Found RFK, Jr’s Lemmy account
Why isn't it considered vegan to harvest animals who die naturally?
Submitted 4 months ago by baggins@lemmy.ca to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 4 months ago
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Vegan just means causing as little animal suffering as possible. Us existing in a capitalist society causes suffering for animals. But where it is possible to avoid it, it should be avoided is what vegans want. Like if a vegan drives a car and a squirrel runs in front of the car the person does not suddenly stop being vegan
Dingleberrydipndots@lemmy.world 4 months ago
What if that person had no remorse for the squirrel?
Bgugi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You mean it’s not Scott Pilgrim rules?
outerspace@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Cars and roads cause a lot of suffering for animals in general
pedz@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
In fact, the numbers are estimated to be around 2 billion animals a year globally.
As for people
WALLACE@feddit.uk 4 months ago
Humans especially. I wouldn’t have to go to work if the roads all vanished
billwashere@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I would think driving a car is not vegan because it’s fueled by dead dinosaurs.
msage@programming.dev 4 months ago
Oil is not from dinos.
billwashere@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It was a lame attempt at humor since it’s called fossil fuel… I know oil primarily came from ancient algae and plankton that died and sank to the ocean floor.
allo@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Why don’t you eat humans if they’ve already died?
webp@mander.xyz 4 months ago
Because of the karma loss 🙄
DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Because I’m not allowed in the morgue anymore.
ericatty@infosec.pub 4 months ago
You made you literally laugh out loud. Thank you
JandroDelSol@lemmy.world 4 months ago
prion disease lol
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 months ago
I would totally try it if it was legally allowed and there wasn’t a risk of diesease from eating human flesh. 🤷♂️
allo@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
i hear children taste the best. maybe we should adopt a system of indefinitely milking mothers while eating their children like is done with cows. Double Bonus. Tastiest meat plus milk.
save_the_humans@leminal.space 4 months ago
I had a teacher in high school ask me to bring him a deer if I ever hit one on my way to school.
Mesophar@pawb.social 4 months ago
I had a teach in high school so the same thing. He’s also note the sides of the road on the way to school so he could find fresh roadkill on the way home.
Made some great venison jerky.
over_clox@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’ve wondered about this myself since like age 7, when our otherwise perfectly healthy horse Sissy got struck by lightning while standing under a pine tree out in the field in a storm. 😢
Living out in deer hunting country, they could have given the neighbors a shout and basically be like hey the meat’s fresh, y’all come help cut it up and stock like 10-20 freezers for free…
🤷
Bluewing@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You probably don’t want to eat horse meat these days due to the drugs that are often given to horses, (mostly wormers). They tend to not flush out of the horses system no matter how long you wait.
FatVegan@leminal.space 4 months ago
If you don’t like broccoli, why don’t you eat it when it’s half rotten?
falseWhite@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You missed this part in the post:
“not necessarily meat, think hide”
VitoRobles@lemmy.today 4 months ago
This. When I was a kid, I asked this same question and it took me years to fully wrap my head around it.
The ELI5 - When we pick food, we often pick it when it’s the most fresh. We want the freshest apples, the healthiest corn. That also applies to meat. We kill animals at their peak, and harvest them for meat.
When you die, it’s because something is rotten. Lung. Heart. Cancer. Its part of aging. If some part of your body was rotten enough to kill you, that means that was circulating through the rest of your body. Say that a rabbit was killed by poison gas. Would you eat it, if technically, the poison was mostly in its lungs?
iii@mander.xyz 4 months ago
We kill animals at their peak, and harvest them for meat.
That’s not the case. There’s even different words to the meat depending on the age the animal got slaughtered. There’a no single “peak”.
dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
What if I was the killer using the poison gas
python@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Really depends on which lens of veganism you view it through. I usually judge things by the economic lens, where veganism is the response to capitalism incentivising the exploitation of animals. It’s probably one of the easiest ways to think about it, but essentially it goes like “As long as you don’t pay money for exploitation, you’re fine”
So roadkill would be fine. Saving food that would be thrown out is fine. Shoplifting is fine. Served the wrong thing at the restaurant- Complain and get your money back. Second hand down jacket from a relative who would have thrown it away otherwise - gross but fine. Stealing chickens from a factory farm and eating some of their eggs- fine. Et cetera.I don’t think that sort of logical line can be applied to anything but individuals though. I still wouldn’t be buying leather from a company that claims to only use roadkill, as my money would still be a financial incentive to expand the operation.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Veganism isn’t a hivemind. We’re all individuals that came to similar conclusions. And we will have different opinions on the details.
