Vegans fight amongst themselves all the time, and plenty of them have different rules.
For example, veganism doesn’t extend just towards diet but animal products overall. A lot of people will only focus on the diet or certain animal products such as leather though.
Really wish people would just agree to do whatever they can, anything helps.
Vegans are unwilling to come to terms with the fact that they aren’t special. Taking honey is fine. Bees aren’t going anywhere any time soon. You know what? Taking honey had no downside for society. There is sooo much other stuff to worry about. Have you heard about our Lord’s, and Savior: Corpse Bees! An obscene amount in cemeteries, and grave yards. Can’t wait for some for you to get offended. Yes, the journey of most animals/insects is tragic. I like having the ability to travel cost to coast in hours on a full stomach. Until my belly aches.
They work for each other, Morty!
That sounds like slavery with… extra… steps
I thought Vegans cpuld consume animal things if its done willingly.
Like if a cow walked up and said “Please gopd vegan, butxher me, it is my purpose,” they could totally make.and eat burgers from said cow.
That said, bee vomit feels like it sort of fall into that category.
Dang dude, turn on autocorrect
The bees don’t want you to take their honey. They don’t make excess, they make what they need and we steal it and replace it with stuff that’s “just as good” according to us. Bees die in the process of harvesting honey.
These are reasons that honey isn’t vegan.
I know some people who keep bees and absolutely none of that is true if you take care of them properly. Bees will try to fill the space they are in with honeycomb even if it is well in excess of what they need because they are anticipating that the colony will grow, but if you harvest regularly and consistently the colony will not grow larger than can be supported by the honeycomb that is left behind.
Have you ever kept bees? They make a ton of honey in excess of what they need.
A quick web search tells me that bees don’t die when harvesting honey, unless you take more than they need to survive, too often and are careless when harvesting?
I’m don’t know much about beekeeping, but I could easily see large scale industry doing exactly that. I would have a hard time trusting them to be careful of the bees’ livelihood. It seems like if the farmers are actually careful the bees should be ok though
“google ai overview told me exactly what I wanted to hear so I’ve decided to look no further”
I’m open to counter arguments
I’m not a vegan, but the current state of beekeeping is pretty shit. Taking the honey and replacing it with sugar water on top of the stresses of monoculture and killing varied flora with herbicides creating food deserts and using market conditions to race to the bottom on pollination contracts just results in a whole bunch of dead hives. Like you can both support sustainably practiced beekeeping and find the production of industrial honey to be a horror show.
Regardless of whether you are vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, or other, if you aren’t horrified by industrial food production, you should be. This goes for industrial fish trawling & fish farming, industrial chicken cow and pig processing, honey I guess, even factory plant growing e.g. alfalfa almonds and corn (ruins the land and wastes water)
It’s so pervasive it’s hard to avoid everything.
With that and the amount of recalled food in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
This is the correct response. Small-scale hobbyist beekeeping is awesome for humans, bees, and nature, and we absolutely positively need it. Industrial beekeeping, in which bees are carted across the continent to pollinate the fields of the highest paying industrial farmer may still be tolerable to the bee but far less so for nature. Many people don’t appreciate the nuance. Apis mellifera almost certainly won’t go extinct as long as beekeepers are around. But that’s not what we talk about when we say the bees are dying…
Apis mellifera isn’t native to the Americas and neither are a lot of the plants they pollinate. They crowd out the native bees and destroy their habitat. Small-scale beekeepers working in populated spaces aren’t the problem though. And they rescue swarms that would otherwise be exterminated. Plus they’re more likely than the average person to know about their local natives and support them, by making carpenter bee homes or whatever.
Industrial honey is just another facet of my distain and complaint of industrial agriculture as a whole. Almost every vegan argument I’ve ever encountered has been in reaction to the horrors of the industrial process
This is what will lead me to the full change in diet. I’m at the mitigation and small changes phase. I really don’t have ethics issues with animals as food (farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order), but we exist in a capitalist hellscape that has zero shame or remorse for exploiting making perverse anything once natural for profit.
farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order
But it isn’t necessary (at least in most cases), and we have the intelligence to make better decisions simply because they are better.
Unless I misunderstood your comment, “when suffering is inherent to existence” could be used for things like burglaries as well.
