Honey Is Not Vegan

Sunday, January 11, 2026

A response to "I don't care about animal byproducts like bone char sugar etc. because animals don't get raised or killed for that."

There are people who consider themselves to be vegans or animal rights advocates who will often make the argument that animals are only killed for meat, milk, and eggs, and not other animal byproducts like bone char sugar so we shouldn't worry about it. But the problem is that because these processes have been in place for many decades now and these industries have come to rely on them, they are killed for all of these other byproducts too.

Animals aren't just killed for meat anymore, and haven't been for many decades. They are killed for bone char, gelatin, manure, leather, and every other animal by product. This is because the industries that have come to rely on these byproducts have built their processes around them. So if the animal slaughter were to stop, these industries would have to halt production as they figure out different ways of doing things. The sugar industry relies on bone char sugar to process the sugar. They would have relationships with slaughterhouses to get the bones, invoices and payments to exchange them, and truck routes established to pick them up or have them delivered.

There are vegan sources of sugar so other processes exist but the mainstream sugar industry would have to take time to switch over first. If meat were to disappear tomorrow, animal slaughter would still happen because these other industries have come to rely on these animal byproducts. The sugar industry couldn't function and would have to install different ways of processing their sugar, teach new employees the new ways, end contracts, source different products, and so on and so forth. So every time you buy something that has bone char sugar in it, you are directly contributing to animal agriculture, because animals are killed for so much more than just their meat these days. Farmed animals are raised for and killed for all of their parts, not just the meat or milk.

What switching from products that use bone char to products that don't does is show the sugar industry that there is demand for the different ways to process sugar. That itself is worth it, so that cow bones are no longer used and they can slowly switch to the other processes.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Vegan Vending Machines

http://theveganvendingmachine.com/
https://www.veganmachines.com/
https://vegnews.com/2020/8/free-vegan-ice-cream-vending-machines-are-popping-up-this-summer
https://www.livekindly.co/vegan-vending-machines-netherlands/
https://www.riseofthevegan.com/blog/vegan-vending-machines-roll-out-across-usa
https://www.totallyveganbuzz.com/news/vegan-vending-machines-launched-at-canadian-hospitals/
https://www.livekindly.co/canadas-first-vegan-vending-machine-launches-in-whistler/
https://www.livekindly.co/vancouver-has-yet-another-vegan-af-vending-machine/
https://www.totallyveganbuzz.com/news/vegan-vending-machines-filled-with-healthy-snacks-chocolate-crisps-and-sandwiches-are-now-a-thing/
https://www.veganfoodandliving.com/news/vegan-vending-machines-are-appearing-on-the-streets-of-bristol/
https://www.livekindly.co/vegan-vending-machine-plant-based-sandwiches-desserts-bristol/
https://www.fwinkspot.com/fwveryown/2019/12/5/serial-entrepreneurs-in-our-city-reesha-and-ron-howard-cpnj-vegan-vending-amp-others
https://www.livekindly.co/family-run-vegan-vending-machine-company-hospitals/
https://www.livekindly.co/manchester-vending-machines-vegan-mars-bars/
https://www.ktnv.com/positivelylv/vegan-dog-treat-vending-machine

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Let's Talk About The Non-Veganness of Having Pets

I want to make it very clear that in no way, shape, or form do I think that pet owners are horrible people. I used to be one. I just want to go through the different ways that pet-owning can be seen as non-vegan (not that I am claiming that owning pets makes you yourself a non-vegan.)

That being said, *technically* (again, not saying anyone who does this is a bad person), having companion animals is kidnapping them (as we are taking them from their families and habitats), and holding them hostage at our houses. I'm sure if we were to stop and actually think about it, we would start to understand that it's not the best idea in general. Think of the mother-baby bond for instance. How many times have we seen a family with a pet cat or dog with a box full of kittens or puppies somewhere, separating them all and giving them all to the different people that come by? Mothers of all species wish to be with their kids, and siblings are better off together as well. Imagine yourself having twins and someone took your kids and gave them away to others to be raised. That is what mother animals deal with all the time when it comes to companion animals.

