people. They do not need to be treated the same.
Most farmers aren’t breaking even let alone making a profit and have to work outside the farm. They do the work because they enjoy it.
Animals are fed mostly leftovers from the biofuel and food industries. Many of the crops grown for them are the crops grown for you. They aren’t stealing feed from people’s mouths. The environmental harm caused by plant ag is on you too, and in some situations it’s more harmful than animal ag.
becoming vegan because factory farming is unethical is like deciding that since walmart and amazon mistreat their employees you are now going to get everything you need out of dumpsters
in a nutshell, instead of reforming the bad parts of your society, you
try to opt out of it in a way that has really no effect, and wouldn’t
work at all if the majority of people weren’t still part of the industry
you dislike.
there was, for a while, a real movement of people who tried to get everything out of dumpsters, as a way of opting out of capitalism. but the problem was that you couldn’t get what you need when you need it, leading to you being kind of a drain on your community, and someone had to buy that stuff in the first place for it to end up in that dumpster anyway. it was Fundamentally Silly.
going vegan to opt out of farming practices has similar problems. for instance: you (hypothetical vegan you) won’t buy honey, but the bees are being used to fertilize the vegetables and fruit you eat, they’re making the honey anyway, all you’ve done is – well, nothing, because you’re not a big enough demographic to make an impact, but even if you were, honey sales are a much smaller part of beekeepers’ income than crop pollination. and beekeeping is not a big faceless corporate interest. it’s not monsanto. it’s a bunch of single-family or partnership business with a truck or two and a couple hundred hives. the bees make honey after a pollinating run, and the beekeepers sell it for a little extra income. if you made a dent in that, you’d be achieving nothing but making joe beekeeper buy his kids’ t-shirts at k-mart instead of target.
animal farming and plant farming are deeply interconnected. plant farmers grow animal feed; animal farmers sell manure for fertilizer. most non-corporate farmers raise both plants and animals. it’s more economic and gives them more resilience.
if you were a big enough demographic to hit ‘the farming industry’ in its wallet. you would be making things MUCH harder for small farmers than for factory farms. you would be making it easier and easier for factory farms to crowd family farmers out of business. so that’s pretty much achieving the opposite of what you want, right there.
and then there’s the fact that plant farming is just as rife with gruesome factory farm conditions as animal farming, but it’s humans who are exploited in those. i’m not going to level accusations of racism here, but it really is unfortunate how little the vocal internet vegan contingent seems to know or care about the exploitation of the mostly nonwhite workers in the industry. it makes y’all look racist, whether you are or not.
look, i keep saying this, even though folks never seem to hear me: i don’t hate vegans, i’m not trying to stop you being vegan, i do not care what you eat.
my problem is with defensive internet vegans trying to promote their dietary restriction lifestyle as a solution to problems in the real world. it is not. it may create more problems than it solves, or maybe it breaks even, i don’t know. it certainly doesn’t solve anything that can’t be solved just as well without it. it can only look reasonable from a perspective of deep ignorance about where food comes from and how the farm economy works. you basically have to be young, urban, and somewhat privileged to embrace it. and it is, fundamentally, very silly.
Furthermore I’d like you to look at a sheep farm. Actually look at it.
You CANNOT grow crops there. That’s WHY there are sheep on it.
You refuse to use wool, well aside from.the fact that it’s a fantastic fiber and how polluting polyester and other plastic fibers are, it doesn’t harm the animal to remove and in fact is done for their benefit.
Above – a sheep farm (note steep and craggy hills), an uncompressed bale of freshly shorn wool and some sheep being shorn.
It’s not stressful for the sheep. Sheep are dumb. Be confident, dont hurt them and they’re good. Wool is a good fiber – strong, warm – even when wet – renewable and biodegradable.
My issue with Veganism-As-A-Cult is the lack of critical thinking. By all means eat what you want, wear what you want to wear but a blanket ban on all animal products because they’re HARMFUL is in itself an extremely harmful philosophy.
Do you refuse to eat plants that were pollinated by bees or fertilized by manure since they’re a product of animal labour?
Honey doesn’t hurt bees. Wool doesn’t hurt sheep.
What about animals that are going to die anyway? We are currently in the process of exterminating possums in our country as they are a pest and destroyer of our native species. We kill them humanely but they’re still going to die because its them (introduced pest) or our endemic endangered species. We use the meat for pet food and the fur for a lot of things now – in making yarns or fur items – because the alternative is to let it rot. Which is just bloody wasteful tbh.
What would (generic) you prefer we do here? Let sheep die of over heating or the weight of wet wool? Force bees into swarming (90% casualty rate) so we can avoid taking their honey? Leave pest animals to rot and encourage the use of set-and-forget traps since there’s no incentive to check them?
What’s the humane option?
see: why I hate militant veganism
Veganism, as I have encountered it, tends to be a thing that morally smug white people try to spring on others as a quick fix solution for the world, and I resent it more every day.
As a vegetarian who used to be a vegan and probably will be again in the future, yes. Any individual change you make is, well, sort of futile. If we really want to make a difference, we have to start discriminating between animal agriculture businesses so as not to ruin the small ones (which are generally more ethical) and get organized and target the big industrialized corporations. Veganism in itself is not a solution. It’s a personal lifestyle; no more, no less. The power is not in the person, it’s in the union.
You could not milk the cow if you just?? Let it’s baby cow feed like it’s supposed to.
If you take away the bby then obviously you have to milk it but if you aren’t needlessly removing the bby I don’t see the problem.
Plus milk is way too many calories and makes you fat. It’s not meant for humans.
expect you can’t just “not milk” a cow. It literally needs to be milked. Cows that aren’t milk can suffer infections (mastitis), pain and discomfort.
