Not Vegan: Sperm Whale Hair Conditioner.

you already know though a lot of meat
eaters will give you this line that hunting is natural eating cows is natural eating pigs is natural and I rarely deal with it because my own approach is not based on embracing or rejecting nature to me that's really irrelevant um to use my favorite example of leather shoes I don't think we can really talk about leather shoes is something either natural or unnatural we're a bunch of bipeds that evolved in northern Africa if you ask me is it natural to raise a cow in a concrete shed under a steel roof with steel bars all around to raise a cow that way its whole life just so you can kill it cut off its skin and wrap it around your feet in the form of a shoe I think the concept of nature is completely irrelevant both ways we can't justify that as natural and we also can't really condemn it as unnatural but we can condemn it as obsolete and then we can look back there's the world and saying even if it was necessary for a thousand years to use leather for some of these products we had no better alternative or at least within Europe maybe we had no better alternative what have you different climates probably did have different alternatives but I digress whether or not there was a better alternative in history we do have better alternatives today we have better alternatives ethically and ecologically and it's obsolete so we got to look at it in that framework neither natural nor unnatural but obsolete but we've just had a mind-blowing experience of discovering a non vegan ingredient in conditioner here hair products conditioner that we would have never even have thought to look for you know I didn't think of it that way but you're right so as a vegan I have a lot of experience reading the labels on food on bars of soap on all kinds of thing but I've been shaving bald since high school so yeah that's actually really true babe know that that's part of it cuz I'm the one who reads Chinese in this relationship we're living in China I'm picking up and looking that stuff that's right but conditioner and shampoo I never gave that much thought to but it turns out there's some kind of international agreements against whaling that prevents you from using in these products all around the world but I'm guessing the People's Republic of China never signed that agreement and we discovered to our horror that the vast majority of shampoo here contains whale oil it's true China beware vegans beware alright let's let's keep it all the way real in this the first bottle we bought it was a European brand name and we blithely assumed that it would have the same kind of ingredients you would get if you bought that same brand in Europe or in the United States it's one of these brands that's around and we only found out afterward after he'd finished the bottle that it contains whale oil yeah so it's a pain in the ass in English it's a pain in the ass to go through all the green light but in a different language sure we're all a lot of the ingredients are chemicals that yes like you said these weird translations from Latin right so some of those names are meaningless in English to begin with because they're a Latin you know word with hyphens in it yeah interpreting a chemical formula like you definitely wouldn't have learned any of those Chinese that we didn't even think - yeah we didn't to translate we first bought it but right so you did have the experience for one month now looking back on it you were in effect cracking open the skull of a sperm whale and dipping your head inside the fluid that's inside the sperm whale skull it's a it's a tradition of you know perfumery and soap making that goes back to like Renaissance Europe at least that's a really ancient thing of you know killing sperm whales to make that stuff property that's right yeah but totally weird that they are still using it now it doesn't seem to be yeah something that should still be in use yeah I mean apparently I mean just Wikipedia told us there is some kind of international treaty that has made it illegal in some places and not others but apart from the question of being illegal there's this question of obsolescence do human beings need to kill sperm whales so they can have shiny hair it's it's it's just bizarre and again to bring it back this question of natural on a natural which I don't normally do how can we possibly imagine that we're a bunch of bipeds were a bunch of apes that evolved in the plains of northern Africa to peer over the edge of the continent into the ocean and pluck away allowed pluck it out bias by its teeth and crack its skull open just to dip our heads in the gooey liquid inside so we can have we can have shiny rare it's it's bizarre but to me like I've mentioned this years ago on on YouTube but you know it used to be really disturbing to me when I was living in France with my ex-wife and my daughter my daughter's no four years old all the baby food in France of course I exaggerate a lot of the baby food in France was based on veal but I'd be standing there picking through there'd be like 30 different baby foods with veal and I was picking out the one or two here were there that were just made of mushy peas or just made of carrots or whatever veal was a really popular thing to feed to babies and it was like the image of that because like the baby that he doesn't even have teeth the baby has no teeth so like in your mind's eye in terms of evolution and evolutionary biology or what's natural was normal do you imagine like a woman holding this little infant and then throwing it like a vampire bat got a cow not even