but-is-it-vegan

[but-is-it-vegan]

“We are fighting until every cage is empty, not until every cage is comfortable.”

—

Animal Liberation Front (via earthling-liberationist)

Animal rights ≠ animal welfare.

(via aloneveganreed)

[but-is-it-vegan]

“Animals do not ‘give’ their life to us, as the sugar-coated lie would have it. No, we take their lives. They struggle and fight to the last breath, just as we would do if we were in their place.”

— John Robbins 

[but-is-it-vegan]

People: *make offensive anti-vegan jokes, joke about animal suffering, shit on animal activism, shit on vegans and treat vegans like shit on a regular basis*

People: I have nothing against veganism! I don’t hate vegans at all! Why are vegans getting so upset, anyway?

[but-is-it-vegan]

Source

[but-is-it-vegan]

I have some horrible news to vegans, there's actually alot of non-vegan/animal products used in building houses :(

alot of the more "non-toxic" and eco friendly installation is actually wool, shellac is used to seal and stop woods from scratching and drying out, animal fats and such are used in resins and sealants.

not to mention more I don't even know.

so if your building a house (I doubt) you will probably want to know this.

I'm so sorry for this sad PSA

Ah don’t worry, I don't think you'll encounter many vegans who don't already know that many of the products we use in our daily lives involve animal exploitation. That is part of the reason why veganism is defined the way it is. Your car, your home, your job, your medications, your furniture - it is near impossible to live a lifestyle that is truly cruelty free. Vegans avoid exploitation as far is possible and practicable.

The fact that we can't reasonably avoid all animal products is a problem for vegans since we reject animal exploitation, but it's not something that in some way makes veganism impossible, or makes vegans hypocrites. We are not dogmatic, our ideology is actually very sensible and flexible. If there is no viable option for an item or a process that is realistically a necessity, then you go for the best option you can. That's not only true of veganism, it's also true of just trying to make ethical choices in general.

There is no need to be sorry, anon, you're not telling vegans anything that we don't already know. Pointing this out is not going to make us feel bad about the choices that aren't ours to make. We live in a non-vegan world where the exploitation and abuse of animals is ubiquitous in all facets of our lives, which is precisely what makes our animal rights advocacy so important.

Thank you for raising awareness for the cause though, take care of yourself!

[but-is-it-vegan]

there is soo much amazing vegan artisan cheese out there like....

yes, most of them are not very widely available and still quite expensive (though its getting better) but it absolutely exists. and if they were to receive a fraction of the funding that the dairy industry gets, i'm sure they could expand more quickly!!

the idea that you can only make good cheese with mothers milk is just wrong, humans have been making plant based cheese for centuries!

[but-is-it-vegan]

Recent studies conducted in Europe and North America seem to suggest that when honeybees are introduced into urban areas they can outcompete the wild bees.

In Munich, an increase in hives in the surrounding area reduced the number of wild bees recorded between May and July in the city’s botanical garden. Similarly, in Paris, fewer wild bees were observed when more hives were introduced across the city. The findings were echoed in Montreal, which between 2013 and 2020 witnessed a twelvefold increase in hives from 250 to almost 3,000. Sites with the largest increase had the biggest drop in wild bee species.

(…) Honeybees are livestock, like pigs and chicken. And just as keeping chickens won’t save wild birds, honeybees won’t save wild bees, and in some cases could be contributing to their demise.

[but-is-it-vegan]

Source

Begging everyone to stop asking this rhetorical question and, instead, demand our elected officials do something about it

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The agriculture sector has spent millions of dollars on discrediting plant-based diets, a new report has claimed.

The report, published by the consumer advocacy organisation Freedom Food Alliance on Thursday (29 February), found that multinational meat companies and lobby groups were using industry-funded research, public ad campaigns and educational materials to sway public opinion on meat and dairy.

[but-is-it-vegan]

Israel is intentionally starving Palestinians and should be held accountable for war crimes – and genocide, according to the UN’s leading expert on the right to food. Hunger and severe malnutrition are widespread in the Gaza Strip, where about 2.2 million Palestinians are facing severe shortages resulting from Israel destroying food supplies and severely restricting the flow of food, medicines and other humanitarian supplies. Aid trucks and Palestinians waiting for humanitarian relief have come under Israeli fire.

[but-is-it-vegan]

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out on desktop, click your blog ➡️ blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

to opt out on mobile, click your blog ➡️ scroll then click visibility ➡️ toggle opt out option.

if you’ve already opted out of showing up in google searches, it’s preselected for you. if you don’t have the option available, update your app or close your browser/refresh a few times. important to note you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)

[but-is-it-vegan]

CLICK HERE TO GO TO EKO.ORG AND SIGN THE PETITION TO STOP THE SPANISH OCTOPUS FACTORY FARM! The petition still needs 1/3 of the 750.000 signatures

[but-is-it-vegan]

Is it hypocritical for people who used to be "anti vegan" to someday become vegan?