Anyone who has ever owned a pet knows that you have to keep them completely locked indoors at least for the first few weeks or else they WILL run away. No one seems to stop and think about why...it's a completely natural reaction to someone taking you and making them live with you. They want to get back to their natural home and family, or just get away from their captors and be free. The reason they are less likely to run away after a few weeks is reminiscent of Stockholm syndrome, but as we all know, pets can literally run away at any time, which is why you see so many flyers about missing dogs or cats around neighborhoods.

The reason we have companion animals is often not for their benefit, but just because we *want* them. It's a situation that revolves around the wants of humans as opposed to the needs of the animals. Every animal is meant to be free, not to be trapped in a house of someone who wanted to have them there. We think they're cute and sweet and cuddly, and so we get them because it's what we want and we feel like we should just get to have them. That isn't thinking about them at all but just us.

Having outdoor cats is often advised against, as they could be eaten by coyotes or other wild animals, or they could hurt other animals themselves, But it's not that great of a life to be trapped inside of a house all day long, only able to walk around the same rooms over and over and over again throughout the years. Imagine if you were never allowed to leave your house, go to work, go to school, take a walk outside, or just go anywhere....can you imagine what it must be like to exist in the same few small spaces for your lifespan?

Rescuing can often be different. If you do decide to have a pet, make sure you always have a rescue instead of buying from a breeder (that's a whole other can of worms), but rescuing an animal *because* you want them as a companion animal still has the same issues, instead of *because* you stumbled upon an animal who needed help and wanted to help them. There are situations where it is better to save an animal if they will die otherwise, and there are situations where they should really be free. It's just better to do what is best for an animal instead of thinking of ourselves.

Providing a loving home can be great, and as far as non-vegan concepts go, this one is probably the most ethical. But animals are still meant to be free, be with their families, walk around long distances instead of being cooped up in an area the size of a house and yard, and not be taken to live at our houses because of what *we* want. It's not always in their best interest. They have their own wants and needs, and as vegans, we tend to think about these things in every other instance except when it comes to owning pets. If you can understand that an animal in a zoo who is in a cage the size of your house or bigger, still needs a ton more land than that, and has their own wants and needs in life and shouldn't be used by us, then you should be able to think more deeply about having furry family members and connect the two concepts. After all, as much as we love them and truly think of them as family members, they had their own families and homes that we took them from, and all because we think we get to have whatever we want.

I get it. I loooooovvee how cute and cuddly kittens and other animals are and I would love to be surrounded by them constantly. They make me happy. But that's what I want, not what is best for them. I'm not saying that anyone who has pets has to stop calling themselves vegan, but I think it would benefit the world to start to think more deeply about this issue instead of have a gut reaction of not exploring these ideas because you want to be allowed to have what you want.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Vegan Leathers

Besides the classic pleather and vinyl, here are other vegan leathers.
http://www.lifegate.com/people/lifestyle/pinatex-eco-leather-pineapple
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/144185625550127283/
https://www.plantbasednews.org/post/amazing-brand-making-vegan-wallets-banana-leather
http://www.foodandwine.com/blogs/vegan-friendly-leather-made-kombucha
http://veganenthusiasts.com/2016/06/21/muskin-a-vegan-leather-made-entirely-from-mushrooms/
http://eluxemagazine.com/fashion/5-truly-eco-friendly-vegan-leathers/
http://www.vegansouls.com/alternatives-for-leather
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sascha-camilli/the-innovative-crueltyfre_b_16932302.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_leather
http://www.alcantara.com/en/materiale/5/index.do
http://vegnews.com/articles/page.do?pageId=9382&catId=1
https://www.facebook.com/georgetakeipresents/videos/149738838974583/
https://www.beyond-skin.com/
https://mattandnat.com/
https://www.votch.co.uk/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcieZYwyEiA

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Petitions

https://www.change.org/p/vegans-we-want-the-food-network-to-start-a-vegan-show
https://www.change.org/p/please-label-all-products-as-either-vegan-or-not-vegan-for-religious-and-ethical-reasons-not-limited-to-only-food-products-all-products-sold-in-the-united-states-of-america-from-medicines-to-clothing-from-glues-oils-solvents-to-vehicles
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/303/931/161/demand-companies-to-label-whether-their-sugar-is-refined-with-bone-char-or-not/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/630/930/075/tell-ellen-degeneres-to-remove-leather-from-her-clothing-line/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/549/038/537/lisa-simpson-to-go-vegan/
https://www.change.org/p/mcdonald-s-it-s-time-for-a-healthy-meatless-option
https://www.change.org/p/msnbc-petition-to-air-cowspiracy-and-earthlings-on-msnbc
https://www.change.org/p/add-vegan-ready-meal-and-sandwich-options-sainsbury-s-and-tesco
https://www.change.org/p/bernie-sanders-introduce-legislation-to-end-government-subsidies-for-animal-agriculture
https://www.change.org/p/vegan-society-make-vegan-baby-formula-available

