Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural"

• prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Kind of racist to suggest that slaves were a different species

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s exactly how people justified slavery in the past, and it is how the person I replied to justified their argument. That’s my entire point. It’s the same argument.

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    • goedel@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      other animals are a different species

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Except that slaves were/are humans. Literally the same species.

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      • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yes, obviously, we all agree on that today, but at the time, that wasn’t widely accepted.

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  • Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s the point

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    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The point is that the animals I eat are the same species as me?

      You seem confused.

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      • Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You seem to have extremely poor reading comprehension.

        The point is that slavers used racist pseudoscience to claim that enslaved people were a different, “lesser” species, to justify their enslavement. Not only was this incorrect, but even if it were true it would provide no justification. Speciesism is irrational and the human-invented line between species is completely irrelevant to the moral worth of individuals on either side of that line.

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• stickly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.

  Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.

  So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.

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  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Bro would rather exterminate all humans than admit that he should just go vegan 

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    • stickly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?

      If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can’t be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn’t even try.

    Humanity’s relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn’t need to be that way.

    We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society.

    I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another’s unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.

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    • stickly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game

      Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.

      From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…

      Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.

      That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.

      We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance.

      Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬

      We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.

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      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Not everything is black and white. You are painting a picture where we have two options: (1) cause as much harm as we please and not worry about the consequences, or (2) cause no harm at all by eradicating our species from the face of the Earth (which would actually cause a lot of harm to members of our species but we’ll sidestep that for now).  

        But this is of course a false dichotomy. Because there are degrees to this. A vegan diet is undoubtably less harmful, both in its carbon footprint and in the direct harm in causes to other species. So if someone wants to reduce the amount of harm they are causing it’s the way to go. So why try to diminish that with this ridiculous dichotomy between death to all humans or unmitigated animal torture? If someone wants to decrease of amount of harm they are causing shouldn’t we be encouraging this sort of prosocial mindset? 

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    • a1tsca13@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We have vastly increased our ability to produce food.

      And it has been largely the (petro)chemical industry responsible for this. The Haber-Bosch process transformed agriculture, but accounts for percent-level quantities of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. And it requires raw materials that are typically produced from hydrocarbons (although admittedly there are renewable options). And other nutrients typically come from mining (even organic options) - which displaces many species of all sorts. And this does not account for pesticides, etc., that others have mentioned.

      Prior to the development of modern chemistry, our best sources of fertilizer were often animal manures - which require breeding, raising, and ultimately usually killing animals.

      Sure, there is a lot we can do to minimize harm, and generally we should, and I try to myself as much as possible. But I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered. Until we all go back to pre-agrarian societies, we will continue to cause large-scale destruction in some way. But of course this in itself would cause massive population decline and resultant suffering in humans.

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      • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I’m not fooling myself into thinking that eating vegan or growing my food organically means nothing or no one suffered.

        There isn’t any vegan out there who believes that. The point of veganism isn"t to be perfect, it’s to reduce harm as much as practically possible.

        Of course I am in favor of sustainable farming practices and minimizing use of fossil fuel industry products, but even with all of that factored in, the social/environmental impact of a vegan diet is hugely reduced, compared to a meat-eater’s diet, and significantly healthier with massively reduced risk of heart disease and cancer among other conditions. That’s not really a solid reason to go vegan IMO, I think animal welfare is the only reason that matters, but it’s a nice bonus I guess.

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  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources.

    True, but no one gives a shit when the consumed life is a plant.

    People say the “plants feel pain” thing rhetorically, but it isn’t a serious argument. And if they were somehow actually being serious, then this would actually strengthen the case to only consume plants due the efficiency of doing so vs consuming animal products.

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    • stickly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.

      Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.

      For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.

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      • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.

        Well, I have chosen to not reproduce. So at least my consumption has an expiration date. I’m sure this doesn’t absolve me either, but it’s what it is.

        For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan

        There is something truly distasteful about bringing a sentient being into existence for the sole purpose of exploiting it. Although I don’t hunt (or fish), I don’t take issue with it so long as it is done in a responsible manner. I know “responsible” is subjective, but I’m not taking an extreme position on it.

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