Hard agree. I’m no vegan as a fully understand that a) humans are omnivorous mammals who thrive on a mixed diet and b) eons of selective breeding has created creatures that are designed for food and goods and wouldn’t survive in the wild in their current state without either much suffering or outright death of the species. The monocultures created for large industrialized farms are a blight for the environment as well.
I champion local small scale farms with permaculture and local plants as much as possible while reducing meat consumption in general (at least here, meat is usually at every meal so reducing it to one a day if not every few days would be a huge shift). I also recognize not everyone wants nor cares about going vegetarian or vegan but would accept the reductions in meat use and focusing on buying local if it was made more readily available
I wouldn’t say “need”. European honey bees are a foreign invasive species. They displace the native pollinators. IMO hobbyists are worse because they are damaging the native bees without reason unlike industrial farmers that need the bees to produce the food we all eat.
And the reality is the vast majority of hobbiest bee keepers do it as a tax dodge. In most states, if you put a hive on your yard, you get to classify your house as a farm and pay virtually no property taxes.
European honey bees are a foreign invasive species
But… I am European?
Europeans used to be pretty invasive, too!
Sadly they still are in some areas of the world.
Particularly the middle east.
i got banned from a vegan comm for saying that bees tend to leave hives if they’re not satisfied with the conditions, a fact that’s just verifiably true.
Honestly, I’m on Team Honey, but that argument has a glaring hole in it.
Which is that many apiaries put an object over the entrance to the hive which lets worker bees pass freely but blocks the queen from escaping. And worker bees bonded to a queen will literally die before abandoning her.
So they can’t just leave. Bees that do that in the while travel as a colony in what’s called a swarm (which is actually very docile because they have no hive to defend). A bee that gets separated from its colony dies.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I have known some beekeepers. Once I was asked to go help because one of their hives had “swarmed”, meaning a group had left the box with the/a queen and had posted up on a neighbors rose bush.
Those extremists would be very upset if they could recognize reality
Reality is a social construct defined by the dominant ethnic group and manipulated by the Epstein class to control us.
I’d say it’s defined by the dominant group, but that group isn’t necessarily an ethnic group. For example, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are certainly a part of that group. It’s not limited to white Anglo-Saxons anymore.
We really need to stop looking at the issue by pigeonholing it into racial, gender, or sexual categories, because that does not reflect the reality. There are gay oligarchs. There are women oligarchs. There are oligarchs of every skin tone.
These are counter-examples, of course; deviations from what we might consider the “norm,” which is cishetero white male oligarchs. Pointing out that it’s not limited to the latter isn’t a denial that the latter form a disproportionate majority of oligarchs. That’s the part a lot of people miss when I bring this up.
The fundamental issue though is class disparity, which we cannot lose sight of; even if there are other demographic trends within that disparity. Trying to make it about anything else is overly reductive and harmful.
…I miss the days when radical statements sounded far off and crazy. Now they just sound like statements of undeniable truth.
I agree with you on the fact, but willingness to stay does not equal informed consent.
Informed consent does not exist in the animal world and I’m very saddened that that’s a sentence I had to type.
You cannot apply human standards to animals, they do not understand contract law…again, a sentence I’m just very sad I had to type because they didn’t understand that.
I’ve tried to have this discussion SO many times, and every time I’m treated like there’s nothing I love more than raping goats and torturing pigs.
That cow that lives on the hobby farm, spends its days roaming fields and eating flowers, then gets milked in the evening and petted with genuine love and affection, is not worse off because the farmer didn’t create a formal contract in order to obtain it’s consent to be milked.
It gave its consent by walking to the milking station, and waiting to be milked.
“Nuh uh! That’s not consent! It didn’t learn English and say the words ‘I consent to being milked,’ therefore milking it is evil!”
