This post is about how being a vegan is not actually cruelty free. There are many other factors than just not eating meat to take into account. But just to be clear – this is not an attack on vegans or non-vegans. It’s just interesting opinions. Everyone should eat how the want to eat or need to eat. Everyone should be free to choose their own lifestyle. And most importantly everyone should accept everyone else’s lifestyle choices. You do you and mind your business.
This post also kind of ties in with the The Moral Dilemmas of Living In Our Society post about how it’s pretty much impossible to live a cruelty free live in our current society.
(via: Raegyn Jesyka)
What do you think, is being a vegan cruelty free or not? Let us know in the comments below!
Caged freedom got their dick slapped the fuck off. Sit down and shut up clown.
“I’m an idiot and wrong”
“I’m a f****** a****** for making this completely wrong text post and should shut the h*** up now””
— Veganism is MOSTLY cruelty free.
Nah. As demonstrated in the reply to CagedFreedom, it’s not ‘mostly’ cruelty free. It’s simply DIFFERENTLY CRUEL.
The game of how much cruelty each approach generates assumes that cruelty is that easy to quantify, but every instance of cruelty is going to have a different effect on the world, and the full scope of its impact often cannot be known for decades.
Veganism is not and has never been either cruelty-free or even mostly so. That’s only ever been a political slogan, because the people who’ve compounded the theories behind veganism have been ideologues with wool between the ears – people who put philosophy above facts and feels above the science.
As noted above, the amount of animal slaughter required to raise and store crops is phenomenal – often greater even in body mass terms than the raising of animals directly slaughtered for food.
To give you an idea, the total growth area required to produce 2.5 tonnes of wheat is a hectare of land.
In a single rat kill, 1000 animals are routinely killed per hectare, and they can store up to 2kgs per rat of grain in their nests – equalling 80% of the entire crop.
Each rat averages 1lb in weight – so that’s 1,000 lbs of meat from that kill-off.
Comparatively, one hectare of land can raise 7-12 sheep. Selling their offspring as lambs, and as big lambs at that, you’re looking at up to 130 lbs each – so lower estimates of 7 sheep to the hectare give us grazing returns of only 910 lbs for the sheep. Literally, more rat meat is slaughtered per hectare in a wheat field, than sheep flesh raised in the same area of open pasture for human consumption.
So, far from reducing animal suffering, cropping rather than grazing the land increases it. You’re literally slaughtering more meat to harvest grain or nuts for the production of vegan foods than if you were feeding sheep for slaughter off the same land.
Then of course, there’s the allergy issue. Most of the meat substitute crops grown to make vegan foods have high proportions of the populace who are allergic to them. To force veganism would therefore result in a catastrophic human death toll. That’s not exactly cruelty-free.
Then there’s the processing issue. Creating artificial meat alternatives is FAR more polluting than simply raising animals for slaughter. As is synthetically producing B12 supplements to replace the natural sources of that vitamin – animal products.
And of course there’s also the ENORMOUS chemical pollution that comes from the manufacture of all the faux leather and other synthetics vegans wear, because they refuse to utilise leather. Pollution that kills waterways, inflicting yet more animal suffering.
And that’s before you account for the bee die-off caused by vegans – whose demand for massive nut monocultures sees endless fields turned into almond orchards, resulting in the pollinators starving to death from a lack of dietary variation.
And let’s not forget that total vegetarians are the ONLY populace out there at serious risk of peripheral neuropathy due to vitamin B12 deficiency – a condition which causes significant human suffering. Or that one of the critical symptoms of long-term B12 deficit is a marked increase in cruelty – which neatly explains the savagery many long-term vegans direct towards the meat-eating populace on the regular.
Being vegan neither obviates nor reduces animal suffering. It only produces cruel, self-righteous people while further poisoning the land and multiplying the suffering of animals of all stripes. It’s a dangerous philosophy – ethically, morally and politically. If you wish to live by it, that’s your choice – but that choice doesn’t come with the right to claim that you’re any better a person than someone who refuses to live by such an artificial choice. The facts manifestly show that you’re not.