:vegan-edge: :vegan-liberation-rad: :vegan-seitan: :vegan-tofu: :vegan-v:
This is the place where you can chat, debate, and ask questions of your local lefty vegans.
Vegan diet why's and how's
- Health and safety: A well-planned vegan diet is healthy at every life stage, including pregnancy and infancy, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases
- Worried about protein, calcium, B12, or other nutrients? Here's an evidence-based intro to vegan nutrition
- Environmental impact and climate change: What you eat matters more than where it comes from
- Do it for the animals, not for you: Being an ethical vegan may help you stay vegan longer
Documentaries:
- Dominion (CW)
- Earthlings (CW)
What's your take on pet ownership? I find that talking people into (and even nominally agreeing, even though that might not translate into them changing anything about their diet) the benefits of a plant-based diet is indeed getting easier as time goes by. Hell, some of them just realize they can basically use the nearest meat substitute with minimal change and effort on their part. The major wall I am seeing is in the "total" bit of "total animal liberation".
so it's three days too late, but this is kind of split in the vegan community, tbh. a lot of people ideologically believe that domesticating animals for our own gain is fucked, and it's hard to disagree with that when you think about it. that said, I'm a little more open to it, especially considering that most dogs and cats will be either adopted anyway or sent to a kill-shelter. the big absolute "no" is buying animals from puppy mills or places who source from puppy mills. those places can't profit or continue to run if we don't give them monetary support.
Thank you for answering, I appreciate it. This answers my question.
Owning a pet you care for and do not exploit is pretty low on the priority list of eliminating suffering of sentient beings.
Ultimately it's wrong to take a species that requires miles of range and keep them in an enclosure only a few hundred square feet like a home.
I do agree that the amount of suffering you're giving your pet is, if all goes well, very low compared to what animals have to endure in other places. That's incontestable. So all in all I would say the conversation is lower-stakes than other parts of being vegan. I'm not convinced that bringing more pets into the world is a good idea, and outside of taking care of strays I find it very hard to empathize with people on the subject.
It's also a very hard way to win people over, similar to the argument about outdoor cats.
People love their pets FAR more than they love eating meat. And being told that them owning an animal makes them a bad person is a very good way to make people absolutely hate you.
There's also a good argument for when people are close to non-human animals, their empathy for them grows. I've converted a lot of people just by making the "you wouldn't exploit your dog for milk, or kill your cat for meat" argument on an appeal to pathos.
im not vegan, but the last couple days have had me much more interested in it. I have a couple I suppose theoretical questions about the vegan diet though. First of all, what philosophically separates plants and animals? Since we are talking about animal liberation due to them being living things, why do we kill plants which are also living things? Or is there a deeper philosophical difference?
Also how much animal death is acceptable before something becomes non-vegan? For example, I used to work on a farm and i have many memories of picking insects off of leaves and crushing them between my fingers. Obviously there are ways to reduce pests sustainably, but even on the most holistic and sustainable farm there will still be problems with pests. The farm I worked had a dog to deal with larger pests, and occasionally we'd find a dead rabbit or something in the fields that the dog had killed. Another guy I knew (I didn't work for him) would take his gun and try to shoot rabbits that came onto his farm. Do either of these things have any effect on the veganism of a plant product?
I hope these don't come off as stirring the pot or something, they're just theoretical questions I've had since I've been thinking more about veganism.
Another question I had, since I used to do a lot of fermentation - one often hears B12 thrown around a lot with regards to veganism, since animal products are often better sources for B12 than plant products. So one often hears that vegans have to take B12 supplements. However, I recently learned that B12 is actually produced by bacteria, which many ruminants then absorb in their guts. Is there any vegan fermented product that has high levels of B12, since its not animals but bacteria that produce it? I'm wondering if one can cultivate the growth of B12-producing bacteria in some sort of vegan fermented product.