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Summary of Speciesism: The Movie

 I mainly wanted to catch the good philosophical quotes, so that’s why those read as more of a transcript and the rest reads as more of a summary.

So the host is a meat eater looking to find the answers of why people care about animals after coming across protesters. He went to PETA headquarters and talks to the presidents, and one of them talks about how there are basically intelligent people leading good lives etc. and they have absolutely no idea what's happening on our factory farms or in vivisection etc. which is why they do their campaigns. He then goes to Compassion Over Killing (this is one of the groups that does undercover videos) to get more of a sense of what factory farms are like, and they talk about things such as that because birds are so confined, they start pecking at each other, so they chop off their beaks, and injuries and diseases etc. (you can watch the various undercover videos to get more of a sense). So then he's all "how can I prove you're not lying" and she tells him to go to these farms himself

So he goes to several of them, and even makes it know that he is on their side, but they won't let him in. He talks to James Serpell, PHD, from the Department of Veterinary Science who says "The ability to feel pain is probably something that emerged early in the evolution of animals..." the host says "So being able to experience pain is not even close to being uniquely human" and he says "OH far from it! No, it's probably almost universal in anything that has a nervous system." Then Dr. Mark Beckoff, a well-known expert on animal emotions talks about how animals of course feel joy and grieve etc. and the neurobiology and ethology support this, and all mammals have a structurally same part of the brain that processes emotions and the same neurochemicals. 

So then the hosts asks "So animals seem to be capable of experiencing physical sensations and emotions...it can't possibly be as intense as humans?" and James Serpell says "It may be more intense because for example I can rationalize my fears..." and then back to Dr. Mark Beckoff "Animal emotions could be even more intense than human emotions, because we like to say that they are unfiltered" and back to the host "Human emotions are what drive our entire lives and intense emotions...that's what life is practically, so if you're saying that other members of other species can feel and experience emotions maybe even more intensely than humans...what does that mean?" and back to James Serpell, "Well it means that we grossly underestimate the extent to which animals may be suffering...from an ethical standpoint we need to give them the benefit of the doubt, just as we would if we came across a human being with whom we had no means of verbal communication. Most of the animals that you eat are living in non-descript, very large sheds that look a bit like warehouses. They're windowless so you can't see into them and they contain thousands upon thousands of animals."

Then an undercover investigator shows up talking about how it's hard to udnerstand what animals go through unless you see it, and then they tell and show a bit more of the horrible conditions (I'm realizing how ling this is now, haha, so I'll skip over that but I hope that you look it up so that you can understand. Here's a good starting point https://www.youtube.com/playlist... ) The host goes to farm animal rescues to meet the animals who had these horrid pasts, and the lady there talks about how they all have their own personalities and have friends and mourn them when they die, and there's a chicken that was raised to be eaten who couldn't walk because of the bad conditions etc. 

There's also a part where he goes to pig farm areas and talks to locals about the environmental impact, because the demand is so high for meat that so many animals are in farms that there's soooo much waste that they don't know what to do with, so it drains off into the rivers and lakes and whatnot, causing pollution, or they spray it all around and it gets into the neighbors area and makes them sick. School children have higher rates of asthma because it's drifting into their schools. These big conservative guys are speaking out against it because of all the damage it does. One of them is dying of cancer and talks about how you can't breathe and he never wants to see a pig farm again. The host flies over the farms and sees huge pools of animal waste.

Back to James Serpell "As far as anyone can establish, pigs are easily as intelligent as dogs. They have complex social lives in the wild, they form permanent matriarchal groups..." he also talks about how in a wild state they would never chew on each others tails, but they do this in confinement which is why farmers cut off their tails, and how piglets scream when they are castrated because there's no anesthetic etc. and how gestation crates (they can't even move) for mother pigs gives them very very severe depression and certainly might be as strong or intense as it would be for humans. 