And there’s many reasons for removing a calf from it’s mother.
And milk has only 42 calories per 100 grams. So no it doesn’t have “too many calories” or does it “make you fat” and being fat ≠ unhealthy.
You shouldn’t comment on things you obvious have no idea about. You’re spreading ignorant misinformation and it makes you look like an idiot to boot.
Me again, I’m sorry for reblogging again, my responses are just too long for the repy button.
Dairy cows produce too much milk for calves, so regardless of calves suckling we would have to milk the cows or they would get engorged, and after a day if being engorged the baby would actually not even be able to suckle due to the swelling of the udder.
Calves are actually not taken away at birth, they are allowed to nurse and live with their mom for the first few days. Then they are seperated into calf hutches/rooms where they live with the other calves. They get fed formula every day and most farmers/farm hands are nice and give them pets so it’s not like they’re starved for affection. They can just look across the partition and chat with other calves.
Calves are also very rough. As someone who has scars on her hand from calves just a few weeks old trying to suckle on them, let me tell you how rough they are. Calves headbutt, chew, tear, and rip the cow’s udders very frequently. Udders are not as strong as most mammals teats after years of domestication, so they are fragile. Calves only have bottom teeth, as the top is just hard gums, but those teeth are razor sharp. My hand was in a calves mouth for 20 seconds before I was bleeding, because he wanted his formula right now. You can tell when a calf has been left with a cow by looking at the udder, which will be scarred and knotted. Sometimes the nipples will be so scarred that no milk can come out, leaving problems for infection and engorgement the next cycle. When the cows get sick of being hurt, they kick the baby in the head to make it stop, which is dangerous to the poor calf.
Leave the baby with mom sounds good in theory, but dairy cattle have been specialized and raised this way for a very long time. That means that natural methods can sometimes hurt them, and it is our job to protect them. Nature is harsh and lots of animals die and suffer. Our goal is to keep animals safe and alive even if it’s for the purpose of consuming them and their by products later.
As something studying zoology on an agricultural college campus I can tell you now that that is completely false.
Anyone that understands biodiversity would know that there’s no one major driver of loss to biodiversity, let alone one that causes up to 60% of all loss. How would you even accurately measure that in the first place, it’s all very questionable.
Biodiversity loss is a combination of multiple, interacting causes. The main causes being; habitat change, climate change, invasive species, over-exploitation, and pollution.
In fact meat production isn’t even the worse agricultural process in terms of effect on environment or biodiversity. Palm oil production is much worse.
Not to mention vegans / other people that claim ‘meat based diets’ are the main cause of environmental issues (biodiversity, pollution, deforestation, ect.) never make the distinction that all the negative effects from meat production is actually statistics for beef cattle.
It’s not “meat-based diets” that are the issue (no matter how much they want to push that agenda) it’s cattle, which are currently unsustainability produced; due to the pollution they produce, area and time they take to raise. The solution to this is to push for alternative sources of meat that are more sustainable.
It’s a classic example of pushing a vegan / anti-meat agenda through twisting facts.
IN AGRICULTURALRESEARCH, it’s been understood for some
time that many of our most important foods have been getting less
nutritious. Measurements of fruits and vegetables show that their
minerals, vitamin and protein content has measurably dropped over the
past 50 to 70 years. Researchers have generally assumed the reason is
fairly straightforward: We’ve been breeding and choosing crops for
higher yields, rather than nutrition, and higher-yielding crops—whether
broccoli, tomatoes, or wheat—tend to be less nutrient-packed.
In
2004, a landmark study of fruits and vegetables found that everything
from protein to calcium, iron and vitamin C had declined significantly
across most garden crops since 1950. The researchers concluded this
could mostly be explained by the varieties we were choosing to grow.
Loladze and a handful of other scientists have come to
suspect that’s not the whole story and that the atmosphere itself may be
changing the food we eat. Plants need carbon dioxide to live the same
way humans need oxygen. And in the increasingly polarized debate about
climate science, one thing that isn’t up for debate is that the level of
CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. Before the industrial
revolution, the earth’s atmosphere had about 280 parts per million of
carbon dioxide. Last year, the planet crossed over the 400 parts per
million threshold; scientists predict we will likely reach 550 parts per
million within the next half-century—essentially twice the amount that
was in the air when Americans started farming with tractors.
Asked what people could do “as a consumer” to try to avoid contributing to such problems, Prof Patel said people needed to think on a bigger scale.
“‘As a consumer’ you are only allowing yourself a range of action. ‘As a consumer’ you can buy something that’s local and sustainable, that’s labelled as organic or fair trade,” he said.
“But ‘as a consumer’, you don’t get to do a whole lot of good. As a citizen, as a decent person, you can demand more from your government, from one’s employer, from yourself.
“Be more aware of your power as part of a society where we can change things. We have this power to change things in the future. What we have to do is make that change.”
He said some people thought being a vegetarian avoided contributing to the extinction crisis.
“I’m vegetarian but it’s not enough. If you are vegetarian and you walk around with your halo of virtue but you are eating tofu that comes from Brazilian soy, then you’re just as complicit in all of this as if you are eating the beef fed on Brazilian soy,” Prof Patel said.
Vegetarianism did not provide a “pure and simple” route out of the problem.
“Capitalism is involved. The capitalist will take your vegetarianism and make money from it with the same kind of techniques they’ve honed in meat manufacture,” he said.
Instead, Prof Patel argued it was time to switch to a world in which resources were shared and looked after, harking back to the days when people had access to common land.
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