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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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I've never understood full veganism. Is it not morally okay to consume animal products (such as milk or eggs) from actual free roaming and happy animals? And not the BS marketed "free range" products in the US.
Say I have 10 acres and keep a dozen or so chickens to roam around and eat all the ticks on my property, is it morally wrong to eat their eggs?
Society doesn’t work on edge cases. But for the sake of argument:
If that’s all the animal products you eat, these chickens are not selected through the common practice of grinding male chicks, the hens are going to die of old age, etc etc etc - for what I’m concerned you’re vegan.
Veganism is about ethics, not diet. Diet is a mere consequence. Lab grown meat is more vegan than coconut gathered by enslaved monkeys (yes it’s a thing).
So if you fine one such farm where animals are never killed or otherwise exploited then by all means, eat those eggs and call yourself a vegan. But something tells me you won’t find it.
Adding to this - I really want to emphasize how much of an edge case this is.
Around 60% of the world's population lives in urban environments, and only ~10-15% of the population works in agriculture where one might expect to encounter a scenario like this.
Living on 10 acres and raising chickens who you hug every night before bed and treat with the utmost respect is a nice ideal to strive for, but it is not achievable for most people, and there is no scenario where we maintain global meat & dairy consumption levels ethically/sustainably. Treating it as a viable solution is disingenuous because it's only a solution for a limited few.
There's a lot of those places in my area, at least for chickens. Not so much for dairy cows.
A lot of places where all chickens die of old age and males don’t get killed as chicks. Really. Go to one of those places then, check the hen/rooster ratio (should be 50/50) and ask them what happens when hens no longer lay down eggs. Do let me know please.
I'm not Vegan, so I can't speak for them, but here's my understanding
if you live in an urban environment, it's basically impossible to get what you're referring to. Maybe if you were willing to have it shipped to you at great cost and not insignificant effort, but the only thing available at stores in the US is the BS marketed "free range" stuff. And even if you find a place that claims to be the real deal, how do you verify? Basically, it's easier for most people to just go Vegan then to seriously vet every source of animal products
Additionally, many vegans believe it to be a genuinely healthier diet than an omnivore diet. And please don't respond with " we evolved to be meat eaters" or something like that, because we didn't "evolve" to do practically any of the things modern life entails, including a lot of what we eat. Beyond that one BS counterargument though, I make no claims as to whether they're right. Anecdotally, my sister in law suffered from IBS her whole life until she went Vegan, when the problem went away entirely. So it certainly has benefit for some people
Finally, for a lot of vegans it's an issue of consent - some might say that you shouldn't eat those eggs in your example for the simple reason that they don't belong to you, and you can't morally take them, because theres no way to ask consent, and so you shouldn't. Again, you don't have to agree with the outlook, but that's the way several vegans have explained it to me.
If any actual vegans come along and think I'm misrepresenting something, feel free to correct it
more or less sums it up. Source: vegan AF
@bitsplease @Poem_for_your_sprog Pretty much. Just also want to add that if we want to make eggs or dairy a staple of our diet (especially dairy), it requires essentially treating other living beings as factories to be abused until they die. Like, cows don't continuously produce milk all the time, right? They have to give birth and *then* they start producing milk (like literally every mammal). So if we want milk on demand, we need to keep cows continuously pregnant, clearly abuse.
Wanted to add a few arguments I saw about eggs, first that we selectively bred chickens to produce eggs at an extremely high rate (unsure what this does to their well-being, but apparently the laying itself is painless). Second, the chicken's eggs could be seen as the "work" they do in exchange for keeping them healthy and happy.
The eggshell requires calcium. At the rates at which modern egg laying hens ovulate, their bones become far more fragile to siphon it. That is to say that their ability to self sustain and survive for the total lifespan of a chicken is greatly reduced.
Thats only if you arent feeding them a regular source of calcium.
Which would happen to literally any animal not properly fed.
Supplements and well managed diets do help, but of the available data, it looks like 12-35% are still deficient depending on area of the world. I checked for studies in USA and Europe. And of course, once that's determined for particular chicken who end up producing thin shell eggs - they get killed.
And ultimately, they've been bred to rely on said diet and supplementing. Vegans are against breeding as it is, let alone breeding them to be dependent.
Almost all domestic animals are dependant, thats how mutualistic symbiotic partnerships work. Humans are only recently arguably capable of abandoning that dependance, none of our symbiotic partners can match that. Im really creeped out by what youre implying here, we shouldnt kill off our evolutionary partners just because we dont need them any longer.