I have known vegans IRL who are genuinely reasonable and can discuss this stuff. On the Internet, 95% of the time you just cannot even discuss it with someone who identifies as vegan, I would imagine even if you’re a vegan yourself, unless you 100% agree with them on how to apply the philosophy. In this very thread I asked a question and it was all but ignored and I was assumed to be shitting on veganism rather than questioning a specific argument/interpretation of it. I think it sucks because I literally agree with like 90% of everything any vegan says, it’s when they veer away from the facts and more toward personal feelings they have that I cannot talk to them about it anymore. It makes sense on the one hand because if that viewpoint resonates with you it’s gonna make you upset to think about and to be shit on for, but on the other, if it cannot even be discussed without false assumptions, insults, and avoidance of inconvenient facts on their part, they’re just going to lend credence to the anti-vegan prick arguments. Because of this extreme inability to even discuss the topic I have to block a lot of vegans because I’d rather do that than always remain silent for fear of upsetting them. They always seem 100% convinced I’m an evil carnist who hates them and is pretending not to be just to erode veganism, but it’s just not so.
I’m in the same boat. I actually agree with 90% of veganism. Animals shouldn’t suffer needlessly. People should eat less meat and animal products. Factory farming is horrifying and unethical. Where it falls apart is the universal claim of “Therefore, even the smaller regenerative and ethical farms are evil, because ALL animal use is unethical.” Which, if you follow the logic and consequences, requires us to either support millions of animals in domestic environments without ANY method of financial independence beyond donations or government support. Or, we drive dozens of distinct species to extinction, simply because some people feel personally attacked when I make an omelette. If we could ask the animals themselves, I struggle to believe that a happy cow living on a dairy farm would prefer non-existance to getting milked occasionally when they want to.
I have very little respect for anyone who cannot justify opinions, or get offended when beliefs are questions. If you don’t want your beliefs questioned, don’t announce them.
Yeah. I think it comes down to the absolutism. They almost certainly ate some amount of meat/animal products themselves, but once they arrived at their current principles, they have no more understanding for it. Rather than remember that they too had to learn/work to get to their understanding, they see you as an enemy for not sharing it. Of course I mean if you offer even the slightest pushback.
I’ve reduced my meat intake by a lot and I agree with what you wrote here. If vegan food was widely available everywhere I’d probably eat WAY less animal products. But dozens of vegans online have given no shits about that, whereas a reasonable person would, and would have some level of empathy toward not being 100% with them on everything they say in terms of applying the knowledge. I totally get wondering how a person could acknowledge animal suffering and still participate in it. I’ve examined myself over that one hundreds of times now. But it’s the reality, it’s where I’m at. And I should be able to talk about it without an automatic assumption that I’m a thoughtless monster who is trying to tear down their worldview. I’m not. Is this about me personally? I’m talking about so obviously yes it’s sorta personal that I have these unpleasant and unproductive conversations on the Internet sometimes, but I truly would rather them not happen for anyone else either. For the toxic assholes who really do want to tear down veganism, they’re worse people, but I already knew that. For the vegans spewing hatred at all the “carnists” I expect better and I think I’m right to. They changed their lives for a good reason. Now why the fuck can’t they talk about it the majority of the time? It’s frustrating.
I have to imagine that those people are virgins, because no one is signing a 17-page contract prior to getting it on.
Consent is allowed to be simple as long as it’s obvious and real. I shouldn’t need a law degree to suck a dick.
People who would be angered by this aren’t reachable, ya just gotta block em.
You just gotta stop giving a damn what dipshits think.
Post your initial message so that some passerby might glean some insight and then move on.
The opinions of people whom I will never ever see nor interact with ever again means less than nothing. They can think I’m the biggest fucking idiot in the world, doesn’t matter to me, I’ll sleep just fine.
Exactly, feed them sugar and they’ll happily stay, that’s not saying it’s good for them. Plus all the monoculture on which they often feed is detrimental to their survival as a species. It’s funny to me how in this capitalist world, there is a living being that is somehow not immorally exploited.
Exactly, feed them sugar and they’ll happily stay
Guess I’m a bee.
Good news: we’ve found ways to satisfy them with the conditions while also killing the hives.
that makes sense.
completely fair, and a response that would hawe been greatly appreciated at the time.
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the bees directly.
You could probably get out of just about any argument this way.
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the
beesflowers directly.Pssshhhh!!! Maybe you set your sights that low. You can eat your bee’s, I’ll only be eating A’s!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) …just tell me where the line starts…
The fun part is that this doesn’t even tell me which side of the honey debate you’re on.
I did assume vegans would be majority against honey consumption.
Not a vegan but I am surprised to learn there is a debate amongst vegans about honey.
