Okay, not the best example. He’s alright. I couldn’t think of any but I was demonstrating the gist of the question.

I’ll start; Ricky Gervais is kind of a douchebag/bully. Yes, he’s vegan.

Rule 2: Being outspoken about animal rights or the environment isn’t a negative quality.

I should clarify I’m mostly asking about a specific well-known vegan and something negative about them unrelated to their veganism.

Well primarily vegans don’t eat honey because it’s a form of exploitation of animals (bees). This can carry ethical as well as environmental issues.

This goes into some of the reasons why vegans typically avoid honey:

https://www.careelite.de/en/why-vegans-dont-eat-honey/

TL;DR:

▪︎ Bees make the honey for themselves ▪︎ Honey production is exhausting ▪︎ We manipulate the animals for the honey ▪︎ Honey bees are exploited in mass breeding ▪︎ Bees are injured and die ▪︎ Honey is not particularly healthy ▪︎ There are plant-based alternatives ▪︎ Wild bees are important for biodiversity ▪︎ Bees are living beings and not commodities ▪︎ Wild bees are essential for the survival of us humans

And here is the Vegan Society’s page on honey:

https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-industry

Hope that helped :)

Well that’s simply not true, I actually counted the practices I referenced and at least 14 out of 19 are standard practice in just about every dairy operation, are unavoidable on a large scale, and the other ones are extremely common as well. Also, thinking “the west” is better for animals is really misguided, since the US, Australia and the UK have some of the worst animal welfare standards in the world, and for example 99% of animal products come from factory farmed animals in the US. While more streamlined in developed countries, by all accounts, other countries aren’t quite as cruel toward animals as most western countries. This does have a lot to do with the fact that wealthier nations consume a lot more animal products than poorer nations on average. Take that as what you will. I’m not trying to point fingers at specific countries since every country in the world treats animals terribly in farming systems, and it couldn’t be any other way while we as a society are all consuming these products that need to be mass produced for a (rapidly increasing) human population.

I reacted to your comment because it was the first and only comment I saw that supported using milk. I only said I’m not a robot to explain that by my human nature, I didn’t read every comment, and I only have a limited amount of time that I would spend on social media like this in general, let alone this specific comments section. And also, making the point once is probably enough for a lot of people to see it. My goal was achieved already. I’m sorry to single you out, or if you felt that was unfair. Rest assured, I blame everyone for supporting animal agriculture equally.

Nice false appeal to hypocrisy to deflect away from the issue of animal exploitation, and blatant whataboutism. 2 wrongs don’t make a right. That’s a terrible argument.

“Hey, stop beating kids!”

“BuT I sAw yOu UsInG a SmArTpHoNe!”

So as per your own admission (pretty much any device you could be using), that’s essentially unavoidable in the current world we live in if you want to be a functional person. Are animal products avoidable? Yes.

That said, I bought my phone second hand from someone who doesn’t have an incentive or means to sell more. So I did not financially support any of the practices involved in the production. And only once it breaks down completely, my next phone will be a Fairphone, which is essentially the only ethical phone and didn’t exist when I got my current phone. What’s your next argument? Oh wait, all the arguments against veganism/defending animal exploitation are just bad faith, rubbish attempts to avoid addressing your own behaviour anyway.

Am I a robot? No, I’m not going to reply on every comment. I guess you care more about nonsense arguments than animals, the planet and your health.

I don’t use Facebook lol. I’m glad we agree that dairy farming causes severe suffering for cows and their calves, hugely impacts climate change, and that we need to stop doing it for their own benefit, and ours.

All of these practices still definitely happen on various farms around the world, especially in factory farming, and the worst of them are the standard practice. For example, cows make breast milk for their baby calves, not for humans. It’s exploitation by its very nature for humans to steal that milk. In almost all cases, the calves are denied the milk, separated from their mothers and killed for veal. Cows are artificially inseminated to keep them continually pregnant to produce milk, and have been selectively bred to overproduce so much that it very often causes them mastitis, lameness, spinal issues and destroys their bodies over time; sometimes they collapse completely. Once they can no longer produce milk, they too are killed for cheap beef at only 4-6 years old when they can live until 20-25. Any exception to this is rare, still involves immense harm to cows and calves, and can’t provide enough dairy for everyone (especially for cheese, which uses 10x as much milk than milk itself).

Dairy farming is unsustainable and cruel, and the products are unhealthy for humans and contribute to inflammation and disease. Lactose intolerance in adulthood was the natural state of humans for a reason. The lactose persistent gene is an unnatural adaptation and doesn’t prevent the health impacts of dairy.

Taking our anger out on innocent animals and harming the environment and your own health because of a comment on the internet is the sign of a strong mind.

