Vegans don't own pets: domestication and evil.

now I've been looking at the works of a
guy by the name of a bass may CL I - yang I'm sure a lot of people familiar with his works he's been blowing up along with YouTube's lately I subscribe to this dude man I'm tough to pronounce but I'm gonna try so a Bosley seal is wrong you can't dismiss it cuz that's still substantial Bosley seal he's wrong once I watched the entire video and I heard this guy Goggins I could see where I was coming from he made some really salient points and that's what I like about this guy forces you to think about your default position forces you to examine partly pal paradigms and I mean one of the things I love about his name abet a vassal seal is the whole ideology behind that name is apparently if it means tearing down the skies this take-no-prisoners mentality where you simply just tear everything down you don't care about aligning yourself with any ideology you're here to shake things up and that's what I like to do that's what I try to do on my podcast hey um the reality is that vegans are deeply divided in the year 2016 about what the status of pet ownership is supposed to be on the moral status of the investigation of animals I'm gonna read two comments anonymously from people on Facebook you will see in a moment here these are such typical comments if you know but what's going on in veganism and animal rights that if you don't believe they're from real people well it doesn't really change anything if I hate these up there to sort of representative comments that just show that these debates are really ongoing right now I'm then again I comment for a moment about what I think of as sort of the historical perspective for these issues and then I'm gonna tell you what I think so first and foremost I was a bit stunned to seeing a question that was posed about the morality of owning cats dogs and other house pets and the morality of feeding meat to them the following comment comes from a vegan so this is a member of a vegan group he identifies as vegan at the end of this comment you may think he's speaking but he defines himself as vegan and that that is significant that does count he self-identified it's vegan he comments why not own animals question mark I've never felt that dilemma as a vegan that having animals is wrong I've adopted for cats I used to work at an SPCA do my cats eat meat question mark of course they do do I feel wrong about purchasing their bag of cat food no I would never deny them what they need I live my life as a vegan and make ethical and healthy choices for myself but also have to make the right choices for my animals I think companion animals are amazing to have whatever the kind is I wish I could tell you I felt any sympathy whatsoever for this guy's point of view on the show I wish I could tell you this was in any way a mixed bag for me there was any ambiguity here you identify as vegan but point one you think there is nothing wrong about owning an animal as property point number two you think there is nothing wrong with buying a metal container with the chopped up pieces of the corpse of a cow inside so you can feed it to your pet cat you you think there is nothing wrong with paying another human being to kill a cow cut up its pieces put it in a bag or metal can so you buy it you pay them for that service to feed it to your cat apparently so you can live out the fictional fantasy that in nature a house cat would be killing and devouring cattle you know can you even imagine in nature a cat you know a domesticated house cat eating sheep you know get real you know a pack of wolves can kill and eat his sheep anyway but what happens in the wild is irrelevant because we're talking about domesticated animals now I notice this guy I just clicked on his about me information he actually is an employee of a veterinary clinic so now his views within veganism animal rights today I wish I could say they were wildly eccentric probably his views are more common than mine are probably he's just much more open than most people are that comment was made within the last 24 hours by the way it's a current example probably a lot of vegans live with the kind of cognitive dissonance he's describing right there Hey look it's not even cognitive dissonance for him it's just in my opinion he's he's wrong to me that's unbelievable but it shouldn't be it should be completely believable to me as I said years ago the reality of veganism is that it is internally fractious and fragmentary and these are not minor trivial differences these reflects real debates real issues real misgivings about what the future of veganism should be what the future of animal rights should be ecology or the future of our society should be and also with the basic ethical premises of veganism so the second comment I wanted to read I believe the sills are from a man there was a young woman asked a question about being vegan and riding horses again this is from within the last 24 hours and she stated that she's vegan but she thinks it's okay to ride horses under some circumstances and this fellow responds with wTF is wrong with some people you cannot exploit one species and still call yourselves vegan horse riding is 100% not vegan ffs there is an absolute ton of science out there proving that nearly all horses riddance ever suffer from spine injuries practically all of them stop hurting horses full stop so here I mean it's interesting what this you know brings to mind for me is instead the sort of historical long view of how different our position is in asking these questions now then it would have been 100 years ago 200 years ago five and years ago a thousand years ago 1000 years ago no matter how morally you might be opposed to domestication of horses the existence of your society the ability of your society to defend itself against invaders would have absolutely relied on domesticated animals like horses sometimes like elephants to the use of animals in war and if you didn't make the compromise to domesticate these animals you would quite likely be invaded and conquered and wiped from the face of the earth in the year 2016 none of that is true anymore and what I've just mentioned is really just information that belongs in a museum but for that same reason I also look at horse riding or any of these things as wondering well look in the future like in the next 50 years what is the significance of horse riding going to be it's just not possible that