Discussion Offer: Why we should be vegan (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by fluffplush@lemmy.world to c/leftism@lemmy.world

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Since purchasing and consuming animal products both depends on and contributes to animal agriculture, and animal farming necessitates rights violations against nonhuman animals, not being vegan when you have the option is synonymous with support for injustice. I believe that as leftists who purport ourselves to strive towards a more just society, and as human beings who generally value nonviolence and compassion, we should hold ourselves to a standard that doesn't allow for the perpetuation of mass-slaughter. Let's discourse!

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[-] senoro@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Why not just go for the more simple it’s better for the environment stance. At least in most cases. Some things need to be hunted to control populations and we should of course eat their meat instead of letting it go to waste. But in general eating meat from an animal you didn’t hunt or wasn’t hunted by someone else is bad for the environment compared to a vegetarian or vegan diet.

[-] fluffplush@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Hunting still purposefully kills individuals who don't want to die. "Population control" wouldn't be necessary if hunting organisations didn't purposefully increase populations in order to have more to hunt. And eating their flesh is necessary in what way? Why not leave it to the wild animals then?

[-] senoro@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Not necessarily true. In Great Britain there is a huge overpopulation of deer because all their natural predators were hunted to extinction in the 1500s. And so deer population must be controlled by humans to protect forests as the deer come and eat the bark off of trees and the fauna wiping out biodiversity in forests. You couldn’t really leave the bodies for wild animals because it’s generally pretty polluting since most wild animals that eat meat generally don’t want to scavenge for food as it is much riskier to eat something that is decaying.

[-] fluffplush@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

You could try and reintroduce the predators that were hunted instead of hunting more. And that doesn't address the point of killing innocents for what, the environment? If environmental damage is a reason to kill someone wouldn't humans be top of the list?

[-] senoro@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

They do try and reintroduce predators like wolves into Great Britain, but there are 2 million deer in the UK and it’s not really viable to introduce enough wolves to combat that amount of deer in any kind of short time frame. As well as this, some of the most common deer species in the UK are non native so they shouldn’t be there anyway.

And your second argument is true but rather extreme since we should in general value human life over the life of other animals.

[-] fluffplush@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

So you're saying that we shouldn't kill individuals based on how much they destroy the environment actually. Not being native doesn't warrant execution and neither does being numerous. Some places have programs for neutering certain problematic species and while I would be careful about condoning those programs it certainly beat being shot and bleeding to death.

[-] senoro@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Being shot by an experienced hunter should lead to an almost instant death. And it’s not like everyone would go out and hunt animals just so they can eat meat. You are hunting the animals to try and control population with a byproduct of meat that can be consumed.

I’m saying we shouldn’t population control humans in the name of environmental protection, because ultimately, the average human life is more valuable than the average deer life. I support going vegan, but we still need to clean up the mess we made in the past with population control, and our only feasible way to do this in most cases is by hunting, and if we have to kill an animal to protect the local environment, why wouldn’t we want the deer to be hunted by experienced and well trained hunters who can make the death of the animal almost instant, and why should we let their body go to waste if we have to kill them anyway.

[-] fluffplush@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You don't have to kill them to protect the environment and what you say about hunters as efficient and precise killers is incongruent with existing statistics. "I support going vegan" - are you vegan then? Clinging to a violent status quo while refusing to even so much as acknowledge the moral worth of its victims, because you feel as though they are so beneath you that you can take their lives and their bodies at will, is not something I would expect from a leftist, or even a decent person to begin with. Bad take.

[-] senoro@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

You quite literally do have to kill them to protect the environment though. Deer are highly destructive. And your only other proposals are to reintroduce wolves so they can be torn to shreds or sterilise huge swaths of deer. You can care about animals and understand that sometimes you have to kill them. It’s the only practical solution in the case of deer in GB.

My original argument was that you can go vegan for environmental reasons and that’s a significantly easier sell to most people than trying to convince them that killing animals for any reason at all is wrong. You have tried to convince me that it is wrong for experienced hunters and foresters in Great Britain to kill deer to prevent some of the destruction they cause to forests, but you can’t convince me because your moral views have no room for leeway and refuse to acknowledge that sometimes animals must die.

[-] fluffplush@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I never said "for any reason at all". I said killing innocents against their will is wrong. I'm not necessarily opposed to all forms of euthanasia. A sterilisation program would not be worse than slaughtering countless individuals and neither would be reintroducing predators that you hunted to extinction.

[-] senoro@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

But it’s not practical to sterilise hundreds of thousands of deer. It may be more moral to sterilise them than kill them. But you would struggle to implement that in anyway that could have an effect. The deer would reproduce faster than you could sterilise them without a cost in the billions. As well as that, reintroducing predators like wolves to a country isn’t as simple as dumping some wolves in a forest and hoping for the best, it takes decades of work to even get close to proper reintroduction of a species that was removed 500 years ago.

[-] queermunist@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I went vegan because the psychological impact on workers are among the worst in any industry. Communities with slaughterhouses have higher rates of suicide, addiction, overdose, domestic violence, homicide, rape, you name it. Working in industrial slaughter is literally inhuman, because we naturally feel empathy for animals. The way they struggle and scream and bleed is disturbing to all but the most psychopathic individuals, and we force the most desperate people to do it for shit wages. People who work in this industry end up with PTSD for fucks sake!

If you've ever been forced to slaughter a helpless animal by hand, you know what I mean. We can not expect other workers to do this dirty work for us, not when there are easy and cheap alternatives.

Consumer activism isn't revolutionary, but cultivating an empathetic mindset definitely is.

this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023

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