I mean I think bees are harmed in the production of honey, it’s just that most people don’t care about bee welfare. Commercially they’re bred by crushing the male to extract semen, and any operation above hobby scale will clip the wings of the queen so that the hive can’t escape.

Then you necessarily need to replace their ideal food source with something that is nutritionally much worse for them (basically sugar water), and then hope that they survive on that long enough to make more honey for us to take.

Imo “backyard eggs” are really small potatoes, especially when like 98% of eggs globally come from factory farms. But even in that case, egg-laying hens are basically bred to suffer. They lay an egg every 1-2 days, compared to like once a month in the wild, which takes a huge amount of energy and nutrients. And we’ve bred them to produce eggs too big for their bodies, so that even when they’re treated really well, the vast majority of hens have bone fractures.

That’s why animal sanctuaries will usually either feed the eggs back to the hens, or give them medication to stop them from laying at all.

Of course, this is on top of the fact that 100% of egg-laying hen breeders, everywhere, kill the males shortly after birth because they can’t lay eggs. See this for more information.

Yes. No animal was intentionally harmed or killed to be turned into oil. This puts it in the same category as foraged deer antlers or cicada wings, or I guess compost where you found a squirrel carcass and added it to the pile.

You could argue that animals are harmed by the process of extracting and burning fossil fuels, and thus it’s not vegan. But this isn’t very convincing to me, since that’s a secondary effect and not necessary to the process of consuming fossil fuels. (Or at least not necessary in the same way that killing chickens is necessary in order to make chicken sandwiches, for example.) And if you start worrying about a big web of consequences of your actions, then it seems like you’re mostly just adding stress to your life without actually making the world a better place.

I agree that Israel bad, but can someone explain what the war crime is here? I’m not asking as a gotcha, just confused

“Waives” instead of “waves”

Tyson foods. They raise, torture, and kill 40 million animals per week. There’s probably no other entity in the history of our planet that’s responsible for more total suffering.

There are plenty of other spaces where vegans can respond to “plants feel pain” and “but what about lions” a million times a day, but that gets old pretty quick. The goal is to have a space where vegans can just interact amongst themselves, which necessarily requires some degree of gatekeeping

No of course not. I was mostly just trying to make the case that killing whales isn’t good for the environment, or is at least strictly worse than not killing them. The sustainability of whaling mostly refers to killing just few enough that we can continue killing them indefinitely, rather than any sort of positive effect on the environment. Clearly if we were actually interested in environmental sustainability we just wouldn’t be killing whales at all.

Did you have any thoughts about the other two points I made? I’m also curious why you’re so passionate about defending people who kill whales, since this seems like a pretty uncommon opinion.

Sure we can do that, I just didn’t want to hijack a conversation about what makes killing whales ok with a bunch of other separate considerations.

1. Whales feel pain.
2. It’s wrong to inflict pain on others unnecessarily.
3. Killing whales is not necessary.
4. Therefore, killing whales is bad.

Separately, there’s the environmental impact. No matter how sustainable the whaling is, it’s not like they’re overpopulating and need to be culled or something. Whales are important in the ocean ecosystem, and they’re good at sequestering carbon on the sea floor for a very very long time when they die. It seems pretty obvious to me that killing whales is done out of self interest (we like eating them, it’s our tradition, etc.) rather than out of some altruistic sense of duty to preserve the ecosystem, and not killing them at all would be the most sustainable solution.

And finally, I don’t know a ton about it but evidently there are some pretty serious health concerns with eating whales, that makes it seem like you could argue for not eating them (and therefore not killing them) purely out of self-interest to maintain your own personal health.

So from what you’re saying, it seems like not only is killing whales unnecessary for the Faroer anymore, but the document you linked seems to imply that it’s actively detrimental to their health.

Also this response doesn’t really engage with what I said before about the lines of reasoning being flawed. You’re painting a picture of how whaling has been an integral part of their cultural history, and that’s interesting information, but it doesn’t really relate to whether it’s the right thing to do.

So again, it’s an argument of the form “X is ok because it’s cultural and we’ve been doing X for a long time,” which I don’t think is very persuasive.

And one more thing: you’re now saying that they don’t kill whales commercially? So “Y is ok because we would be economically ruined if we didn’t do Y” doesn’t even apply, right? Or am I reading what you said incorrectly?

Got it, thanks for clarifying. I think both lines of reasoning have problems though:

1. X is ok because it’s cultural and we’ve been doing X for a long time.
2. Y is ok because we would be economically ruined if we didn’t do Y.

I can think of many things to fill in for X and Y that satisfy the necessary conditions, but still aren’t ok. I do, however, think this line of reasoning is valid:

3. Z is ok because we would literally starve if we didn’t do Z.

I don’t think any vegan would take issue with #3, since in that case Z is necessary, and vegans are only concerned with unnecessary harm.

Just to be clear, you’re no longer saying it’s ok to kill whales because it’s cultural and they’ve been doing it a long time? You’re now saying that it’s ok because they would be economically ruined if they didn’t kill whales?

I’m not trying to be combative, just trying to clarify.

Unfortunately the cheese inside the plastic wrap is going to be far worse for the environment than the couple grams of plastic surrounding it. The bigger zero-waste win would be to get them hooked on something plant based instead.

It seems like you’re willfully ignoring their point to attack them on tone. I think the parallel is that both comments are saying something of the form “I enjoy doing something that harms others, therefore it’s justified.”

Did you watch the video? I’d maybe approach with caution if not, because it deals with topics like sexual assault, but it really makes this point clear.