Hypocrisy is claiming to have higher moral standards than you actually do, by contradicting those professed standards through your actions. Realising that you were wrong, admitting it and changing your behaviour is not hypocrisy. It is growth, it is what good people are supposed to do when they figure out that they’re in the wrong. The world would be a much better place if more people were willing to be wrong.

[but-is-it-vegan]

I know you have talked a lot about leather. But what’s about wool and fur like are those materials really that lang lasting and sustainable?

Long lasting? Sure, but that doesn’t mean sustainable. ‘Long-lasting’ and ‘biodegradable’ have been seized on as marketing for what are about the only corporate green buzzwords you can legally apply to these wildly unsustainable products that make them sound vaguely sustainable. Anti-vegan tumblr of course, does their advertising for free.

The massive environmental harm caused by grazing sheep, who have converted vast swathes of formerly forested land into ecologically dead wastelands, is difficult to overstate. Grazing animals are widely acknowledged as one of the most significant barriers to forest restoration and re-wilding.

Sheep are called ‘the white plague’ by some ecologists for good reason. Just take a look at what has happened to most of England and Wales. That isn’t even factoring in the methane emissions of the sheep themselves, their resource requirements, or the fact that farmers routinely kill predators to protect their herds. Not to mention the fact that modern production and dyeing processes make much of the wool we buy not actually even biodegradable.

The vast majority of fur is farmed, and farmed fur is no more sustainable than plastic is by just about any available metric. From getting the animals to slaughter size in the first place to the production processes, toxic run off, preservatives, it is nonsense to call fur sustainable. So much so that a campaign from the European Fur Breeders' Association which claimed that it is ‘eco-friendly to wear fur’ was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, as the group could not provide adequate evidence that this was true.

It is just utterly depressing how much corporate propaganda that otherwise intelligent people are willing to swallow just because it confirms their existing bias and supports the choices they already want to make. Let’s be honest, nobody is buying a fur coat, a leather jacket or choosing wool over cotton because they did the research and decided it was more sustainable.

People buy animal fabrics because they like the way they look and feel, then find ways to justify it according to their existing values after the fact. Hell, they barely even talk about the sustainability of fabrics outside wanting to criticise vegans for being somehow solely responsible for the existence of plastic clothing.

[but-is-it-vegan]

strawberry date 🍓

[but-is-it-vegan]

I love being vegan. Reblog if you also love being vegan.

[but-is-it-vegan]

You have all just got to come to terms with how laughably simplistic it is to dismiss legitimate critiques about modern wool production with catchphrases like ‘Its just a haircut, it doesn’t hurt them!’

Wool is ‘just a haircut’ in the same way that cocoa is ‘just a plant.’ Yes, you can acquire chocolate without harming anyone, but is anyone dismissing the obvious ethical issues with modern chocolate production by pointing out that cocoa doesn’t require us to hurt anyone to acquire? Of course not, because we all recognise that because of modern production practices and exploitation it is far more complicated than that. Why can’t we do the same for animal products?

Shearing a sheep does not have to harm sheep by itself, though fast processing speeds demanded by commercial producers means that shearing injuries are very common. That isn’t the issue with wool. The issue is that wool production by itself is not very profitable, profits are subsidised by taking lambs from their mothers every lambing season, then slaughtering them for meat. The issue is that sheep will almost always be slaughtered once their profitability declines., Most farmers cannot afford to house and feed unprofitable animals.

Tail docking is an issue, de-horning is an issue, castration is an issue. The live transport of sheep for hours in all weather extremes without food and water is an issue. Breeding sentient beings into bodies that over-produce wool, eggs, or milk to the point where they require human intervention just to be comfortable is an issue. Exploiting the bodies of animals for profit is, in and of itself, an ethical issue.

The massive environmental harm caused by grazing sheep, who have converted vast swathes of formerly forested land into ecologically dead wastelands, is difficult to overstate. Grazing animals are widely acknowledged as one of the most significant barriers to forest restoration and re-wilding. Sheep are called ‘the white plague’ by some ecologists for good reason. Just take a look at what has happened to most of England and Wales. That isn’t even factoring in the methane emissions of the sheep themselves, their resource requirements, or the fact that farmers routinely kill predators to protect their herds.

All you do when you dismiss these real concerns by pointing out that ‘wool doesn’t hurt sheep duhhh’ is show us how little thought you are willing to put into what is a far more complex issue than any of you are willing to admit. That these cringe ‘shave your sheep’ posts still get tens of thousands of shares is evidence of nothing so much as widespread ignorance and confirmation bias when it comes to discussing animal agriculture.

Honestly, so many of you have been so brainwashed by this cottagecore pastoral fantasy that you’re no longer able to apply any real nuance or analysis to animal issues. I’m not expecting you to immediately agree with us and throw out all your fleeces, but at least recognise that it’s not as simple as saying ‘shearing doesn’t harm sheep you morons.’

At the very least, you should all be able to recognise that vegans aren’t just stupid for not immediately agreeing that an environmentally destructive, ecologically disastrous industry that is breeding and exploiting sentient beings for profit is just uncomplicatedly fine actually.