or eggs or other insect parts
My understanding is most do but it’s the subject of occasional controversy.
Depends who you ask. I know a guy who’s vegan because he likes animals. I asked him about honey and he said “fuck insects”.
But opinion differs because bees are pretty much free to go about their lives and we just steal the honey every now and then. It’s not hurting them and not keeping them confined, so…
Others put the line at no hurting animals ever. I don’t ask about fleas or mosquitos or tapeworms though.
bees are pretty much free to go about their lives and we just steal the honey every now and then. It’s not hurting them
I don’t think this is entirely true. Honey bees are basically factory farmed, we don’t just go into the woods and steal honey. They are ecologically problematic as they compete with native bee species. I’m not an expert but look up how bees are being exploited for almond pollination in California for instance.
That’s a valid position, but it applies equally to most kinds of land use. Agave plantations are not less ecologically problematic. Agriculture has an impact.
Fuck mosquitos. I kill them with a passion. I would estimate I have been bitten a few million times. They’re numbing protein doesn’t work on me and I’m allergic to it. Nothing like feeling your body is on fire.
Yes.
Used to be vegan for 5ish years.
It is a grey area and personal preference. Are you vegan for morality, health, global sustainability, etc…
It depends why someone is vegan (diet, not movement).
I was vegan for health reasons, and local honey helps with allergies so I ate it.
not all vegans are the same but personally i use agave over honey
One’s an excess product that we’re literally allowed by the animal to take, the other’s a food source for an endangered species of bat
You should reconsider
Bees can’t give consent
Tell me you know nothing about beekeeping…
They literally only take honey that the bees don’t need. If the bees lose enough honey for it to hurt them, then guess what? They can’t continue to grow and keep making honey. If bees had an actual problem with it, they wouldn’t be so chill about it either
Meanwhile bats have no way of making agave. It’s just there, and then when we harvest it, there’s just gonna be less for them to have. That’s the difference
There’s no need to be confrontational !
They literally only take honey that the bees don’t need.
Bees still can’t give consent, lol
the plants you eat didn’t give consent either. nor did the spider you killed. so sit down and shut up.
Control yourself, mate. You should be able to discuss things without immediately resorting to insults. If you’re interested in talking further, I am, but only if you drop the attitude. Cheers,
if telling you to sit down and shut up aka don’t be a hypocrite is something you consider to be an insult… then you are the biggest snowflake second only to maga.
Most reject honey. There are those who don’t and there are vegans who want to strictly deny that label to those who don’t.
Eggs? That’s pretty universally rejected.
Maybe but honey is far more humane than eggs.
Depend on the eggs. Farm ? Yes, most of them are unethical. Home chicken ? Not unethical, if there are no roosters.
What makes it unethical if there’s a rooster?
It has been fertilized so, if you are vegan, might qualify as murder because th egg is technically viable. No rooster, no fertilisation, no murder : ethical in principle because you can’t stop a hen from laying eggs.
The hens I’ve met abandons most of their eggs, for most of the year. If the hen abandons the egg, it won’t grow or hatch regardless of fertilization, so as long as you only take the abandoned eggs, a rooster makes no difference in the ethics of eating those eggs.
The difference is that what I’ve heard a flock usually does better and feels better with a rooster (this may be propaganda from Big Rooster), and if you don’t interrupt the nesting process (I dont know the English word for it, when the hen lays on the eggs until they hatch?), you’ll keep putting more of the birds into the world which may not be ethical according to the person.
So positives and negatives, but no difference in the abandoned eggs.
But is this a wild hen roaming free, or imprisoned?
What’s unethical about roosters?
It has been fertilized so, if you are vegan, might qualify as murder because th egg is technically viable. No rooster, no fertilisation, no murder : ethical in principle because you can’t stop a hen from laying eggs.
You would have to be a life-begins-at-conception, anti-abortion kind of person, as well, for that.
It’s not an impossible or unnatural combination, intellectually, but demographically speaking, being radical in two directions at once is rare.
A vegetarian would be fine with a backyard coop. Vegans might say that your chickens are kind of like slaves - they make stuff for you, and can’t leave - and that’s bad.