And.... "Bred to rely on said diet" is a crazy thing to say, no? All animals rely on their diet. Some breeds of chicken have a higher calcium intake requirement, but so do some breeds of human. Not an excuse nor reason to drive either extinct.
Homie the problem with breeding them like this is selecting them to ovulate 300 times a year so we can steal their excretions.
Symbiotic relationships don't involve human breeding intervention. Least of all when it's for selecting traits that come to the animal's detriment. I'm not opposed to rescuing animals or providing accomodations for animals facing extinction so as to safetly raise young with minimimal human interaction.
You know what else isn't a partnership? Slitting their throats. Which happens to these chickens. Thats creepy. Assuming you aren't Vegan, which I don't think you identify as much, idk why you care if they go extinct - because you want to keep eating them? I just don't see good faith framing in your interpretation of what I said at all.
You in the wrong sub my dude. No one asked them to unbirth themselves. More bad faith shit. They slit their throats. Really fucked up that you are okay with that. Weird priorities youve got in the Vegan subreddit. Dumby dumb dumb I am telling you that forcibly breeding them is immoral. Anyway bye carnist.
This is such an unhinged response
Carnism is unhinged. I.e. your lifestyle is unhinged.
Aight eugenicist
Thats cute. Keep up with the animal holocaust animal abuser. Force breeding for human desired traits is itself literally eugenics.
Youre illiterate or a troll, eugenicist
Thanks for the info, that makes a lot of sense.
When they are kept happy and healthy I personally don't disagree yeah, but frankly how many of us here actually get our eggs from sources like that?
If I were ever to go Vegan, I probably wouldn't mind eating eggs laid up in environments like that, but I also don't blame vegans who'd rather just simplify things by cutting it out entirely than having to morally evaluate every egg they eat
Yeah definitely impossible for a lot of people. I live somewhere that I can do this and even get eggs from those people. Mmmm tick eggs.
I think there's some information you don't know about milk and eggs: milk is produced by forcing a cow to be pregnant (they call the rack they tie them to for breeding the rape rack), and then forcibly removing her calves from her and stealing her milk. It's terrible. And eggs are forced to be produced by grinding up male chicks so that females produce more. It's honestly terrible.
You are intentionally ignoring what they said about hens on their own property.
How do you think the cow would get pregnant or where you'd get the eggs from?
I get eggs from our own chickens. Six chickens and a rooster. Hatched them myself, originally had two roosters. The other rooster went to a local petting zoo which had some hens, but their rooster had died.
By the way, six chickens lay a lot of eggs, more than a family of four eats.
But where did your chickens come from? They were sorted by sex and the males thrown in a grinder.
They just told you they hatched them themselves.
The chickens they hatched from did not appear out of thin air.
So we need to make chickens extinct, because at some point in their genetic history they might have been abused? Its impossible to treat someone well if there is any history of abuse in their lineage or ancestry?
If thats the ideology of veganism, you are worse than eugenicists.
I got the eggs from my neighbour across the street. He also doesn't own a grinder.
Do I need to promote my chicken's lineage back to before they were domesticated?
I'm referring more to small farm chickens or chickens that are basically pets (they still plop out tons of eggs). All of the factory farmed products are definitely terrible.
And to clarify I'm not against veganism at all, just curious where/why lines are drawn.
They are selectively bred to overproduce eggs which shortens their lifespan significantly. Also they cannot consent to you taking their eggs away, in the same way it is wrong to steal from someone else.
People are vegetarian and vegan for a variety of reasons. There is also no reason people need to live their life confined to a label. The labels are helpful for quick understanding, such as ordering meals and discussing these topics, but people are more varried than labels.
I've been a full vegetarian for over 22 years but before that I only ate meat that I hunted or fished myself. I didn't call myself a vegetarian then, but ordered vegetarian when eating out. I probably had similar ethos to some including a dislike of the commercial meat industry, while others would still abhor that I was harvesting my own meat from the forest.
So what I would say to your question is why do you worry about attaining the label of vegan? If you or someone else is sourcing animals in a way that you feel is ethical, then simply be a conscientious consumer who orders vegan when eating out. As a bonus, you sidestep all the confusion around the label and the different reasons people have for using it.
A cousin of mine literally owns chickens and won't eat their eggs. I don't get it.
What a weirdo. I know someone who's dog died at a prime age and they didn't even eat it.
Idk man eating eggs kinda weird ? You eat spider eggs?
Eating plants is kinda weird too. I mean, do you eat hard wood?