:vegan-liberation:
Welcome to /c/vegan and congratulations on your first steps toward overcoming liberalism and ascending to true leftist moral superiority.
Rules
No plant-based diet bullshit or promotion of plant-based capitalism. Veganism isn't about you, it's about historical materialist anti-speciesism, anti-racist animalization, and animal liberation. Ethical vegans only.No omni apologists or carnists. Babystepping is for libs, and we're not here to pat you on the back. Good faith questions and debate about how to fight for animal liberation are allowed.No advocating violence to any species for any reason. If you think this is negotiable GTFO. This includes but is not limited to animal testing, slaughter, and mass euthanasia. Anything that promotes speciesism or the commodification of animals will be removed.Use Content Warnings and NSFW tags for triggering content.
Especially if a comrade requests it.Questions about diet belong in c/food. It's also a great place to share recipes.In all sections of the site, you must follow the Hexbear.net Code of Conduct.Resources
Animal liberation and direct action
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Vegan 101 & FAQs
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Take B12. :vegan-edge:
It's funny to me because it reads like a satire of non-vegans, but this is literally how most of them are.
bet if you asked this person why so much of the world still has to use like, oxen and not tractors they would have no clue
never trust the words that come after "honestly" or before "but"
look at the big brain on that poster.. glad they put so much thought into it so we don't have to
Idealism vs. Materialism in a nutshell. "Plant rights" and "universal principle of non-use"
We have big tractors to plow or fields in the west but most of the world still gets their vegetables the old fashion way, animal labor.
Wait till this person learns about migrant labor in the USA and where their fucking vegetables came from. All carnists are idealists, veganism is the only actual science here.
That doesn't even get into the ideas around plant rights, plants are literally living thinking things so why is it okay to use them
I agree, agricultural practices should definitely be changed so that plants and the animals in their ecosystems are being treated ethically.
I don't know necessarily that a tree is actually sentient but if we seriously consider it, perhaps that might lead to better environmental conservation practices as a matter of ethics.
I don't know necessarily that a tree is actually sentient but if we seriously consider it, perhaps that might lead to better environmental conservation practices as a matter of ethics.
They most likely are not sentient, as we currently understand or can perceive, though the complexity of the networks formed within a forest might, might, allow for something like it in aggregate. Consciousness is deeply strange, for something that should be so familiar.
But as Angel says, here it's just a paralytic deflection. Like saying that eating plants is stealing from the animals that could eat them, therefore we're already sinners, therefore we might as well sin some more.
Plants aren't sentient, but regardless, this person bringing up "plant rights" is just a deflection. We could handle environmental issues far better if we get rid of the nightmare that is animal agriculture, as that is fucking up the planet more than anything else. Natural ecosystems would be better for both plants and animals because we'd be without the problem of clearing vast amounts of land to grow crops to feed animals who are also responsible for a shitload of carbon emissions.
While I don't disagree about animal farming being terrible, it's impact is significant but not the top of the list by any means. Energy production dwarfs all other polluters by a large margin. 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and tons of toxic pollution. Construction is next because of all the toxic byproducts. Transportation is also worse. Agri-industry accounts for around 15% of GHG with a lot of pollution generated from food packaging. After that it's the fashion industry. While there is definitely some room for reassessing the impacts due to methodology, it's a roughly accurate list.
Not trying to minimize, just contextualize.
This seems to be neglecting the fact that animal agriculture absolutely requires a ton of energy production. It's not just happening in a vacuum—it's tied to things that you mentioned like transportation and fossil fuel usage. Also, as far as the point about transportation goes, just to be clear, the "local meat is more environmentally friendly than a vegetable that is transported across the world" take is not true.
This table covers environmental impact of many factors.
The story's subtitle declares that transportation costs of shipping foods to consumers is not a significant factor compared to whether those foods are animal-based (a lot of CO2 emissions from land use, farming, animal feed) versus plant-based. "The distance our food travels to get to us actually accounts for less than 10 percent of most food products’ carbon footprint."
Here is an actual high quality version of the image.
I was simply going by impact assessments of impact by industry types, obviously nothing happens in a vacuum. This is why I said there is room to reassess impacts. The stats that I was referring to try to take into account overall usage, pollution and other factors. Everything is linked in systems which is why it's difficult to get perfectly accurate pictures of things yet it IS possible to have a decent set of data to guide decision making on how to best course correct. Moving to renewables, building housing made to last generations instead of 20 years, public transportation powered by said renewables, reducing/eliminating meat consumption, growing locally, banning single use plastics etc.