Honey is an animal byproduct, so technically it is non-vegan, but I think that’s kind of pedantic because the bees (ideally) aren’t harmed by the apiaries, and the relationships is more of symbiosis rather than exploitation.
I’ve tried explaining this to vegans and they get really hostile about how apiaries are bee slavery and we need to abolish all forms of subjugation and exploitation, and that I’m a colonialist pig for not seeing it that way.
They also talk about some of the problems with large-scale apiary practices. But those problems are very much known within beekeeping communities, and the average small-time beekeeper is as upset as any vegan about giant corporate monocultures spreading parasites and diseases.
The beekeepers are also very active in trying to solve that problem by regulating large-scale apiary practices, monitoring bee colonies, medicating, funding (and participating in) research, etc… All stuff that most vegans couldn’t be bothered to do.
It’s a bit like being against backyard chickens because Tyson and Perdue are an evil industrial ag duopoly.
So… they saw the bee movie and considered a documentary?
Do/can domesticated bees swarm/rewild?
If so it seems like it would be the best argument that bee keeping was mutually consensual.
It’s a bit like being against backyard chickens because Tyson and Perdue are an evil industrial ag duopoly
Are there apiary industry standards/certifications? It seems unlikely most folks are buying the backyard chicken version of honey.
Do/can domesticated bees swarm/rewild?
It is possible. When a colony grows too large for the hive it produces a new queen and then splits itself in half. Usually beekeepers who monitor their colonies notice this and start a new hive, but if left to do their own thing (and if there’s not a queen trap on the entrance) then one of the queens will take half the colony and go search for a place to build a new hive.
If so it seems like it would be the best argument that bee keeping was mutually consensual.
I generally agree, but how do you define that? You can’t exactly get a bee to sign a legal document. Sure you could opt against using a queen trap, and make your hive as enticing as possible so they stay. A good apiary will provide ideal conditions, and cultuvate botanical and herb gardens in the immediate surroundings. Basically make it a paradise for bees, and give them medicine too.
Just because some people abuse their dogs doesn’t mean pet-keeping as a whole should be damned. Punish the abusers and prevent the abuse as much as you can. But don’t take away granny’s sweet little shitzu just because Dale down the street kicks his pit.
Are there apiary industry standards/certifications?
That unfortunately depends on the state. Some do a better job than others.
It seems unlikely most folks are buying the backyard chicken version of honey.
Yes but try asking a vegan “Is it fine if I only choose local honey?”
I’m not at all, vegan as a personal trait is a bit of a broad church these days.
There’s the people that are mostly motivated by the not-killing-animals thing
Then there’s the ones doing it predominantly for environmental reasons
Then you’ve got the ones doing it for various health reasons
Then you’ve got people doing it predominantly for cost reasons (fewer here, given vegan is still treated as a luxury aspect in a lot of food categories)
Those groups do not have to overlap in views at all. It’s entirely expected for there to be disagreement and purity test drama given that IMO
Yeah, I’m not in any vegan groups but I’ve seen (what is hopefully) a vocal online minority of those who use the label for killing-is-wrong reasons come off as angrier at folks using it for any other reason than they are at folks who do consume animal products, and insisting that the other camps should use “plant-based (diet)” instead.
I’ve known people who called themselves vegan and still ate fish, there are basically no rules
That’s pescatarian, not vegan. Whoever said that was wrong.
But I recognize that confidently saying something is wrong is viewed as arrogant these days. We have to respect everyone’s subjectivity, even if that means not saying anything even when they’re blatantly wrong.
Like “No, don’t keep walking forward. There’s a cliff in front of you.” “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! YOU CAN’T CONTROL ME.”
Toxic positivity has seeped way too far into the collective unconscious…
They justified it as something to do with fish/shellfish not having the same kind of pain receptors and consciousness that “real” animals do and argued it was more akin to consuming fungi and bacteria. They didn’t eat dairy products or meat for more traditional vegan reasons. Since it’s this thread, i’ll say they also ate honey lol.
I don’t agree with them, and I do agree with everything you said here. I’m just saying, based on experiences in the field, when someone says to me “I’m vegan” internally I’m like “cool, so you eat whatever you want, just like everyone else” 😂
yeah the fda classifies it as a meat product.
That’s just a myth spread around the internet.
