Please don't let your experience with vegans push you away from it. There's plenty of reasonable, kind, and understanding vegans.
Also btw, rescuing a shelter animal = vegan, buying a bred animal = not vegan.
weastie
joined 1 year ago
Him hitting you out of nowhere with a passive aggressive "are you vegan?" was not the move, but you have to recognize a bigger picture here.
When animal abuse happens, and people see it, they are disgusted by it. It makes you feel awful inside, it makes you empathize with the animal.
But when animal abuse happens and you don't see it, people don't seem to care. I mean, what this fellow did to his dog is absolutely atrocious, but frankly it's mild compared to the 25 million chickens killed daily (USA alone), who are often hung upside down in assembly lines for hours, not to mention the atrocious living conditions they had beforehand. And that's just the surface.
Rather than passive-aggressively questioning your ethics like the other user here, I instead urge you to explore these feelings you have about animal cruelty, and think about what happens even when you don't see it.
Lol I figured that out shortly after typing my comment, hence deleting it
Your very slightly incorrect internet comment has ignited me with a passion to correct you. The interval in Killing in the Name is not nine half steps, but rather a minor 9th, which is 13 half steps.
Do you ever "hang out" with her, like play games or chat about life? Are you supposed to try forming a relationship with her, or are you supposed to just assist her with her tasks quietly and politely.
I haven't managed to "convert" anyone to veganism, but I have at least helped to dispell stereotypes and spread awareness. Most people's experience with vegans is just the extremely vocal and perhaps extremist ones you find online, calling everyone rapists and murderers. And look, I understand that there is some logic behind that, but if your goal is to try to bring more people towards veganism, you won't do it by insulting people.
I've managed to convince most people that vegan food isn't gross. I offer people little bits of vegan food that I make or eat and they're often impressed.
I've dispelled myths about imitation meat being really unhealthy (not arguing it's healthy, but some people act like it's the worst thing you can eat). You'd be surprised how many people think it's some lab made nasty chemical.
I've dispelled a lot of myths (always respectfully, of course) about vegan nutrition. Most people aren't trying to be harmful, but they've heard a line or two online about how vegans can't build protein, can't get certain vitamins, etc.
Mostly, I think by just being a respectful and amicable human being, I've shown people that you can be vegan and not make your whole life about it. Most people don't even know I'm vegan until we eat together and I have to explain it. I don't want veganism to be some kind of religion or cult you have to join, I want it to just be a normal thing that people choose to do for the animals.
That being said, I do hope that I can eventually convince at least one person to become vegan, but I think trying too hard will just have the opposite effect. I'll continue to live by example and hoping people follow.
The most popular take among vegans (and this is coming from a vegan myself) is that breeding animals is awful, but adopting an animal from a shelter is great.
There's a lot of reasons that vegans are not fans of pet ownership, mostly because there are very minimal regulations in place regarding their treatment. I'm sure everyone knows someone who doesn't treat their pet well.
However, once an animal is born into this world, it already exists, and there's only two options. Either we can care for it, or let it die.
That's why vegans are okay with adopting pets but not with buying animals from mills. Buying animals from mills incentives the breeders to make more, taking them from shelters doesn't profit / incentivize anyone. Let's stop making more animals but take care of the ones that already exist.
This is an absurd take. Vegans have to sacrifice a lot. I absolutely love animals and it's insane to me that someone can't see the amount of torture and murder of animals there is out there.
I decided to cut out, as much as is reasonably possible, anything that was made by or is these animals. I don't do this because I want to feel superior, I do it for the animals. Most vegans don't do this for attention. Just because you see some vegans shouting online doesn't mean we're all like that.
Sometimes I just wanna wear an outfit that makes people laugh and smile...
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I'm a vegan and I actually partially agree with your sentiment about "quick death + no pain = maybe not too unethical", and that's actually the justification I used for a while to defend why I wasn't vegan.
Just know that this view is not inherently incompatible with veganism. Go vegan because of the way the animals are treated while they're alive. Also, most animals are not killed without suffer.
Cows for meat are possibly the only animal we eat that actually sometimes get decent treatment, if they're pasture raised with no growth hormones. But non vegans act like this is significant. Only about 3% of cows get to live their entire lives on a pasture. I would commend someone if they actually held a strict rule that they only ate pasture raised beef, but I've never met anyone like that. That would mean you could never order beef from a restaurant, you could never eat beef your friends made, etc. unless you're 100% sure it was pasture raised. Because just about every other cow had to live it's entire life in a space so small it can't even turn it's head and doesn't get to see outside.
That being said, virtually every other animal product does not have that going for them. Chicken is never pasture raised (too expensive), their lives are absolutely atrocious and the vast majority of the time they are killed by being hung on an assembly line upside down.
I'm not going to go into all the details but just know that, even if you do hold the belief that it's okay for an animal to die if it is quick and painless, that you can still recognize that veganism is correct.