this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2023
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Vegan
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An online space for the vegans of Lemmy.
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My two cents: "being" vegan is overrated and subtly shifts the goalposts from reflecting and acting upon serious ethical questions to policing each others' adherence to an imaginary pure ideal. I say this as a vegan btw.
So for example, I reject the idea of veganism as "avoiding animal-derived products as far as practicable" (paraphrasing the exact definition). I.e. if I'm stuck on an island with zero plant foraging skills, and I then catch some fish out of our necessity, I'm not vegan. It's just that simple.
But I'm not going to feel bad about that fact and guilt-trip myself into inertia. Maybe the fish help me survive long enough to learn to identify edible plants, learn to climb trees to get coconuts etc. Over time, I'm able to completely eliminate my fish intake and rely on plants. So the initial fish helped keep me alive long enough...to protect scores of their fellow fish!
If I'd obsessed over being vegan everywhere and at all times, I'd ignore the ethical possibilities right before my own eyes, and possibly even conclude that the most ethical thing was to starve to death -- all in the name of being recognized as "vegan".
If you solely focus on individual acts of killing, you tend to forget that death is a part of life. It's impossible not to kill, to be honest -- just as it's impossible not to be killed. We often forget that latter part. It goes both ways.
One notorious example I've encountered is when people go vegan for the "wrong reasons". Say someone learns about the extremely morbid effects of meat & dairy, and then chooses to go vegan. I've heard people say that these people have no right to be "vegan" and should call themselves "plant-based". In either case, the ethical effects on animals are basically the same, except that maybe the "plant-based" folk have a couple of animal-based non-food products around the house.
I'll skip a few steps here to share my own broader position, which is that it's consequently possible to have relations with animals that are reciprocal and not merely exploitative. People have practiced such relations all around the world for millennia.