Why Veganism is a Lie
I am personally a big supporter of animal rights and am somewhere between eating vegetables and the parts of animals that are a unwanted byproduct of the large scale meat production.
But lies have to be exposed so we can all make more rational decisions and the currently rising trend of veganism is build on such a lie.
Are avocados vegan?
I started thinking more about this topic after hearing that avocados are no longer considered vegan because bees are exploited to pollinate them. Opposed to most vegetables that are farmed with stationary beehives, Californian avocados are farmed using moving beehives on trucks that are transported around the country. As a consequence these bees are no longer free and are being exploited link.
While the above argument is valid, it takes a very biased point of view. The harm done to the bees is real, lots of bees will not be able to find the hive, get lost and die. But that is nothing special compared to the ordinary farming of any vegetable.
All industrially farmed vegetables use pesticides, including the ones labeled as bio. In order to produce regular corn as an example, many bugs will be killed. Mice living in the field will be left to starve after harvest. Compared to this mass murder the issue of some bees being harmed in the production of avocados seems like a joke, only taken serious because everyone loves bees while bugs are not particularly liked.
The story of the dying bee is everywhere. But remember back in the days, when driving on the highway the windshield was full of smashed bugs. Now there are almost no insects left. Industrial farming has reduced the insect populations massively and caused a huge extinction.
Natures Unavoidable Principles
Living implies killing, there is no way around that. If we accept that all animals have a certain set of rights, then we immediately discover a fundamental conflict of interests. We need food to survive and by doing this we are violating the rights of other animals. And this does not only apply to us, it also applies to the chicken we want to eat that itself feeds on worms and insects.
I am not aware of a universal solution to this dilemma, but at least everyone can try to minimise the harm caused by their own existence. And the answer does not seem to be veganism, but instead returning to a less industrial farming system. If you can grow some plants in your garden that is perfect. The only animals harmed are the ones that have settled next to the plants expecting to be able to feed of them, that will starve after your harvest. If you also have some chickens in your garden that is also fine. A natural balance is reached where the chickens eat the insects that want to feed on your vegetables, that were already doomed to die. In the end you have your vegetables and a few eggs and a chicken.
Rejecting avocados to save the bees is a bad joke. We should really reject avocados due the unnatural industrial farming that is used to produce them, that is causing massive damage to animals and the environment. In contrast, the horror of any vegan, is going to the woods and hunting a wild boar. But looking a bit deeper, that seems much more animal friendly than eating avocados from a far away part of the world that were farmed in huge chemically controlled monocultures.
It seems that instead of worrying about veganism we achieve much better results by looking for locally sourced produce that is farmed by smaller scale operations and avoiding chemical additives.
As the proud new owner of both an avocado tree and a few chickens, this article certainly resonates with me. What about oysters?
that sounds amazing! My current garden is too small and I have only some vegetables and fruits. Still very nice to grow your own food.
I live to far from the sea to have any qualified opinion on oysters :)
Are you eating a plant/fungus/bacteria or an animal? It's pretty simple. Insects pollinate many plants. Breeding them to do it is indeed different. But that doesn't change the fact that what is being eaten is a plant. You carnists like to use any ridiculous argument to justify your current behavior and deny the moral concern for animals when you don't need to be eating them and taking their lives.
I know carnism quite well and dont think I am using any carnist arguments. Of course it is better to eat factory corn than eating a factory pig fed by factory corn. It is also better to eat homegrown corn than a homegrown pig fed by homegrown corn.
My criticism is more that many vegans tends to forget the horrors of industrial vegetable production. In fact almost nothing you can buy in a supermarket has not caused animal death. But most are not ready to give up supermarket food completely and are looking for options that will reduce animal suffering. What should such a person do? If you treat mammals as inherently more valuable then veganism may be the answer.
But when each living being is seen as having the same rights, it is overall more beneficial to go into the direction of natural farming than into the direction of industrial but meet-free farming.
Of course the optimal solution might be to go all vegetable and non-industrial, but that seems to be more of a long term goal.
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It's hardly a ridiculous argument. If I drink milk I'm not drinking an animal so if your logic is "you're not directly consuming an animal its okay" then I'm a vegan?
Just because you aren't consuming something that was once alive doesn't mean you aren't causing death.
There is no need to justify eating meat, it's completely natural part of life. The unnatural way we farm animals is where the cruelty lies, not in the eating of meat.