I know the ethical and moral considerations are important. I agree with animal liberation entirely. I just take issue with presenting animal agriculture as THE single most damaging environmental practice, which it just isn't. Being factually accurate is important and misrepresenting the issue is harmful to the overall cause of environmental justice.
i believe incorrigible was talking about transportation as in like, everyone driving around gas guzzlers, not the transportation costs of food
and i would like to see a source about how much of energy production goes into animal agriculture vs plant agriculture vs everything else, all this other stuff is irrelevant to what @[email protected] was saying
Yes, the categories have crossovers and the stats attempt to take those into account, as difficult as they may be to separate entirely. Transportation includes shipping across all categories and moving humans by car, plane, etc. I am certainly NOT advocating eating meat or anything remotely like that. I DO want to make accurate statements and have others get accurate info.
Animal agriculture will undoubtedly be more costly to the environment than plant agriculture—that's for sure. And who knows? Maybe I was missing something about other sources of energy production being more costly than animal agriculture, but especially with the sheer scale of it (over trillions of animals exploited and slaughtered every year), it is very destructive regardless.
However, irrespective of any environmental concerns about certain things possibly being worse than animal agriculture, the exploitation of animals ought to be condemned from an ethical standpoint anyway, and ultimately, even if there are concerns about environmental destruction in other ways, reducing our negative impact on the environment by doing what we can as individuals and finding solutions on a broader scale would not preclude going vegan anyway, so it remains a moral obligation.
Animal agriculture will undoubtedly be more costly to the environment than plant agriculture—that's for sure
i have no doubts, not trying to argue otherwise
However, irrespective of any environmental concerns about certain things possibly being worse than animal agriculture, the exploitation of animals ought to be condemned from an ethical standpoint anyway, and ultimately, even if there are concerns about environmental destruction in other ways, reducing our negative impact on the environment by doing what we can as individuals and finding solutions on a broader scale would not preclude going vegan anyway, so it remains a moral obligation.
wasnt trying to argue about the morality of anything, sorry if i came across that way
Plants aren’t sentient
that's actually fairly contentious, some researchers argue that they might be
though my answer to the "what if plants turn out to be sentient after all?" thing is i'll cross that bridge when and if we get to it
We conclude that claims for plant consciousness are highly speculative and lack sound scientific support.
A few "experts" who arrive at their beliefs off of vibes rather than science may say they support the notion of plant sentience, but it's not taken seriously as a scientific idea.
Non-vegans also don't believe it. If anything, they just throw it out as a disingenuous excuse to alleviate guilt.
Something I ask non-vegans who say this stuff [NSFW]
If plants are to be sentient and that therefore makes exploiting animals for food and eating plants morally equivalent, would you consider using a cucumber as a sex toy to be morally equivalent to bestiality?
In every case, they dodge the question and act as if they don't understand the relevance.
the "experts" are botanists, they aren't like just random people and the idea has been published in scientific journals
and yeah, of course non-vegans are being disingenuous, that's what they do
Can you a cite a source, though? I've seen non-vegans cite sources and arrive at the wrong conclusions because they misinterpreted the sources. For example, they think that responding to stimuli is an indicator of sentience, but it's not. I feel like you are assuming far too much good-faith when it comes to this debate about plant sentience. Just because an idea is discussed and seems controversial doesn't actually mean that it's truly contentious with in a scientific context. Not all "debates" are genuine, and not all "controversies" are scientifically valid, and this is really just a "We have to validate both sides" kind of framing. Can you please demonstrate to me a single reputable botanical source that endorses plant sentience?
my 2 cents is that we dont understand nearly enough about consiousness/cognition to say (i dont have the time to look right now, but i remember reading about people somehow receiving some sort of vague memories when they receive a heart transplant, which suggests that cells themselves might have memories in some fashion), but this isnt the comm for it because like you say most people use the "plants are conscious" to justify their own meat eating
Is veganism generally against animal labor? I thought it was just the eating that veganism was about
Slavery is bad.
I don't even like my own job, I ain't gonna turn an animal into an employee.
Veganism is opposed to all animal use—it is a principle against animal exploitation, not a diet.
This community supports animal liberation as a matter of ethics. To use a definition borrowed from Wikipedia:
The animal rights movement, sometimes called the animal liberation, animal personhood, or animal advocacy movement, is a social movement that advocates an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and an end to their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries.
I would expect that of this community, but what I'm wondering is if this is common outside of marxist spaces
It depends who you talk to. The original definition was coined by people who were originally classified as vegetarian but opposed drinking milk and had conflict within their organizations because of it. Thats how The Vegan Society came about and who the definition of the term was expanded by.