There’s more talk of the horrid conditions with someone from the Department of Animal Science, and then back to James Serpell, “Obviously the bond between mothers and their infants is very strong, not just in humans but in all mammals. In order to maintain their milk production, we have to let them have a calf from time to time. We don’t want them nursing the calves because we want the milk so the calf is taken away very soon after it is born. And this causes the cow a great deal of distress and it obviously causes the calf a great deal of distress. Sometimes the calf is put in a little kind of kennel, within ear shot of the mother, so the mother can hear the calf calling, and the cows will call to the calves...and it’s quite distressing to listen to actually.” Host: “Have you heard it” James: “Oh yes, yes.” The host also visits people with depression or who have constant pain from walking etc. to help him connect the dots to how these animals feel, and a visit to the next generation of farmers to see how people get into it.

Then there’s a section with the humane society and lawyers talking about some of the progresses they’ve made and how the animal farming industry tries to stop them. Then Bruce (from PETA) said “So when you take this idea of might makes right/I can do this to you and so I’m going to do this to you, the pinnacle of that form of bigotry, the pinnacle of that form of racism, is speciesism” and then the host realizes that there’s a deeper philosophical issue at hand. He then talks to some philosophers about the issue, such as Dr. Tom Regan, who wrote The Case For Animal Rights, Dr. Dale Jamieson, director for the center of environmental studies at New York University, David Degrazia, chair of the department of philosophy at George Washington University, Sherry Colb, a professor at Cornell Law School, Gary Francione, a professor at Rutgers School of Law, and Peter Singer, who wrote the book Animal Liberation and is a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

David: “If we think about what is most clear and certain in ethics, what basic ideas are accepted by all moral systems regardless of their major differences, it’s that we shouldn’t cause harm without very good reason.
Dale: “The Harm Principle basically says everything else being equal, it’s wrong to cause harm.”
Gary: “Speciesism is the use of species to exclude certain beings from the moral community who are relevantly similar from members of the moral community and you base that exclusion on species alone. It’s like racism or sexism where you have relevantly similar individuals, some of whom are in the moral community, some of whom are excluded on the basis of race or sex.”
David: “Speciesism as I understand it is excluding members of different species from ours from the realm of moral concern just because those individuals are members of other species.”
Dale: “The core idea of speciesism is really the same, or at least analogous, to the core idea of sexism and racism, namely that it’s a prejudice in favor of ones own kind against others. There aren’t many philosophy books that have been more significant [than Animal Liberation] in terms of changing the world and changing the people. It’s almost impossible to overstate its significance.”
Peter: “I entitled the first chapter of Animal Liberation, “All animals are equal”, and what I meant by that was that we ought to give them all equal consideration of their interests, whatever their interests might be. That doesn’t mean that you give them equal treatment because they have different interests. As long as they have interests, for example, interest in not feeling pain, it should be irrelevant whether they are members of the species Homo Sapien or (insert other species), I mean what’s that got to do with how bad it is for them to feel pain?’

So the host tries to make objections to their arguments...

Host: “Isn’t it just natural for us to use other animals?”
Dale: “Well the problem with the concept of the natural is that it means many many different things...”
Peter: “Maybe war is natural, there’s a good argument for saying that war is natural to human beings, that we’ve always done it, as long as far back as you can go. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try and stop it, that we see the cost of war, we see the suffering involved, and we do our best to prevent wars.”
David: “Rape may be natural. Rape by powerful males may be natural in some sense and biologically adaptive, but it’s about the last thing in the world that could be morally justified.”
The only person he could find to agree with him that we should follow laws of nature is a nazi.

Host: “Well...humans are smarter?”
Tom: “Babies aren’t, the mentally disadvantaged of all ages aren’t. If you’re going to say that intelligence is a basis for inclusion in the moral community and you’re going to say that non-human primates are more intelligent than some human beings but they don’t belong as members of the moral community, but those human beings do, that looks like a contradiction to me.”
Host: “Animals have no conception of morality so why should they be included in it?”
Dale: “Well infants have no conception of morality.”
Tom: “We don’t say of them, that is the babies and those who are seriously mentally disadvantaged, we don’t say “Well, we’re at liberty to do anything we want to to them. They must exist for us then.””
Host: “They look completely different from us...”
David: “They look different from us, that doesn’t matter at all. I don’t think looks could matter, just as the elephant man’s looking very very different from other human beings add no relevance to his moral status.”
Sherry: “If we’re trying to say that humans have some particular quality that distinguishes them as superior and as worthy of moral consideration compared to some other group like pigs, then I think we need to think about the fact that there are members of our human community who we think are entitled to full moral consideration, but who don’t have the quality that we think is so important, or who have it to a lesser degree than an average member of another species like pigs. Pigs are very intelligent.”