an adult cow and a calf and the baby like sick thinking it's guns into this cow and tearing it apart like it's so bizarre how can you think it's natural for for kids to be even though again natural and natural or irrelevant don't get but the the images that are those yeah yeah yeah and I think that is I think it is like sympathetic magic like in the minds of the French people like because the human baby is small and weak it should eat cows that are small like I think there is a kind of yeah yeah in their minds I it makes sense to them yeah and then later they grow up in eat steak I guess right God but I mean I can't admit that there may be some redeeming qualities to some animal products of course Milly water calcium from milk but I can't think of her deeming quality of whale oil and obviously so we've got more than 1 billion people living in China and this is mainstream here it wasn't like we just picked up one brand that it was especially expensive and had it we went through more than 30 different brands then for different brands and different shops and we had brands that were apparently Japanese so know if they're imported from Japan or seizing a Japanese brand a mere brands that had European names brands that had the same names used in America like head and shoulders and all of them had this whale one well we first discovered it because we purchased another conditioner and that one once I got it out of the bag it's the the back of it's one of the ingredients was hormone so that's what I do you want to actually look at the ingredients to say wait is this actually snail hormones in English in English it says snail hormone yeah so I sat down with my phone to try to translate word by word what this stuff is made of and it wasn't snail hormone it was it was whale so we taught a class recently where we were writing the word whale on the chalkboard so I have I'm familiar with the Chinese word for whale but you're just in a state of disbelief looking at that right like and you wonder like is it just an adjective like you know like does it mean it in a in a poetic or a literary sense like and you're going to dishes like no this is literally a fluid from the skull of a certain type of whale you know sperma Ceti oil that's what used to be called in English right would you just Wikipedia we were just looking at yeah so we had this mind-blowing realization at that point and we we found out that the last conditioner you bought like a month ago or something that that also had this ingredient in it and then we're going through the shelf at all these different brands have it we eventually found just one brand that's imported from Australia that did not but this is a mass phenomenon and I can't imagine how many whales are being killed to supply China with care conditioner yeah even the Western brands great right right right and in America head and shoulders wouldn't contain whale oil but here in China it does an Oreo under the sea brand name unknown a presume at the same core corporate ownership or some kind of corporate arrangement okay you can you can write a letter but I mean I'd never become another benighted vegan quest sort of fail phase out the use of sperm well but yeah it is mind-blowing because this is not like look if I was in Hong Kong and only the most expensive shops in Hong Kong had this special whale oil for people's hair that would be kind of shocking in itself that would be like shark fin soup and you know something expensive but you realize there are only so many sharks on the planet it's not like everybody on the corner can eat shark fin but this really is this was going to several normal grocery stores normal grocery stores that had conditioner and every single brand thirty different brands maybe 50 different brands all of them have in their top list of ingredients this this extract from the corpses of whales yeah mind look I hope I'll just say as a footnote here I hope it turns out they were wrong I hope it turns out like someone finds an article on the internet saying that you know it's false advertising like the labeling is somehow old misleading or the labeling is some kind of poetic use of the term but every every single thing I looked up indicated and including the women we talk to in the shops the woman today I really said to her face to face it isn't this in Chinese they're speaking Chinese isn't this bizarre isn't this bizarre to imagine that millions of whales are being killed so that people can you know have shiny hair isn't this strange you know she was basically agreeing governement some of the women else they just had never thought about it obvious but yeah whale means whale it's not yeah so that's anyway that's that daily burden of being vegan we went to buy something like popcorn and you know you're going through the different brands of popcorn seems like every single one has you know milk protein or something added to it that's not vegan and yeah it's mind-blowing to think that something as anodyne as a bottle on the shelf you know I mean hair conditioner it just it looks morally neutral you know what I mean it looks like there's no difference in two brands but one of them is ineluctably ethically linked to this really unfathomable atrocity it's hard to imagine human beings dragging up a dead whale onto the hull of a ship with chains to crack open its skull and get this get this fluid you know I mean it's it's it's just a moral obscenity and there's another bottle next to a shelf that looks just the same but ethically and ecologically and economically is of such a different significance in such a different character so yeah [Music]