Veganism as a philosophy has always been against all animal use where practicable (commonly conflated with practical), meaning it recognizes that it may not be possible for every object you own to be fully absent of animal exploitation under the present societal conditions.
Many people who call themselves vegan erroneously apply this solely to diet though and especially non-vegans will do this since their common perception is of veganism as a dietary restriction rather than an ethical philosophy.
In every day, I would assume someone I am talking to who says they are vegan will also not own leather items, etc. In practice, people will use all sorts of reasoning to bend these rules, such as keeping objects they owned before they were vegan, arguing it was bought second hand, etc. So outside of places like this and vegancirclejerk, you'll find a lot of variety.
Yes, generally speaking, veganism is specifically a boycott of the animal agricultural industry. That means, no leather, no wool, no silk, etc.
If you're talking about the diet, technically that's called "true vegetarianism" ("traditional" vegetarians are called ovo-lacto vegetarians).
Basically all vegans are true vegetarians, but not all true vegetarians are vegans.
That'll vary quite a bit person to person. A lot of people who are fegsn are also just woo new age hippie weirdos who do it for health reasons and don't give a fuck about animals. I've met many 'vegans' who eat honey cause bees aren't directly harmed in it's making but like...if you buy eggs from.someone who's nice to their chickens that's kinda the case except chickens blast off a lot of nutrients into their eggs and tend to eat their unfertilized ones to get it back, think of how full you are off an egg vs what a chicken generally eats, that egg is tsking a lot out of the chicken and if you eat it they can't get it back. Similar with honey, they didn't make it for us, it's not ours to take.
if you eat it they can't get it back.
presumably the chicken in this scenario (i.e. someone who's nice to their chickens) is being fed more than enough food for this not to be a problem? do chickens care if you take their eggs? if they dont im not actually 100% sure what the problem is in this extremely rare situation lol
There is something to be said about the commodification aspect of it, i.e., taking the eggs and using them still reinforces the mentality that animals exist for us to use them. The problem with the relationship between humans and animals is that humans view animals as resources to use for their own benefit. Veganism is not welfarist—it is abolitionist, and it recognizes that these things that belong to other animals are not ours to take. These chickens should not exist in the first place, but if they're on a sanctuary, they shouldn't be viewed as a means to a human's end. The guardian should take care of them the same way they'd take care of a child, expecting nothing in return. Having the thought to use the egg in the first place is the problem. If a non-vegan came across some tarantula eggs, there's a reason why they most likely wouldn't think to make use of them. Similar things could be said about consuming roadkill—some people would argue that vegans should approve of it because of a consequentialist outlook, but the thing is that veganism, as a principle, rejects the commodity status of animals, period, and with roadkill, we notice that it's typically brought into question only concerning certain kinds of dead bodies such as deer corpses specifically. Why? Why wouldn't someone think to consume a human corpse or a dog corpse they find lying around? Mindset, the mindset that oppresses non-human animals.
There is something to be said about the commodification aspect of it
do you know another term you could use beside commodification? im not entirely sure what you mean, humans have been using animal agriculture since before class society even arose, let alone capitalism ofc which is where my mind wants to take me when you use "commodification".
generally though, i will say i think this whole argument is not very strong. in this example (which is admittedly very small/irrelevant in that this is essentially intellectually masturbating lol, but anyways the vast, vast majority of animal agriculture is under the pressure of market forces and you have to be pretty well off to have backyard chickens anyways) the chicken is not on a sancutary and is like someone's backyard pet chicken or something like that. non-vegans dont think anything about tarantula eggs probably because they're not tasty and/or nutritious.
as far as roadkill, putting aside that this is again mostly intellectual masturbation and that the vast majoirty of people arent going to eat roadkill if for the sole reason that the meat will probably have started rotting by the time you get to it, i think that is probably very regional as far as only being deer. where i live i have heard more than deer being used as roadkill in the rare cases where people actually eat it. i dont particuarly want to open up the dog/cat/human/etc. meat can of worms rn
i guess i'll end off with this kind of argumentation seems especially weak to the "nature" argument, and while i think that argument is easy to brush off usually (i.e. wild animals do SA do you think humans should? no? then why are you bringing "nature" up?), in this case (that again is intellectual masturbation lol) a savy person will bring up symbiosis. many species do symbiosis, and it's often even unbalanced because one side is getting more than the other/putting in way less effort etc. like, for this chicken example it seems like the problem to me is more so that we are probably getting way more out of it than the chicken is and maybe causing it undue stress (making this comment before i clarify with galaxybrain). an example that i think is way better would be a guard dog. even today, i think a work dog like a guard dog is probably receiving so many benefits compared to what it is giving that it would be better to consider that a "symbiotic" relationship
cw: cannibalism
im vegan but i still have a curiosity to try out ethical human meat (i.e. friend gets body part amputated and we cook and eat it), does this make me insane or?
