The problem I have always had with veganism, as someone who has had stints of vegetarianism, is the absurdity of certain restrictions. Milk, I can agree, is bad because of how it's derived. Honey and eggs (sourced ethically) are a restriction I cannot stand behind. I think the dislike of self-labeled vegans is aligned with someone publicizing an extreme decision.
As an anecdote, I'm nearly vegan and don't have honey.
I think it's interesting how easy it is to criticize veganism as extreme when, to me (and in many anecdotes here and in the rest of the world) it is actually the result of trying to reconcile all my actions behind the same non-controversial principles.
Maybe "rigid" vs loose/flexible would be a better description but that isn't how it feels to people; vegans just existing conjures feelings of disdain and dismissals of extremism (I felt that way before as well, just like some other commenters on here).
In a general sense, people absolutely hate being told to change or that they have been wrong about something. It puts our backs up immediately and it fires up an emotional storm to start invalidating what they imply about us.
At the risk of this devolving into a typical online veganism argument: why are eggs bad? Say I keep 3 chickens in a coop in my backyard. They're going to produce unfertilized eggs that will just go to waste
To keep it from devolving, I invite you to search for existing arguments in a search engine of your choice.
However, in a show of good-faith, here are 2 answers to your question:
1. Male chicks of laying varieties are ground in a macerator shortly after hatching. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
In your fantasy, you could get around this by getting a rooster and breeding your own hens for eggs, but then what will you do with the non-laying males? What about hens who stop laying? Keep in mind, their natural lifespan is 5-10 years.
2. Hens have been bred to produce exponentially more eggs than in the wild. Wild hens lay around 10-20 eggs per year. Domestic hens lay around 250. This development can lead to osteoporosis.
1. I have personally never met someone who only eats backyard eggs. The conditions of commercial egg producers are well documented.
2. You are still essentially using another living being for resources. Why keep the chickens in the first place? They are only going to waste because you bought the chickens in the first place, probably also from an industrial breeder, essentially subsidizing the industry.
3. If your way of producing eggs is more ethical, you could sell your backyard eggs to displace the (pretty awful) commercial producers rather than eating them yourself.
I agree that the case against exclusively consuming your own backyard eggs is weaker, but I also don’t think we are describing a considerable proportion of actual egg consumers in the West.
1. how? healthy chickens lay an egg every 1-2 days. a small number of chickens produce more than enough for an entire household. everyone I know who keeps chickens gives most of the eggs away.
2. chickens are the ultimate garbage disposal. you can feed them any excess food from your household and they turn it into fresh eggs.
3. see 1. the volume of eggs gets out of control fast, but not quite on the scale that it’s viable for random people to build an FDA compliant business out of it. it’s hard to get rid of all of them, even for free.
1 -> Sure, but are they declining the omelette when they're out for brunch?
2 -> I think the subsidy point still stands.
3 -> Totally agreed but I think your point about giving away eggs applies just as much, any eggs you eat rather than give away are just going to be an additional egg from the chicken CAFOs or at best case a fractional additional egg from the CAFOs.
But I certainly agree that this is among the instances where the case is weaker.
There is a summary of veganism that follows the principle that we shouldn't take sentient things and change their lives for our own ends. There are several important bits and nuances but the overarching point is to not have a world view where you see anything and prioritize what you can get out of it, regardless of the suffering you cause. Sometimes you hear it summarized as "they arent here for us".
It is an interesting philosophical bit and it combines pretty standard modern morality with a pointed concept of not discriminating by species and instead trying to use the ability to suffer as when you decide if you should exploit something. In this paradigm the reasons not to rape or enslave people are the same as the reasons not to rape or enslave other animals.
This still has plenty of inconsistencies and weird bits, both theoretically and practically. Silly questions like eating braindead people stymie both sides until you get into the weeds about stuff like dignity. Would the theoretical cows in the hitchhikers guide that WANT to be eaten be ok to eat? Is it ok to have second hand animal products, especially if they are high quality and will prevent additional exploitation/consumption?
