this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Honey can be vegan. I have a friend who keeps endangered bees and as an unintended side effect of fostering their growth has honey that she has to give away because she doesn’t want it
Genuine question, I would like to know if there is a reason. Why doesn't she just let the bees keep it?
The bees make more than they need. They'll keep filling up cells till there's no room for larvae then swarm. That takes a while but in a meantime, the honey sitting there attracts pests and predators that can harm the colony.
And this is where I have problems with strict veganism. Animal husbandry can be ethical and beneficial to the species. Animals do produce excess nutrients that can be reused for other animals (culling chickens to feed carnivores for example) and some byproducts can benefit humans in a non exploitative manner.
The real issue is capitalism. Or the exploitation of others for personal benefits.
I believe it’s to encourage them to increase numbers, but I haven’t discussed that with her. She’s the type of nerd I know probably has a good reason so I never asked
Isn't that vegetarian, not vegan though?
"It's complicated".
It's the same category of dispute as the "eggs or milk can be vegan under certain circumstances" one. The argument is that rescued farm animals have been so warped by human intervention that it's actively harmful for you to not use their produce - dairy cows can in rare cases die, and otherwise will just be miserable, if left unmilked. Chickens lay too many eggs, and leaving unf. chicken eggs in the coop can lead to the chickens learning to eat their own eggs, so you have to remove them. (I don't hold a position on these claims, I'm just reporting what I see come up in the argument.) Bees fall into the same sort of category, they've been so selectively bred that they now produce far more honey than they can possibly use, so removing and eating some of it helps to mitigate the negative impact that humans have had on the creatures.
Regardless though: cows, chickens and bees are all still animals. I don't think any vegans are gonna argue that one.
Seems like a weird thing though. A lot of domesticated animals can't survive in the wild. And even the ones that can, it would only be in certain parts of the world, and they'd be an invasive species.
So do we want all of those animals to go extinct? If you eliminate all farm related activities with these animals, give them a place to live out the rest of their lives, but then what? But do you not allow them to breed? Or just let them all die off so they go extinct?
Or do you keep some of them in zoos? Given they've been bred to live on a farm, does that mean you have zoos that are identical to farms? And if you can get milk, eggs and honey from these animals if they're technically living in zoo (which is exactly like a farm in every way) what's been accomplished?
This is a very common argument and it's a little shortsighted, because the answer is broadly "yes". Reducing the number of cows/chickens/etc in the world is a net positive, and would only require us to stop force breeding them like it's some kind of degenerate poultry hentai. Allowing the species to reduce in population is only of benefit to the species (cough humans cough) and is overall desirable. Keeping some in zoos would be fine, maintaining the native wild populations is also a good plan, small scale farms ("family" or "hobby") farms where they don't brutalize the animals is also a feature of most vegan utopias. Take india, where most of the population is vegan: there are still cows on farms, cow-derived produce is still available, it's just the cows aren't kept in American-style stock farms.
YMMV, and like any ideology there are other opinions with equally valid outlooks, this is just what I see most often. (full disclosure, I am not a vegan (there's plenty of evidence to that in my post history), I just sleep with a lot of vegans and quite like chana masala)
(There's also a pretty... sane... subgroup that proposes 'corrective breeding'; a process wherein we undo the destructive changes humans introduced to the species and return them to what would be found in their 'natural' state. "Contentious" is probably the best description.)
Most indian population is definitely not vegan. there have been various surveys that show the percentage of the vegetarian population is between 23% and 37%. That means 63% to 77% are non-vegetarian. It's a myth, a big one, that India is mainly a vegetarian country.
Not even the majority of Indians are vegetarians, much less vegans.
Very poor word choice on my part, I will freely admit that. The veg population of inda in is roughly larger than the entire US population, which is the much more useful statistic. I'm also aware that the vast majority of people who eat a vegan diet do so for economic reasons. Sorry about that.
Many Indians I've worked with are sort of semi-vegetarian, eating meat but only on certain days. I think that's specific religious doctrine rather than a general attitude about animals - like Catholics eating fish on Friday.
Excuse me sir/madam, but I'd request that you respect the preferred literary sub-genre of some without resorting to terms such as "degenerate". Poultry Hentai may not be overly popular and only have a niche following, but it truly is an art form in and of itself. Whether it's "2 hens, 1 cob" or the better-known "Lady Chookerlee's Lover" it truly does represent a formidable contribution to the art.
I cherish you.
~~But probably from a distance. Chickeboos aren't the best for, you know, close-up cherishing.~~
~~You know why.~~
Don't even get me started on Bawk-kake...
Damn. That's a good one!
Indian economics and laws regarding dairy produce their own sort of hell. If the unwanted non producing animals aren't smuggled across the border for slaughter, they're abandoned and left to starve due to laws about culling. Nobody's really feeding unproductive animals except for the goshalas and there's nowhere near enough of those for India's dairy cattle production.
Yeahhhh... I was drunk and I probably could have thought that example through better. My apologies.
Yeah I feel like that is just forcing animals to live in the way humans want them to live under a weird assumption that we know what they want.
I could live out in the wild if I really wanted to, but I don't because living in a heated home, having access to healthcare, and having a grocery store nearby is way better than starving to death, getting frostbite, dying of a disease, or getting eaten by wolves. I don't know how an animal wants to live their lives, so who knows, maybe they'd rather die of disease over being poked by a few needles by a veterinarian, starving because there's no mangers filled by humans, or getting eaten alive by a pack of wolves. Maybe animals want that, but there's no way of knowing and it's a really weird thing to assume given humans don't want to live that way. We live happy an fulfilling lives without having to constantly worry about being eaten by wolves, why would that be a requirement for an animal to be happy?
I think people see nature from a Disney cartoon perspective where the only danger is a human hunter. But the reality is nature is extremely brutal.
I don't think a perfect ethical solution to domesticated animals really exists. Best we can do is just treat animals better. If they seem like they're happy enough, then that's probably alright.
The response I've heard for that one is that domesticated animals are dependent on us because we've bred their survival capabilities out of them. People originally just captured wild animals and put a fence around them. Selectively breeding only the more docile ones has turned them into something they wouldn't have been without our interference. To me that part makes sense, but the present reality is still what it is, and what you're saying is still true.
Playing devil's advocate, this could be sidestepping the issue, because the honey is only an unintended side effect from your friend's POV, not the bee's.
So, if they were endangered cows and your friend didn't like milk, the milk would be vegan..?
Well veganism is about reducing suffering. If the cows didnt suffer to produce that milk, like no forced insemination, calfs aren't separated from their mother, male calfs aren’t slaughtered, the cows don’t have unnaturally large udders, you only take the over production and not steal the food from the calf and the cows live a good life then you could argue that the milk is vegan. But milk is not produced like that so milk is not vegan.