Some folks will say consuming those that died naturally is a-ok. Others will argue that it incentivizes creating conditions under which animals die “naturally” to harvest them.
Personally, I’m part of the group that is probably the largest by a long shot, whose opinion is: Why are we even thinking about that?The vast majority of vegans find corpses gross, much like anything you might derive from corpses.
It also seriously does not happen often, that animals drop dead in front of you. And there’s nothing on an animal’s body that you can’t find a different alternative for. So, it really just is not a relevant question in our lives…chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 4 months ago
How about using birds’ discarded feathers for decorations? Discarded seashells? Pearls from clams that died naturally?
Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Well, I hope you are happy with the answers you already got, because my answer is that I personally don’t care to keep these items, so I don’t have much of an opinion on it. 😎
That’s kind of the point I was trying to make up there, that I don’t have to be the arbiter of all morals, just my own morals…
But if you want to keep such trinkets and you feel like you’ve informed yourself enough to know that no harm is done to these animals, and that makes you decide that it is moral, I will gladly accept your decision.
If I learn that it does harm in some way, I would let you know, though. Not to attack you, but because I would assume that you want to do no evil. And that you don’t subscribe to thehorseshitbelief that your own ignorance of evil makes it moral.I feel like I really need to drive home that veganism is when you care, but you’re also lazy. I don’t want to have to inform myself about every supply chain for my food and every possible moral effect that my actions might have. So, I just nope the fuck out of a large chunk of that by not dealing with animal-sourced products.
Like, yeah, if a bird drops a feather in front of you, the supply chain is quite obvious and I would hope you don’t set off a trend of enough people wanting feathers in their homes for there to emerge an industry.
So, it’s almost certainly fine. But if I myself don’t actually want a feather, you can bet your ass that I will gladly stop thinking right then and there.
If these were not just random examples and rather genuine questions, then I would try to help you reason through it, but ultimately the decision is yours…
Ogy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I find corspes yuck because it feels the same as cannibalism to me. I have no issues with touching human hair or fingernails, but I wouldn’t eat your arm, spleen or eye. Does this help?
blackris@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
Speaking for every single vegan on the whole world: If you fancy that stuff, go for it. We won’t deny you our universal seal of approval for that.
allo@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I have the same repulsive reaction to eating the body of a someone, of any species, as you probably do to eating insects or humans or literal fecal balls of steaming dung.
mika_mika@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Oh so it’s a mental illness thing.
notreallyhere@lemmy.world 4 months ago
seriously the graveyard is full of them
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
They call themselves freegans
IronKrill@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I think it would depend who you ask. I consider myself vegan and would have no major issue with someone using roadkill for parts. I mean, I would find it disgusting and could never myself, but if they want to and still call themselves vegan, I see no problem with it as the harm has already been done to the animal. Seems the same as harvesting bones from the forest - what’s dead is dead.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Seems the same as harvesting bones from the forest
Umm… Wut? Why are you being a bone harvester, what do you need them for??
ReiRose@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Witchcraft
Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Whatever I want.
blarghly@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Lots of people like to use things like antlers or skulls as decorations
rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Bone stuff, why are you asking so many questions?
toebert@piefed.social 4 months ago
I’m not vegan myself but I had asked a similar enough question to a vegan friend a while ago and liked his answer:
He said for him it’s 2 parts, 1 is that while the animal that died may not have been harmed by humans, the ecosystem that relies on scavenging carcasses will be hurt if humans effectively start removing their entire food source (same way we have driven species to extinction by hunting).