The host visits a center for those with disabilities and realizes “No matter what characteristic we think is unique to humans, a certain level of intelligence, language, the ability to form a social contract, to engage in consensual agreements, to think and act on ethical principles...no matter what criterion we use for believing that our suffering is more important, there will always be some humans who do not have that characteristic. And it’s not as if these people are included in ethics under the wire, sort of sneaking in along with the people who actually count. We believe they actually count ethically, for their own sake. I wanted to say, “But they’re human”, but that would just leave me to justify trying to drawing the line around species membership again, and the more I really thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that ethics really isn’t about any of those other characteristics in the first place. That’s why disabled humans are included in ethics. What matters would have to be the characteristics that we share.” He goes on the street to ask passersby why they eat animals and gives answers to their reasons with what he has learned, and stumps them.
 
Host: “I can’t find a logical reason for speciesism. Why is it then that I just feel like speciesism is justified?”
Sherry: “Well we’re trained from very young to think about things in that way.”
Host: “I refuse to believe that speciesism is wrong. I refuse.”
Peter: “Well, what are you saying ya know? You just...haven’t got a counter argument?”
Host: “It just can’t be. That would make the world so different. That would make what we’re doing to other animals so significant. It’s impossible that that is the case, that what you conclude is the case. There must be something wrong.”
Peter: “Put yourself in the position of a slave owner in Virginia in let’s say 1800. Such a person in that society could have said something the same about someone who produced arguments that slavery is wrong.”
Tom: “Some people, for example, just knew, without needing reasons, that white people were superior to black people. Some people just knew without needing reasons, as a matter of immediate intuition, immediate knowledge that men are superior to women.”
Peter: “In all these cases you have a dominant group. You have a group that holds power and that defines itself as superior and that develops an ideology to justify that and to exclude the others.”
Bruce: “If we had been having a discussion of slavery in the 1820s, there would be a consensus of opinion that slavery had always existed, that slavery was the natural order of things, that slavery is justified in the Bible, and that slavery is consequently moral. And now, we’re 190 years later, and society has diametrically the opposite view about slavery, in what is relatively historically a finger snap. It’s a really brief period of time, 200 years, in all of history. We now have diametrically the opposite view. What we need to do with animal liberation is get our ethics into line with our science, because we know scientifically, as Dawkins says, that other species are our cousins. We know they feel pain in the same way and to the same degree, and what we’re doing to them is a moral atrocity that is justified in the same way, and is similar to, past atrocities like slavery.

The host stops by a party for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday being thrown by his college biology department.
Professor: “And you can’t look at biology without understanding it from a Darwinian perspective, so as a biologist it has tremendous significance...with the publication of the Origin of Species and the recognition that there is an evolutionary link of all living things and that basically man was just another animal in that series, it had to have an influence on ethics and thinking about other organisms as well as the relationship of humans to other organisms. It had to have an impact.”
Host: “We might extend our basic ethical principles, our opposition to causing harm for unnecessary reasons to other species, and they might argue doing things like using animals for clothing or for food in ways that cause them suffering, is no longer justified. Have you thought of that?”
Professor: “I haven’t thought of that actually, no.”