One of the most sticky conundrums I personally chew on is if this means we should actively try to prevent suffering, not just choose to personally try to avoid causing it. If the former, that means trying to make other people change their beliefs and behave in a way that is pretty objectively worse for them in society, which starts to edge toward causing suffering if you squint. It is easy to fall into trying to reason about which suffering is worse which is a terrible minefield where everybody loses. It's easy to SAY I value something no longer being tortured over my taste preference but is there a logical framework for that that can ever be objective and applied to harder problems? If it is only subjective then what makes it better than any other decision - people decide to eat pigs but not dogs every day but there is no more OR LESS reason behind that than the claim above. There might be answers but I haven't found them to be easy to pin down which is especially interesting because of how strongly I feel that not caring any hurting things is bad.
I think we can agree humans tend to see reducing suffering as a good thing, and that people who we believe have caused suffering are viewed with disdain. With that in mind, here's a framework: "given two choices, is there a choice that 1) reduces suffering, and 2) is not prohibitively expensive (or in some other way too difficult to make)". "Too difficult" or "too expensive" is obviously subjective, but I don't think having objective definitions is necessary here.
An analogy that I like to illustrate this is: going shopping for clothes vs going shopping for food. Both tend to have ethics attached to them, e.g. with child labor for production of clothing, and slaughtering of animals for production of food. If you walk into a store to buy new clothes, and there are 2 sections of the store, 1 for clothes that were produced using child labor, and 1 for clothes that weren't, and both sections had clothes of the same price and quality, the decision of which section to shop in is very logical. This is how I see going shopping for food- you have sections for food that were produced using factory farming, and sections for food that weren't. Both sources of food are the same price and quality. So the decision to make about which source of food to buy is, again, a logical one. It's also a decision that most people in the developed world have to make every week, at least people who live in cities and do their shopping at grocery stores.
While we unfortunately don't have visibility into whether our clothing is produced with child labor, many of us do know if our food comes from factory farms. In the US, the estimate is that over 95% of meat sold in grocery stores is factory-farmed. Why make the decision to buy that if you could easily avoid it?
Because people lie to make money and keeping up with everything is exhausting. Free-range is a term regulated by the FDA but who knows the last time a regulator came by and checked the farm that the chicken came from? How do you tell the difference between a farmer that actually cares and is doing their best to be free range, and a farmer that's doing the bare minimum to meet that regulated standard when you're in the supermarket looking at a package? Is there a difference between meeting the minimum because you really care about chicken vs meeting the minimum because you care more about money? Why is the minimum in the regulation set at that level?
But more unfortunately though, they're not the same price and quality. Whole Foods is called Whole Paycheck for a reason. I can get cheaper food from a different store that's good enough.
Sorry, when I was comparing the foods, I was talking about meat versus plant-based foods. The point I was trying to make is that buying plant-based can be framed as a logical decision.
Actually there’s many people defining vegan that eat eggs (me) and honey (many vegans). Vegans aren’t as extremist as people see them or as common dictionaries define them. Most don’t define themselves by « I don’t consume any animal product whatsoever », of if they do it’s just a simplification.
For the think you feel absurds:
- honey is usually done by placing queen in a room she can’t escape. Also the honey is stolen of the bees. They didn’t choose to be here and they don’t work in the purpose of human eating it. Live it in the nest and they won’t make so much honey. Less bees will die of exhaust also. I got a neighbor that participate in « honey in the village » program. She’s not vegan or vegetarian in any way. Once she saw what’s happening she decided to not harvest. It’s still a delicious product with many nutritious benefits and the bees doesn’t suffer as much as other livestocks so many vegans choose to eat it (again veganism is not about perfection or absolutism)
- I don’t know what eggs production you consider ethical. In my country, the best quality eggs you can fin in the supermarkets comes from chickens that were born in the exact same factory farms as factory chickens In the case of personal backyard poultry it really depends what’s your ethical stance. I often see people that have them in a cage not so big, with no grass (chickens destroy the grass!), no trees, etc… that’s better that a factory but it’s still a miserable cage life. When I go in a farmers market and see someone selling "fallibly farms backyard eggs" I have no way to asses how they live.