The 2nd part is that with humans everything with even the tiniest loop hole will get abused.. Imagine that we say this is okay. Today it may be the odd naturally deceased animal, in a month it’ll start including animals “killed accidentally”, in a year it’ll be someone farming animals with some weird way of culling them so they can claim it’s still natural causes by some twisted logic.. at the end of it we’d just not be able to trust any of it anyway so it’s easier to not even entertain the thought - the energy to figure it all out would be better spent on improving alternatives.
Nomad@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Slippery slope argument. Much more valid today then you would think. Its my primary go to to argue against deportation of immigrants for whatever reason.
CannedYeet@lemmy.world 4 months ago
For the sake of argument I think you could say that you’re depriving a scavenger of a meal. I don’t know if that’s how veganism is usually framed.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Won’t someone think of the bacteria??
Manjushri@piefed.social 4 months ago
…and crows and vultures and eagles and bears and assorted rodents and foxes and beetles and many, many more. There is actually a rather robust eco system out there, you know. And when you gut part of it, you are just asking for trouble.
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 4 months ago
From a materialist point of view, I can’t see any harm in harvesting the hide of an already dead animal. However, wearing a real fur coat and calling yourself a vegan is never going to be an easy thing to explain lmao
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
shouldn’t it be considered vegan to harvest any of the useful parts from it, since there was no human-caused suffering involved?
What the fuck are you talking about? The corpse is still made up of animal parts. For the record I’m a vegetarian because I hate animals and I think they’re gross.
I’m agitated by this post not because of whatever morality question you’re trying to pull, but for linguistics sake.
Definition of Vegan from Merriam - Webster:
a strict vegetarian who consumes no food (such as meat, eggs, or dairy products) that comes from animals
also : one who abstains from using animal products (such as leather)
People like you are the reason why the word “literally” doesn’t mean “literally” anymore and we don’t have a replacement.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
lexicons don’t tell you what a word should mean. they just record known uses
AsoFiafia@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Sounds like someone woke up not just on the wrong side of the bed, but off of it. Take six chill pills, bro. 😂
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
why the word “literally” doesn’t mean “literally” anymore and we literally don’t have a replacement word.
Literally still means literally, it just ironically also means figuratively now too.
But it’s literally always meant literally.
meco03211@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Literally used to mean literally. It still does. It just used to a well.
baggins@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I’m referring to veganism the moral philosophy, not the deit.
MisterNeon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s not the question you asked
shouldn’t it be considered vegan The answer is no, because the definition of the word. I’m sick of “vibe” people. Words have meanings.
toomanypancakes@piefed.world 4 months ago
Hi, ive been vegan for a bit over 10 years. I don't think animal parts are for us to use at all. I'm not really sure why you'd harvest animals at all, I don't think normalizing the commodification of others' bodies is a good thing to be doing. If you really can't live without animal parts, that's probably the least harmful way of acquiring them. I wouldn't recommend eating anyone you find lying on the ground though, that sounds like a good way to contract horrible diseases.
Veganism is about doing the most that is possible and practicable. We probably kill insects just by walking, but it's not reasonable to never move again to avoid that. Similarly, driving a car for many people is a necessity to be able to access goods and services, and its not at all practicable to avoid driving for them.
Ultimately, veganism is a moral stance about reducing harm to others as much as you can. It's not a competition, so don't feel like you have to be perfect at it to do good.
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
Not for us to use? Do you mean you don’t think we should or is that something that comes from somewhere “above” (religion, philosophy, something like that)
toomanypancakes@piefed.world 4 months ago
I don't think we should, other's bodies aren't ours. Just a deeply held moral belief.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
If you don’t make a moral distinction between humans and other animals, it seems difficult to justify scavenging with any logic that couldn’t also be used to justify grave robbing or even necrophilia.
pastaq@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This is strawman reasoning. No vegan I’ve ever met belives that there’s no moral distinction between human and non human animals. They believe that non human and have moral worth, and that moral worth is higher than 15 minutes of taste pleasure or shoes, etc.
The basic logic flows like this:
- Non human animals are capable of subjective experiences, which includes the ability to suffer.
- Exploitation of or killing of animals causes suffering.
- It isn’t essential, under normal circumstances in modern society, to cause that suffering for our survival.
