This is a section of veganism that I don't really know much about. I know some people advocate for humans working to reduce the suffering of animals in the natural environment. I do understand the drive behind it because animal suffering is horrible even if it's natural, but on the other hand is it our place as humans to intervene in the environment like that? My personal view of environmentalism always hinged on making as little change as possible to local environments, to the point where I avoid foraging or picking flowers to reduce my impact.

If anyone knows any good places to read some theory on this topic, or if you have any of your own thoughts on this I'd love to hear from you.

  • save_vs_death [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I think there's a distinction to be made between:

    1. stopping humans from murdering non-human animals
    2. stopping the murder of non-human animals

    We can all agree on 1 (I hope, if you're reading this), whereas your post is addressing point 2.

    Here's another complication on top:
    3. stopping humans from murdering humans
    4. stopping the murder of humans

    I think most people will agree that while 3 is ok, we want 4. We don't quite care who or what harms humans (within reason, obviously, murder can be justified if it happens in self-defence and so on and so forth). We generally want to preserve human life and while the specifics matter we don't really care for technicalities like "well actually no human directly killed this guy, he just happened to go to a workplace environment that had asbestos in the air for the past 5 years, ah well".

    I think this is the major difference when it comes to inter-species stances on murder. And this is how most non-vegans arrive at (humorous) critiques of animal advocates that amount to "why don't you protest wolves eating chickens then?".

    I do want to make one thing clear, within current events of things that are happening as we speak, factory farming is heinous and we should remove it, however many animals are eaten by wolves or w/e don't even matter as a pure numbers game. That being said, from the point of view of pure debate about principles, in a contextless void, I am left thinking, why is it right to limit myself at point 1 when it comes to animals, but want point 4 when it comes to humans. If I wanted 2, there are some questions of pragmatism. It kind of implies that we would know what we're doing, when chances are that we don't.

    I don't have any answers, but have wondered about the same thing and this is where my thoughts have led me. I might be wrong, and I'd like to think what you think.