By consuming dairy, you’re funding these abuses done to innocent dairy cows:

1. Restraint / Restricted movement

2. Repeated Artificial insemination (anal and vaginal rape, sexual abuse) and forced pregnancies

3. Electroejaculation (Forced ejaculation, anal rape, sexual abuse)

4. Dehorning / debudding (cutting / burning off horns, without anesthetic)

5. Ear tagging (no anesthetic)

6. Tail docking (cutting off the tail, no anesthetic)

7. Branding (no anesthetic)

8. Nose ringing (to prevent the baby calve from suckling, no anesthetic)

9. Udder singe (burning an udder to remove the hair, no anesthetic)

10. High stocking density (cramped, unhygienic conditions, infections go untreated, shit everywhere)

11. Cannibalism (Blood and Bone Meal, How do you think Mad Cow started?)

12. Separation from child (calves) immediately after birth (so we can get that milk)

13. Killing of calves immediately if deemed unprofitable (throat slit alive, bolt to head, hammered to death)

14. Veal calves (Social deprivation, tight confinement, and restricted movement [to keep the meat tender], killed at 4-6 months of age)

15. Growth Hormones and antibiotics

16. Induced milk production through selective breeding and hormones (Leads to mastitis, milk fever, early death)

17. Pre-Slaughter Transportation and Starvation (Exposed to elements in extreme winter cold and summer heat, purposefully starved to decrease risk of fecal contamination)

18. The murder of someone who does not want to die (bolt in the head, throat slit, skinned alive)

19. Killed at only 5 years old on average (natural lifespan is 20 years)

Cows milk is for baby cows!

If you dislike these practices, you can easily stop funding them by going vegan.

Yeah :/ On the bright side, they’re presented as a pretty “cool”/attractive character and it also exposed a lot of people to the idea of veganism in the first place. I liked the fact that a lot of people heard this line said by a vegan character in a mainstream movie: “I partake not in the meat, nor the breast milk, nor the ovum, of any creature with a face.” (The ‘with a face’ part was unnecessary, since there are faceless animals we don’t eat/exploit either, but good enough)

This anime doesn’t particularly interest me otherwise (it’s multiple episodes), I already saw the movie and it was just ok. The “vegan powers”, “vegan police” stuff is something I never hear the end of from other people, though. “You get 3 strikes before the vegan police catch you!” “Vegan police!” “No vegan diet, no vegan powers.” “Chicken parm isn’t vegan?! Gelato isn’t vegan?! It’s milk and eggs b-” “Being vegan makes you better than most people” yada yada. That movie (Scott Pilgrim vs the World) is honestly where a lot of people get their first exposure to veganism from, and something they gravitate to whenever the subject comes up. In my experience anyway

Does it have any one-liners likely to be referenced by people? Like the ones from the movie

That’s fair, I guess I would just hate for people to read it and take the absence of any description of how the dairy cow-human relationship is a horrific, unjust, exploitative and oppressive one to mean that dairy farming is acceptable.

If we really are exploring that relationship genuinely and without obscuring facts, the suffering dairy cows experience at the hands of humans must be acknowledged.

To be honest I shared this with vegans who I thought might relate, it wasn’t something I typically say to non-vegans, because in my experience, they make fun of vegans before they would allow themselves to truly engage with the idea of animal suffering/exploitation/killing etc by humans. So I would probably modify my language to be more facts-based and make them aware of the problems with animal farming/exploitation. If I see a living, conscious animal, that’s immediately a “friend” to me and I respect them, so all animals are friends. I hope this inspires more kindness to them. But for others, the idea of that might seem worthy of ridicule.

I understand the resistance to “appealing to emotion”, but I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing as a whole; if we’re sure that being vegan is the right thing to do, then appealing to people’s emotional side with how they view animals could be a useful tactic. Perhaps it would need to be less vague however, such as “animals are sentient, complex beings” rather than friends.

I would argue saying “think of the children” while holding up an image of an aborted fetus might be a bit of a misrepresentation of reality rather than just an appeal to emotion, at the risk of offending someone. Undeveloped, unconscious fetuses aren’t equivalent to “children” or fully formed, conscious humans in the sense we typically understand it (e.g. a sentient human woman who would truly suffer from an enforced pregnancy), but it might lead people who don’t know to believe they are. I don’t think anyone really thinks I’m personally friends with every farmed animal who gets abused and slaughtered as a result of people’s animal product purchases, so I don’t think it’s misrepresentative to call them friends as a general term of endearment for all sentient life.

But I take your point, I really do.

“Hello my friends” (says to complete strangers), or “My friends over in x country” (where you don’t actually know anyone), for example. Wouldn’t it also work in the human context, even if you don’t know the individuals personally? Just wondering. I’ve heard “friends” used to refer to people you care about simply because they’re humans and you acknowledge their (even theoretical) existence. So why not non-human animals as well?

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I appreciate what you mean. I wonder what it is about the phrasing. Calling them friends is too much? It’s a term of respect, that’s all. I care about my friends, and I care about animals. Friends not food.

I agree people are in denial about what they consume and what they do, and it’s so sad. And I think you meant this anyway. But just saying, I think this can apply all animal products, not just meat. Which is important since I think dairy and eggs are the most cruel industries of them all.

Why exactly? Don’t they have empathy for animals?

Checks notes: is a plant, has egg in the name. Yes.