JC Denton
I’ve been vegan for a few years in East Asia where, believe or not, is a horrible place to be vegan (not to confuse it with south East Asia where there is a vegetarian tradition).
More than 90% of the restaurants and processed/packaged food contains animals. It is almost impossible for me to eat outside unless I specifically go to a vegan restaurant but they are only a few in the country.
What I won’t do is to bow to the society or to the brands that keep abusing animals. If I can’t find vegan snacks or a restaurant, so be it. I will cook my own food and find alternative ways.
Even vegan brands are starting to appear here, so I hope the same will happen in your country. I’m pretty sure of it since it appears to be a global tendency.
Well, the thing is that symbiotic relationships between beings of different ‘intelligence’ levels are difficult to measure.
For me an easy way of understanding this is thinking for example about the relations between adults and children or adults and people with mental issues. It is very easy for an adult to exploit/abuse them and how do we know if the ‘exploited’ part is being happy about it or if they understand what’s happening.
For me this is impossible because like them, animals cannot give us consent and they don’t understand what we are doing to them.
And of course the abuse goes beyond the ‘rational’. Animals are systematically bred to be tortured during a certain amount of time and then horribly killed. Again and again for billions of animals every year.
Veganism can be summarized as ‘Through my actions, I will directly and indirectly avoid to contribute to animal suffering in all the ways and as much as possible’. This means being against anything that was produced as a result of animal exploitation: consumption of animal parts or the result of animal labor, leather, wool, circuses, zoos, horse riding, animal experimentation and many others.
It could be considered an evolution from anti-racism to anti-speciesism.
For these and many other reasons, veganism is vastly different from being vegetarian and putting them in the same sack is a mistake.
Regarding materials, there are a ton on internet but since you mentioned bees:
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-industry
There is also a quick view of the dairy industry in youtube called ‘Dairy is Scary’.
But the ultimate compendium of animal abuse is the documentary ‘Dominion’ narrated by Joaquin Phoenix.
I think there is already a vegan community in another instance, I’m pretty sure that they will answer any questions you may have and provide guidance on how to transition if you are interested.
Very polemic the decision to group veganism and vegetarian.
Why do you think a diet and a philosophy are the same thing? I do not understand this decision and the stubbornness of it. Why are you not open to discussion?
Please explain how this makes any sense. Why not then socialism and vegetarian? or conservatism and steaks?
Veganism is not a diet. I am not making this up and can be checked by literally any source on the internet.
With this decision, you are undermining what veganism is by reducing it to a simple diet that can be grouped with other non even similar diets.
You pride yourselves that this lemmy instance is respectful and inclusive. But you are disregarding vegans and refusing to even talk about it to improve things so you don’t hurt people’s feelings.
Vegetarians can eat fish, eggs, milk, honey, etc. Vegetarians may enjoy leather clothes. Vegetarian can also enjoy activities like fishing or going to see caged animals in a zoo.
This is a small example but these activities are not vegan because it involves the exploitation and suffering of animals.
When the community is created, pictures containing food with dead animals can be perfectly uploaded under this ‘Vegan and Vegetarian’ category. Do you think vegans like to see animals that have been killed for their taste?