You’re right on that, I can’t deny it. But then again, I had some vegans friends that had hens that were saved from the slaghterhouse. They had no barriers at all and their hens roamed free. Yes, a hen is a product of human selection, and on that aspect the line between ethical and practical is really fine and more suitable to philosophical debates, but since the hens were saved, they were better off their fate and in that regard, harvesting eggs was not an act of torture per se. But I’m not a vegan and can’t speak for them, just give an insight on a non-dicheotomic point of view.
Yes, a hen is a product of human selection
Actually, layers are pretty close to natural red junglefowl, as far as I can tell. It’s not like turkeys or cows, where they can’t really exist in the wild. Although, the wild sucks too…
I’m in the picture FWIW, as a vegetarian who’s cared for backyard hens. They seemed fine and happy, if a little bored in the winter, and were pretty great and easy-to-care-for pets. If there was any money in fixing the gender ratio problem, that bit about what happens to the male chicks would probably be solved, as well.
Turkeys do live in the wild
That’s an interesting aspect that I hadn’t considered. It brings the question of “does life begin at fertilization” into this.
“honey, I’m home!”
shocked gasp “I want a divorce!”
I know a vegan who has ex-battery hens as pets. She’s against taking eggs away from them because it may cause distress, but often they’ll lay an egg wherever they happen to be, and walk away. Those ones are fair game because the chickens have abandoned them, and they need to be collected before they rot in any case.
That’s stupid because chickens don’t give a shit about their eggs. It’s a good idea to feed them egg shells to give them back some nutrients but you have to smash the shells up because if they recognise the eggs as food they will enthusiastically eat their own freshly laid ones.
Also, there’s a distinct difference between normal and brooding behavior. A broody hen gives a shit about her eggs (well, not specifically her eggs just the concept of sitting on and hatching eggs) but if they aren’t fertilized it rapidly becomes a problem. And they’ll lay another in a day or two regardless.
I find this one interesting. I knew a farmer who only had hens and so all of the eggs were unfertilized.
Of course, its always possible that there’s some sort of immaculate conception and a hen will lay a fertilized egg, but I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.
Parthenogenesis is rare, but it can happen in chickens
They’re against domestic animals as a concept, so you’d think. The basic idea is that animals are independent beings, and benefiting from them, with the massive power imbalance in play, is wrong.
Vegetarians are just against slaughter as a practice. And then you might land in between, if you don’t like the way battery hens are treated, for example.
They’re against domestic animals as a concept, so you’d think.
Except the great many vegans who keep pets, as if that was somehow different.
I’ve wondered about the pet thing too and I am vegan.
I’ve brought it up a few times with people and most of the replies were that the pets they had were rescues or strays, so looking after them was better than not, which I kinda get. Vegans who own and ride horses are weird as fuck though and I do not understand their moral stance at all.
Personally, even though I really like playing with cats, I am deeply uncomfortable with owning a being for my entertainment,and said being relying on me for its survival. So I am not having pets.
I don’t share your principles but I have to respect them, it’s nice to see a consistent position instead of carving out self-serving allowances.
I’ll start with the fact that I am not a vegan, but I have a cat because a cat walked into my house. She has had several occasions where she could leave and chooses not to (or once she peaces out for three days and came strolling back like nothing happened despite my fiance and I being totally distraught).
There’s been a lot of Japanese studies showing insects aren’t so dumb recently. Same with fish.
So I’ve ranked them up and don’t consume honey anymore. I already considered fish sentient before the recent studies anyways but now I’m validated lol.
Some do, some don’t.
I suppose they should probably avoid products that use shellac as well.
- hard candy
- chocolate
- gum
- ice cream
- popcorn
- pretzels
- cookies
- cakes
- pies
- vitamins and supplements
Honey: some do, some don’t.
Eggs: Vegetarians eat eggs and drink milk. Vegans don’t, that’s the whole definition.
Fun fact, in India vegetarians specifically don’t eat eggs (they do have dairy). People who are that sort of vegetarian and also eat eggs are referred to as eggetarian instead. I was told that this is because the eggs might be fertilised? Not sure how they farm eggs in India. In the country I live in laying hens live in a completely separate facility from any males so there is 0 chance of an egg being fertilised. That’s possibly why eggs are always considered vego here.
I would be more interested in knowing if commercial honeybee pollination is vegan ok or not, and the same with buying boxes of bumble bees to pollinate inside greenhouses.
