Isn’t that vegetarian?
Comment on Honey
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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
ColonelThirtyTwo@pawb.social 2 days ago
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
“It’s complicated”.
It’s the same category of disputes as eggs, or milk, being vegan under certain circumstances 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.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
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?
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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 the villains from 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)
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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. By selectively breeding the more docile ones we’ve turned them into something they wouldn’t be 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.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
gjoel@programming.dev 2 days ago
So, if they were endangered cows and your friend didn’t like milk, the milk would be vegan…?
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well veganism is about reducing suffering. Like if the cows didnt suffer to produce that milk. Like no forced insemination, calfs aren’t separated from their mother, male calf’s 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.
Lux@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Genuine question, I would like to know if there is a reason. Why doesn’t she just let the bees keep it?
TassieTosser@aussie.zone 2 days ago
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.
davidwkeith@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.