He then goes to a lecture with Richard Dawkins to get more of an answer.
Host: “The extraordinary similarities between ourselves and other species that evolutionary biology helps us understand, do you think it has an ethical implication in term of our treatment of non-human animals? I mean in my understanding you are not a speciesist.”
Dawkins: “I think it does have ethical implications. If you think about the way in which we give special treatment to humans, for example in the case of abortion, human fetuses are treated as babies, and a lot of people think that it’s murder to abort a human fetus whereas they quite happily go and eat a cow, which of course has much more capacity to suffer than any human fetus. Chimpanzees which are pretty close to us, are not given anything like the same ethical, moral, or legal protection as humans are. Suppose there were discovered relict populations in the forests of Africa between humans and chimpanzees, what would we do, what would those speciesists do, if a live specimen of Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) were to be discovered? It’s a pure accident that they’re extinct. We ought to be able to do something about our morals and our ethics, taking account of the fact that they might not have been extinct. It shouldn’t, this major ethical distinction should not depend upon the mere accident of extinction.”
Sherry: “When we’re very emotionally invested in using other animals, we then sort of decide to have a moral principle that will support that behavior, rather than it going the other direction. If we were coming into the world on a clean slate, I don’t think the reasons that so-called “justify” speciesism would persuade us.”

He talks to astronomers about how huge the universe is and how it’s bigger than even scientists a few generations ago thought, and comes to the conclusion, “What if it really is just a prejudice? What if we’re all just here on this planet after a billion years of evolution? Could we be just one species, more powerful by luck, tyrannizing over all of the others and not stepping back to notice what we’ve been doing all this time? After all, we’re capable of it, we’ve seen it, we are genetically no different from the people who engaged in human slave trades for thousands of years, and the civilized societies that took part in genocides.”
Holocaust survivor: “As a holocaust survivor, I spent my childhood years in the Warsaw ghetto until late 1942 when we escaped to the other side. After the war, I visited some of the death camps where my family was exterminated. I was struck by the piles of hair and glasses and boots. Years later I happened to be visiting a slaughterhouse in the United States, and there again I saw piles of hearts and hooves and other body parts neatly stacked, and then I got to thinking about the highly efficient and dispassionate process that was used in both cases...that the perpetrators felt no guilt about what they were doing, that my fellow Jews were transported in cattle cars. It made me realize that the slogan we’d been using, “Never Again”, was not really about what others shouldn’t do to us...”

He talks to a vegan who talks about how hard it is to have the realization that  you are confronted with a holocaust and everyone you know is participating in it etc. and a doctor who animal tests...
Dale: “Then we ask the question,  “Would we be willing to do the same experiment on a human being who is at the same level of consciousness”, and if the answer is yes we would do it in the case of the non-human but no we wouldn’t do it in the case of the human, then that seems to expose a bias in favor of our own species.”
Doctor: “Would I put tumors into people to test? No! What do you mean why not?”
Host: “Do you put animals below human beings?”
Doctor: “That’s right I do...because they don’t make moral choices.”

Then there’s talk of groups like the Animal Liberation Front who free animals, and comparisons to how slavery used to be legal but the law isn’t always right, so freeing those slaves (even though that action was illegal) was the right thing to do.

Gary: “What is the difference between sitting around and watching dogs fight as he was apparently doing or allegedly doing (referring to Michael Vick) and the rest of us are sitting around our barbecue pits, charbroiling animals that had been tortured every bit as much as the animals that Michael Vick fights.”
*Cuts to an animal parade with blessings for animals.
Host: “What can I do?”
Peter: “The first thing you should do if you’re opposed to the treatment of animals in factory farms, is to stop supporting it, and as long as you buy the products of factory farms, as long as you consume them, or therefore get other people to buy them for you, that’s all the support it needs from you.”
Host: “So if I’m not going to buy from factory farms, what about all those humane farms I hear about.” and this is where he goes to a “free range” farm who is a supplier at Whole Foods, and I took a video of that here so I’ll just add that link and long story short, it’s not nearly as good as we think it is, with tons of birds crammed into the same room, saying that they get 3 square feet per bird (and of course the bird takes up a lot of that room) etc. etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvGGW2xNWVQ 