> I don’t know what eggs production you consider ethical. In my country, the best quality eggs you can fin in the supermarkets comes from chickens that were born in the exact same factory farms as factory chickens In the case of personal backyard poultry it really depends what’s your ethical stance. I often see people that have them in a cage not so big, with no grass (chickens destroy the grass!), no trees, etc… that’s better that a factory but it’s still a miserable cage life. When I go in a farmers market and see someone selling "fallibly farms backyard eggs" I have no way to asses how they live.
Many jurisdictions have well defined categories. In BC for instance [1], free range and organic ensure the animals get to spend a significant amount of time outdoors.
Where I live there are small farms you can observe and buy eggs from directly. It's totally possible it just takes some looking into and some effort.
I agree those farms are somewhat better. I don’t know where you live but here in France they get the baby chickens from the exact same factories as the industrial farms. Breeding themself at scale would be such a pain that it’s not economically viable in any way. There might be exemptions thought.
Girl-chicken (excuse my English) require to produce male-chicken, which often get killed at birth because the meat chicken are not from the same breed. Also the egg-breed is such intense that they produce eggs in an insane frequency compared to a rustic breed, which result in them being exhaust way before their lifespan. It’s very similar to the cow breeds that produce 40l milk/day compared to the 6/7l for historical breeds.
Vegans absolutely define themselves by not consuming any animal products, myself included.
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."[1]
I don't know your individual circumstances, but based on your justifications in your post, you are not a vegan.
You can still be a vegetarian, an animal-lover, and a good person, but not vegan.
It is not extremist to have strongly-held ethical principles, and I hope this refutation is helpful to anyone reading both posts.
Thanks for sharing that thought. I strongly adhere to the vegan society definition. I think "as far as is possible and practicable" should be followed by "and beneficial to the overall goal", which is obvious but would make the phrase too cumbersome.
Let me share my situation with eggs: in the family I’m the one that leaded the shift, from flexitarian to vegetarian to (99%) vegan. My GF likes the principle and is willing to shift but also needs more time to change her habits, one by one. One of the very last habits are eggs, and she’s not ready to stop it yet, but do avoid buying them in any form. So she bring three chickens in a ~30m2 parc with a tree and plants etc… It’s still a cage and I’m not proud. The chickens are a more rustic race than the eggs producers breed because she figured out they suffer less by not being breed-ingineer eggs factories, so they lay during 2/3 weeks every 6/12 month. When that happens and she won’t be home for a while, I eat the eggs. Last time was around May I think. Someone in this thread suggest to give the eggs to a neighbor so they buy less from the store, that is a great idea I will definitely consider. Removing the chickens would create a mess in my relationship with GF, wish is not "practical" and could even in the end make her consuming more animals product because of a defensive psychological mode in reaction.
To the extremism and if people consider me (or others) vegan or not, here’s a few thoughts:
- a colleague a once told me I’ll never be a vegan because I "have" animals, which is a form of exploitation for my pleasure. There’s also many "vegans" that do have cats and dogs (in captivity) and buy food for them. Is it beneficial to the veganism goal to exclude each other’s on the last percent of our animal consumption? I don’t like them buying meat for their cats but telling them so wouldn’t help veganism progress.
- what about a "Muslim" that have a beer once per year ? An "altruist" that buy a (child made) Bangladesh apparel ? A "monogamous" that do adultery once? I don’t think they should be excluded from the definition they believe in because of a tiny deviation or not-yet-perfection. They should be listen and companion instead.
- what about vegans that use soaps in public places? Buy stuff colored in red without knowing the provenance? Buy glossy lemons?
The limit of "practical" is fuzzy and IMHO debating it doesn’t really serve the overall goal. I’m very happy to be in the same boat as you, my friend, even if we don’t share the same room.
If the muslim, altruist, and monagamist from your example knowingly continue a behavior that is antithetical to the definitions of their stated identities then they are not a muslim, altruist, and monagamist.
They may like to be or strive to be, and they can change, but they aren't right now. They should be excluded from the definitions.
You're right in identifying pet food and unknown ingredients as grey areas. "Practical and practicable" provides a tremendous amount of grey area.
However, knowingly consuming animal products when there's an alternative is not a grey area. It is antithetical to veganism.
99% vegan is 99% better than the alternative, and that's undeniably great.
I'm pursuing this so that people reading our conversation are not confused about what veganism is.