horses are gonna replace the motorcycle it's not possible the horses are going to replace cars or trains or even bicycles at this point so outside of a few places that resemble museums you know historical recreations or what have you what would the role for domesticated horses in society be so although I agree in principle and obviously you know riding horses is not vegan beyond that I also have to ask well you know what is the 22nd century going to look like nobody thinks the 22nd century is gonna have horses you know pulling carts down major roads or people relying them on transport or for war or for anything else so the whole framing of the questions are different and by contrast the vast majority of human beings on earth absolutely do assume that in the 22nd century people are going to keep cats as pets and they're gonna buy little metal cans that contain cows that have been chopped up and killed and put into that can to to provide meat for that that pet can so the debates are very much unsettled and very much ongoing and dicey and real and the people involved do not have a settlor unified notion about what being vegan means but what the ethics of veganism mean and so on when I think about the role of domestication of animals in our society today in the future and in the ethics of veganism ecology and animal rights I think the most important referent the most important point of reference to keep in mind is the wild is the wilderness itself the question of how well a horse is treated on a farm is irrelevant the question of how happy or seemingly happy your pet cat is is irrelevant the question of how much you love your pet cat is irrelevant and I think what I've just said really is deeply unpopular and deeply unsettling even to people who consider themselves committed vegans and who may live with some of the strange and incongruous compromises I've just mentioned whether that's riding horses or buying meat to feed their cat or heating other vegans who ride horses and by me to feed their Kaz that's a kind of contradiction also in your life if you're vegan and you're part of a social movement with people who differ with you on those fundamentals back when I was a child there was a famous singer called Michael Jackson and among the things that made him famous was that he owned a pet monkey I think it was a chimpanzee I could be wrong wrong about these species and every so often a journalist would ask him what happened to the chimpanzee because he had it for awhile and disappeared it was a question of did he own one and then replace it with another or what have you and there would be these sort of awkward and strange answers and I can remember him saying incoherently you know it's okay to keep them as pets when they're babies but then they grow up and they start to behave in a more independent way and they can't really be happy living in your house okay I think it's very easy because of how close chimpanzees are to us in appearance or any other primate monkeys great apes what have you it's very easy for people to admit that it's chimpanzee can never be happy unless it is either in the wilderness or in a simulated environment that attempts to reproduce the wilderness in other words if it has to be in a zoo then you want that zoo to simulate the conditions of the wild as closely as possible and now that doesn't mean that life in the wilderness is happy in the same way that a cat lying on your couch may be happy that having a dog that lives its whole life on the carpet and watching television with you you may consider that dog to be happy but that is in no way what its natural life would be like should be like and is that natural life with both the joys and the miseries of living in the wild we have to treat morally as the baseline for how animals should live and how we should relate animals I think it's deeply problematic that in 2016 vegans are using the image of pet pigs as an icon to challenge the cruelty of the farming industry of the fact that people eat pigs and bacon I understand it's an effective propaganda tool but like all propaganda it's a mix of truth and lies isn't it pig may look cute and cuddly when you present it this way you want to argue that pigs can be a host pet in the same way that a dog can be or a cat can be but that is not what pigs are like in the wild that's not what it's like for the pig to live in the wilderness roaming free finding its own meals or finding its own starvation going to sleep hungry waking up independently making its own life for itself and its pack you know that is a life you can take away from a pig but that's not a life you can ever give it okay you can give a pig a couch to sleep on you can give up a human home and that pig can be reduced to decorating your carpet and living with you as a pet but that in itself actually is immoral in many ways you're denying that Pig the opportunity to be a pig and you're making it into a pathetic echo of a human being a pathetic shadow of human civilization a decoration and a plaything for human needs human boredom human desires and I think many of these people who glorified pigs as pets have never seen a wild boar I had never seen even feral pigs that have recaptured some of their wild characteristics and I think those same people would find it very disturbing if they went to a friend's house and there was a chimpanzee or a group of chimpanzees showing their natural social behaviors which are terrifying you know in the wild chimpanzees monkeys and great apes generally they're competitive they compete with one another they fight they scream at each other they compete for social status of course they also go out and get food they have all these complex social behaviors dogs in the wild you know have all the politics of the wolf pack of how how the dogs are organized and again fight for superiority many people are shocked when it comes up that we do actually live in a dog-eat-dog world that dogs in the wild big dogs do eat little talks dogs are cannibalistic as a species um many vegans are proud to raise their house pets vegan okay well you want to take an animal that in the wild not only hunts and kills but will hunt and kill its own species happily enough and turn it into this plaything in many ways there's a series of immoral decisions that have already been made before we even get to the point of questioning the social role of this thing that sleeps on the rug and in some ways is treated as if it were just a living rug