Gary: “If animals are to be in the moral community, then we have to give their interests equal consideration. If animals are property, it becomes impossible to give their interests equal consideration. Think about it for a second. When you are weighing the interests of a piece of property against those of a property owner, you’re always going to way the interests of property as less than the interests of the property owner. So just as in the case of human slavery, there were all sorts of laws that protected, supposedly protected human slaves, but they didn’t work, and they didn’t work because you were trying to balance the interests of slaves against the interests of slave owners.”
Host: “Somehow I had just never thought about that contradiction between considering the well-being of other animals comparably important to our own well being, and then using them as economic commodities.”
Bruce: “It’s also true that if you’re eating meat, you’re entering into a contract relationship whereby you are paying other people to mutilate animals without pain relief, even on the best farms, to slice animals’ throats open without pain relief, you’re paying people to abuse animals if you’re eating meat. So you can’t reconcile those. You can’t say “I’m somebody who opposes cruelty to animals, and yet I consider it to be acceptable to pay other people, in this mercenary relationship, to go out and slit animals’ throats for something so inconsequential as a palate preference.” It’s the ultimate subjugation. You’re literally eating the corpse of another being. It’s hard to imagine something more speciesist.”
Host: “I can’t believe I never thought of this before either. But there is something bizarre about eating an animal...eating a corpse. I wonder if people who stop being speciesists start to see eating animals the way all of us see human cannibalism.”

*cuts to a butcher shop, and then Bruce starts talking about the cruelties of the fishing industry, and Gary talks about how there’s more suffering in a glass of milk than in a steak and how vegetarianism is like saying you don’t eat small cows but you’ll eat larger cows. Shelly talks about how it’s the most horrible pain that any mother can suffer to have her child taken away from her but it’s a routine part of the dairy industry and if you don’t absolutely have to do that in order to survive, it’s hard to see how anyone can live with themselves and support that.

Host: “Other animals eat other animals...”
Peter: “Suddenly after putting down animals, they want to say “Oh well look, if the lion is going to eat the antelope then it’s fine for me to eat the cow.” but I never said that animals are a kind of moral example for us to follow. They’re just doing what they have no choice about.”
Host: “Animals are at least accidentally harmed in the making of everything probably.”
Bruce: “Well yeah, I mean that’s absolutely true. Human beings are accidentally harmed in driving every single day, but nobody is going to say “Well human beings are accidentally harmed so we should all take our cars and crash into as many people as we can. We’re not as a society going to get into a place in which we take those harms seriously if we’re still intentionally and gratuitously and for no good reason, causing animals to suffer.”
 Host: “What about plants?”
Jonathan Balcombe PHD, chair of animal studies HSU: “Plants are not sentient because there was never any need for them to evolve a nervous system. That’s because unlike animals, they’re not able to move away from harmful things. Now you may have seen a time-lapse photography of flowers tracking the sun across the horizon, but that’s just mechanics, changes in pressure in cells. If plants were sentient, it would give us even more reason to eat plants directly, to have a plant based diet, for the simple reason that it takes a lot more plants to feed animals to make meat, than it does to eat the plants directly.” He then asks another stranger on the street about meet and they say they need to for protein, so then the vegan bodybuilder Robert Cheeke is telling his story and how it’s a misconception that vegans are weaker, and how everything we need is in plant based whole foods. 

Milton Mills M.D.: “I was trained as an internal medicine physician, and I’ve spent the last 18 years working extensively in critical care. The justification that we use for our abuse and mistreatment and exploitation of non-human animals is that we deem them the “other”, as something less than we are, and being viewed as an other is something that I personally am very sensitive to because, as an African American, for a long time, this country viewed us as “other.” After I became vegetarian and became convinced that in fact a plant based diet was the healthiest diet for human beings, I definitely wanted to spend my life trying to educate people on the fact that they could live healthier, more disease-free and longer lives.” another stranger says that vegetarian food is boring and the same thing over and over again, so he cuts to a vegan restaurant with various options of classic meals made vegan. He takes some of the food and gives it to people on the street and they are surprised that it is vegetarian. Paul from the humane society makes him some vegan meats, and talks about how easy it is to get these things, and how if people were raised eating vegan meats they would be criticizing animal meats, and that we eat meat just because of habit and how it’s become normal for us, but just because something has been habituated doesn’t mean that we have to keep on doing it for the rest of our lives.

He then asks people on the street if they had lived during the time of human slavery if they would be abolitionists or just go with the majority, and they say they would be abolitionists, and then he talks to someone from Vegan Outreach, and takes about how activism has been effective. He goes to a Jewish human rights organization who use the lessons of the holocaust to educate people against the dangers of bigotry. 
The documentary ends with him expressing how different he views the world now through all of this.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Veganic/Veganiculture

https://plantbasedtreaty.org/the-veganic-way/

https://learnveganic.com/

https://certifiedveganic.org/

This was seen at Pigs Peace Sanctuary in Stanwood, Washington, USA.