"Commodification" here refers to viewing animals as property, resources, or objects for human benefit—not just in a capitalist sense, but as a fundamental mindset that reduces sentient beings to objects or things to be used.
Framing this as a non-sanctuary scenario makes it worse, not better. Where do these backyard chickens come from? Almost certainly a breeder or farm that exploits them as egg-laying machines, meaning their very existence is rooted in commodification. The act of keeping them for eggs (even "kindly") reinforces the idea that animals exist to serve humans.
On tarantula eggs: The point isn’t about taste or nutrition—it’s about mindset. Nobody considers exploiting tarantulas for their eggs because they’re not culturally conditioned to see them as commodities (at least for that purpose). Veganism seeks to extend that baseline respect to all animals, rejecting the idea that chickens (or their eggs) are exceptions.
Regarding roadkill: You’re dodging the core analogy. The question isn’t "Why don't most people eat roadkill?"—it’s "Why do some people consider deer roadkill 'acceptable' but recoil at the idea of eating a dog or human corpse under the same conditions?" The answer is objectification. Society assigns arbitrary value to animals based on human utility, not inherent worth. Veganism rejects human supremacy outright.
This isn’t symbiosis—it’s domestication under oppression. These chickens are the result of centuries of selective breeding to turn them into egg-producing machines. Jungle fowl (their wild ancestors) don’t lay nearly as many eggs. The truth is that humans manipulated their biology for selfish gain. Calling this "mutual benefit" is like arguing slavery was "symbiotic" because slave owners provided food and shelter. Oppressors don’t get to define the terms of the relationship.
Guard dogs? Same issue. Domestication is human supremacy in action—breeding animals into servitude and pretending it’s "for their own good." Veganism isn’t about tweaking exploitation to be kinder—it’s about dismantling the very mindset and system that treats animals as tools to begin with.
They do. As I wrote, they gotta blast out an egg worth of nutrients and thst came from somewhere. A lot of chicken energy went into it so they eat their own eggs to get it back. The stuff chickens eat is fairly low nutrition but they eat a lot of it so to replace an egg worth of lost nutrients isn't really practical with the corn and grain and occasional worm they eat cause chickens also blast out eggs constantly. Their tummies get full and it takes time to process all that grain, if they're not chomping their own eggs back down they're gonna be malnourished
They do
just to 100% clarify i moreso meant if it upsets the hen with my original statement.
The stuff chickens eat is fairly low nutrition but they eat a lot of it so to replace an egg worth of lost nutrients isn't really practical with the corn and grain and occasional worm they eat cause chickens also blast out eggs constantly.
ah i thought they just ate that stuff because that's all people normally give them (i.e. shit low nutrition food). so i had been thinking if you fed them higher nutrious stuff it would be fine lol. i also thought the chickens that blast out eggs like that were factory farm ones, i was unaware normal chickens are like that too.
There has never been a 'normal chicken'. Chickens as they are have never been wild animals.
i suppose i should say im comparing it in my head to those monstrosity ones like they make for chicken meat that grow up super early and super fast and just suffer their entire short lives because of how fat they get in such a short time. i had figured they did something similar with egg focused chickens.
i didnt know chickens were so domesticated tho, what were they domesticated from?
to add to this point, taking the chickens eggs interrupts their laying cycle, causing them to produce more eggs introducing potential health problems and iirc shortening their lifespan
from reading like this seems like even the fantasy of having a backyard chicken isnt really ethical either!
I understand the obvious moral quandaries that come with using animals in lab testing, but what are the alternatives to that? There's only so many willing people. (I mean this in good faith I'm not trying to 
)
The thing is multiple sources* show that animal testing isn't even reliable to begin with. Much of it is totally unnecessary, especially since the results you'd get from testing on animals does not serve as a good representation of how a medicine would affect humans.
*Examples:
Some alternatives have been thought about, and these would include things like extracting cells from consenting humans for lab-grown tissue models and running trials on consenting humans in cases we can ensure no risk of lethality or harm.
Ah okay thank you! Looks like I have some reading to do.
