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submitted 4 months ago by Angel@hexbear.net to c/vegan@hexbear.net

It's funny to me because it reads like a satire of non-vegans, but this is literally how most of them are.

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[-] hello_hello@hexbear.net 29 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 27 points 4 months ago

how is a society of nearly 8 billion people supposed to feed their families with animal use?

I'm always saying this!

I do kind of give them credit for thinking about this in term of animal labour isn't vegan, honestly. It's not a great point all in all but I bet we can get this person

[-] Angel@hexbear.net 17 points 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure "with animal use" is a typo, by the way. They meant to say "without animal use."

[-] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 20 points 4 months ago

It is, yes, but it makes that whole post even more hilarious

[-] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 22 points 4 months ago

I think this one post just filled out my bingo card.

[-] carpoftruth@hexbear.net 20 points 4 months ago

It's missing my uncle's farm but yes still about as dense with memes as lentil loaf is with protein

[-] TheWolfOfSouthEnd@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 4 months ago

It’s also missing the bit about vegans killing bugs with pesticides.

[-] peeonyou@hexbear.net 13 points 4 months ago

look at the big brain on that poster.. glad they put so much thought into it so we don't have to

[-] mendiCAN@hexbear.net 10 points 4 months ago

never trust the words that come after "honestly" or before "but"

[-] ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net 9 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] Angel@hexbear.net 16 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 months ago

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

[-] Angel@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago

No, not really.

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.

[-] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 4 months ago

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

[-] Angel@hexbear.net 12 points 4 months ago

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?

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[-] Nacarbac@hexbear.net 11 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] Dessa@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

Is veganism generally against animal labor? I thought it was just the eating that veganism was about

[-] Angel@hexbear.net 21 points 4 months ago

Veganism is opposed to all animal use—it is a principle against animal exploitation, not a diet.

[-] Babs@hexbear.net 16 points 4 months ago

I don't even like my own job, I ain't gonna turn an animal into an employee.

[-] GalaxyBrain@hexbear.net 13 points 4 months ago

Slavery is bad.

[-] ThermonuclearEgg@hexbear.net 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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 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 nerd )

[-] Angel@hexbear.net 16 points 4 months ago

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:

  1. "We have moved away from studying human disease in humans … We all drank the Kool-Aid on that one, me included … The problem is that it hasn't worked, and it's time we stopped dancing around the problem … We need to refocus and adapt new methodologies for use in humans to understand disease biology in humans,"
  2. Across the board, human genes and their corresponding mouse genes only responded in the same way 50% of the time— a statistic that could easily be explained by random chance.
  3. In 2004, the FDA estimated that 92 percent of drugs that pass preclinical tests, including “pivotal” animal tests, fail to proceed to the market. More recent analysis suggests that, despite efforts to improve the predictability of animal testing, the failure rate has actually increased and is now closer to 96 percent. The main causes of failure are lack of effectiveness and safety problems that were not predicted by animal tests.

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.

[-] Dessa@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago

I would expect that of this community, but what I'm wondering is if this is common outside of marxist spaces

[-] GalaxyBrain@hexbear.net 10 points 4 months ago

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.

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[-] MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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