Their actual definition is:
Reference materials in the public domain define honey as “a thick, sweet, syrupy substance that bees make as food from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants and store in honeycombs.” FDA has concluded that this definition accurately reflects the common usage of the term “honey
a definition is not a classification though. how do they categorise it?
As “Honey, jams, jellies, fruit butter, molasses”
ah, neat!
The right side
In Lemmy you have to be on the left side.
The real debate is with figs.
And don’t get me started on mushrooms
I’m really interested now
Mushroom aren’t classified as either plants nor animals, with some arguing they’re much closer to animals. I’m not a vegan or vegetarian myself, but that’d be an interesting point to consider.
By definition are vegans those that don’t eat or use animals or animal byproducts.
Fungi aren’t animals. If this group doesn’t consume fungi then they should call themselves something else entirely to avoid further confusion. Maybe they should go strictly by herbivores.
Huh, I’ve not heard any vegan talk about that. In fact mushrooms are a staple in many of the vegan foods I’m aware of
Not some. They are taxonomically more related to animals than plants. Just a fact.
We’re also technically eating their peepees.
It feels like there’s a whole debate about honey I’m unaware of, but isn’t the point of veganism avoiding anything made by animals? If yes, why is honey an exception?
Most of are agreed that the point of veganism is to reduce nonhuman suffering. Following absolute rules for no reason is silly. The point is the ethics.
But the other vegans have the wrong opinion about whether eating honey causes suffering.
Ahh thanks. But wouldn’t that make you a vegetarian?
(Not trying to be confrontational or disagreeing with your point, asking out of genuine curiosity)
No. If someone ate no animal products besides honey that doesn’t make them not vegan, it means they don’t share the opinion that honey causes animal exploitation. I do not wish to register an opinion there, I’m just saying what the rationale is.
I’m actually not a vegetarian. I’m a kangatarian.
Kangaroos have evolved over the past 60,000 years to breed in such numbers that their population can sustain hunting by humans. They have no other natural predators, unless you count parasites. Dingos in some places, but not many. The result is that if humans don’t hunt kangaroos, they over-breed. Destroy the local habitat, threatening endangered species, then starve. Some kangaroos must die at human hands for the good of everything else, including the other kangaroos.
So the government uses drone surveys to analyse the population, and then tells people how many kangaroos need to die. Each kangaroo in the quota can either be hunted, or culled. Culled kangaroos will be shot, and their bodies will rot in a ditch. Their meat will benefit nobody. If they’re hunted, then at least some good comes of it. If a kangaroo survives the initial shot, hunters will stun and then kill it. I’m unsure whether the same regulations apply to cullers.
So, I eat kangaroo meat. All kangaroo meat is hunted, there’s not a single kangaroo farm in the world. At least, not the western idea of a farm. Every kangaroo I eat lived a free life in nature, and then died for the good of the ecosystem. No animal slavery.
And I propose a bigger question than honey: is kangaroo meat vegan?
No. An animal died for it, it isn’t vegan. Simple as.
Veganism is about consequences or at least should be. If an animal was (and apparently in this case is) killing the ecosystem if you don’t kill it, I’m curious what the rationale for it not being vegan is. Veganism seeks to end cruelty and suffering. Whereas in this case not killing the kangaroo would be a choice that leads to more suffering and that’s not just for humans. If veganism isn’t about applying these “rules” for a purpose and instead it’s just about applying them without taking context into consideration, what’s the point of it?
Notice how your entire argument for ethical behavior applies to controlling the population rather than eating the animals after? The step of eating the animal is the not vegan act.
Control the population, leave the remains in the ecosystem it belongs to.
Notice how you’re not responding to my question?
Edit: the silent downvote indicates you don’t intend to, and that’s a shame, assuming you’d reply in good faith. You’re literally arguing for leaving carcasses to rot instead of replacing other meat in human diets which would have been derived from pointless cruelty.
I avoid honey because european honey bees are an invasive species, devastating populations of native bees and threatening their existence, endangering plants who have specific pollinator relationships, where that pollinator is now threatened. They are helping facilitate ecological collapse. We are not the same.
I chose a whole food plant based diet for health reasons, and honey just isn’t good for my body.
I chose to plant pollinator friendly plants in my yard because I think bees are cool and I love watching them do their thing.