LOL! You are using one of the Three carnistic (FALSE) justification defense: These myths are expressed largely through the Three Ns of Justification: eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary
(Source: Melanie Joy PhD)
Just because you give it a catchy name doesn't mean it isn't a relevant justification, aside from that there's no need to justify it. Does a bear justify eating a salmon? does a snake justify eating a mouse? Does a crocodile justify eating a deer? no because it doesn't need to be justified, its just something that IS. no other species on earth has a moral compass no other beast feels bad or even considers what it's doing.
Do you think a cat needs to justify eating meat or is it just part of it's life?
same thing here, before we even thought about it we ate meat. Now that we have evolved to have more complex feelings like guilt it's a problem.
Also your PHD friend has a strange sense of what suffering is, it seems to Melanie that death in and of itself is suffering. If this is true would you consider a man that dies in his sleep as having suffered?
In fact her next line in the article backs up my point that its the lifelong en-slavery and farming practices that are the real issue not the actual consumption of meat.
We don't want to see animals suffer, and yet, we kill them, and then eat them. Taking part in a brutal and oppressive system, humans have become unaware of the contradictory nature of such irrational practices.
If eating meat isn't natural then nor is any of the omnivores or carnivores that walk this earth.
also the point still stands that we kill many many animals to produce your vegan diet
I often have a similiar moral debate. I feel guilty when I eat meat or animal products from supermarkets etc, I oppose live export and so many other aspects of animal rights but when it comes to veganism I can't convince myself it's all that much more harm free than a man who goes and kills a deer that feeds him for a month.
I have no issue with hunting so long as it's done in the least harmful way to the animal involved. Unnecessary suffering is something I see all too often when animals come into my shelter that have been shot in the stomach or mauled by a dog and then left to die slowly.
I have been thinking about creating an animal curation program for Steemit and saw your post in the new section, I quite like it and It's helped motivate me to actually create a curation account so thank you. Upvoted and resteemed.
Are they exploiting bees?
When a bee colony can go to sleep in one area that has been picked clean, and wake up in another area that has just started blooming... is that exploitation?
Have vegans given up Pecans too? for the same reason.
Thanks to those "bee exploiters" we still have bees. They responded to the huge bee die offs by dividing hives. And trucking their bees to places that were safe for the bees.
And what vegans/vegetarians miss is that cows exist because we eat them. If we stopped eating them they would disappear. Just like many species before them. Nature is that way.
The happy world of cows leading a carefree retirement life doesn't exist.
I agree with the fact that it's waytoo extreme for people not to eat avocados because of the bees, and that there maybe collateral damage due to pesticides.
But saying that veganism is a lie maybe goes a bit far. I would personally say that whatever you can do to minimize harm to animals (and vegans still do the best they can) is better than not doing anything or eating animals from small farms. No matter how small the farm, you are still killing an innocent being.
So is it possible to be 100% vegan? Probably not for the reasons you mentioned. But is veganism still better than not doing anything? For the sake of the animals I believe so, and hopefully some time in the future more people will resort o having their own chickens and eggs to rely less on industrial farming, but hopefully they will also not need to eat these chickens or steak =).
PS; I'm totally cool with eating eggs from "happy chickens"...
thanks for your comment.
I am mostly vegan myself, but after realising the huge insect problem (that goes far beyond migrating bee hives) and will likely have drastic consequences in the future, I think supporting a local and pesticide-free production is very important. The number of wild insects has decreased drastically and I dont think anyone knows what the long term consequences of our new chemically enhanced industrial farming will be.
But one does not need to choose. One can be vegan and eat local reasonably farmed vegetables. But in doubt I nowadays think that supporting natural farming is more important than supporting veganism and sadly the public trend goes to mass-produced vegan products. Still better than mass produced meat, but I think simply not enough.
yeah you're right, but I think both (being vegan and being against industrial farmers) are not mutually exclusive. I totally believe that everyone should shop local whenever they can. =)
I'm an ex-vegan. I was a Vegetarian for four years and two out of them vegan. Until today I eat mostly vegan. But I kind of realized that veganism is not healthy in a long-term perspective. It is a good cleansing diet that will have its benefits for a while. I no longer unwillingly "judge" any non vegan. Which was a negative side effect beeing with the vegan community.
I agree
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