- It isn’t morally permissible to cause unnecessary suffering.
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
If you don’t make any sort of moral distinction between humans and animals then sex might become on interesting topic.
UntitledQuitting@reddthat.com 4 months ago
Thank you for your well rounded and ernest perspective. That final sentence really gave me pause. And it’s nice to find a corner of the internet where vegans aren’t vilified immediately for existing
SolidShake@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Back in the way way way way way way way day. Human used animal fur for warmth, and the meat to eat.
OfCourseNot@fedia.io 4 months ago
We probably kill insects just by walking, but it's not reasonable to never move again to avoid that.
There's this Hindu sect whose adherents wear veils, sweep the floor before them, and/or tread very slowly and carefully to avoid injuring, killing or eating any small insects. As you said, it's about doing as much as you can, but if it were a competition they'd win for sure.
FoxyFerengi@startrek.website 4 months ago
I think you mean Jainism? It isn’t Hindu.
They also have a very strict vegetarian diet, they won’t even eat root vegetables so burrowing insects aren’t disturbes
QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
i saw a really interesting video about biking jackets and the design of them, the conclusion is that molecularly leather is the safest material for abrasion and there’s not really any synthetic replacement that comes close.
What does your perspective (in regard to veganism) have on this subject?
youtu.be/xwuRUcAGIEU
Btw this channel is REALLY entertaining and well written, I’d recommend watching this channel if you get bored sometimetoomanypancakes@piefed.world 4 months ago
I'd take the risk with synthetic materials, personally. I don't think any amount of danger I put myself in would justify killing someone else for their skin. I have a synthetic jacket with elbow and shoulder reinforcement for when I ride, and that's good enough for me.
I'll definitely check out the video later when I have more downtime though.
baggins@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Thank you for this perspective!
JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
From my end, I’m a registered organ donor because I feel that I won’t need this body once I’m done with it, and if anything is useful off it for someone else, then hell, let them have my liver.
However, an animal can’t consent to that and yeah, an argument could be made that who gives a fuck, it’s a pig/chicken/cow, it’s not gonna give a shit, but death is unfortunate for anything and I’d feel more at ease that the carcus is treated respectfully and buried than me harvesting it for food.
Beacon@fedia.io 4 months ago
It is going to be eaten no matter what. The chance of it being eaten is essentially 100%. So i can't see how that's part of the equation.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Sure, but a person can choose to not be the one who does it.
baggins@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Interesting. I guess that’s one perspective on death, but in nature it’s more of the decay and vultures no? Humans are a bit unique when it comes to how we handle our dead and how we try and preserve them and remove them from the natural cycle of life.
JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
And such is the circle of life right. I also feel that if we as a species can move beyond meat, then we should. I can live a perfectly normal life on my current vegan diet, and if that carcus is then left for other animals and fauna to have, thus leaving the cycle undisrupted.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that I’d rather let the animals that need those nutrients have it, as I’m already sorted.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Idk much about vegan philosophy but it is a philosophy not a diet to be clear. However, personally I see it as stealing from the vultures. The vegan solution is of course, to limit roadkill to negligable levels by making cars a redundant and antiquated form of transportation.
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 4 months ago
For the second question, one could argue driving a car isn’t vegan (unless it’s electric) because gas and oil are technically animal products, even if that animal was a dinosaur
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 4 months ago
To me it’s not a matter of ethics but a matter of health. Unless you saw the animal die from something that clearly isn’t disease I wouldn’t trust meat I just found laying around.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You can do pretty much whatever you want man…
Like “vegan” isn’t even a century old yet, it was made up in the 1940s by some guy who thought vegetarians weren’t good enough, and he set whatever rules he wanted to.
You can just keep using his word, but not care about his rules.
Or you can make up your own rules.
People searching for labels they like and then conforming to every fucking aspect of that label and nothing else, doesn’t work out well.
So please, if you want to eat roadkill just do it.
octobob@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Some of my friends were “freegan”. Meaning if meat or something was literally getting thrown away, or if they dumpster dived and found something that wasn’t vegan, it was fair game.
Take that as you will I guess