Veganism 2.0
07 November 2018 [link youtube]
https://www.patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel/
Youtube Automatic Transcription
we open with my favorite catchphrase if
I look exhausted it's because I am exhausted we just flew into Victoria British Columbia Canada from Detroit I got a letter from viewer asking me about the wildlife management approach to veganism one of the ideas I've been talking about on this channel for years and he was asking specifically about how my thoughts apply to hunting will say why that is and what his interest was when I searched my own channel it's been more than two years since I said anything about hunting so some of you may have been watching this channel for two years already had never heard me comment on hunting one way or another I thought he asked a good question and it's something other people might be confused about especially given how long ago was that I really kind of debated discussed explained it did Q&A videos talking about these ideas many vegans are accustomed to criticizing the meat and dairy industry in terms of the profit motive and I guess what makes this issue of the ethics of hunting different for the guy sending in the question is that the profit motive is removed and that there is a kind of Ethel pardon me a kind of ecological justification offered in the United States of America many people justify eating deer by claiming that the deer are too numerous they're overpopulated and therefore it's inevitable that the deer have to be killed anyway and if it's inevitable that people have to kill the deer then they argue they say why not eat the deer why not make a sport out of killing them why not why not even make a for profit industry and if killing them why not make their skin into garments so and so forth now probably you can already tell by the way I'm framing this question I don't agree with any of those statements it may be inevitable that you have to kill a thief a robber who comes through the window of your home and to try to burgle you to try to steal your belongings now ideally you might have a non-lethal way to tranquilize the thief but let's say in these circumstances you shoot and kill a thief how many thieves are killed per year this way it's inevitable people are going to be shot for home invasions what what would that justify what further steps ethically would be justified eating them raping them and slaving them taking their skin and making into a an articling no none of it absolutely none of it because the necessity of killing the thief in the home invasion the disgust 'ti is only by sheer dint of self-defense it's by those immediate circumstances right and if if the necessity of killing deer or the necessity of killing rats or the necessity necessity of killing wolves if that really is a necessity created by ecology then again that that justification is exhausted with the act of killing and we have no justification for anything further on the contrary I'm quite comfortable and saying that it's evil to eat the deer that you killed I think it's quite evil to make a sport to make a game out of it I think would be evil to make a sport out of killing a human being it breaks in your house too to make a game of it to make so well if you're gonna shoot this robber if you're gonna shoot this in this home invader why not make a game of it why not make it fun why not invite your neighbor to come over for a thief's hunting party why not try to make money out of it why not try to make it skin into leather this is evil now it's also true that we have questions of greater and lesser evil but these things I mean I can make them more closely comparable here in Canada it does happen that Bears break into people's houses I've said this before on the channel bears forced their way through a window often a basement window and then they're in the person's basement and they found food or garbage and they're tearing it apart and can't get the bear back out and it may be that you call animal control and the government is not going to help you and the police aren't going to help you or if the police do come to help you they're just gonna shoot the bear and kill it anyway it may be that there no a simple matter of using a tranquilizer dart or you know some kind of technique you may have imagined or seen in a Batman comic book to remove the bear without hurting it it may indeed be inevitable even if tragic the human beings kill bears when those bears break into a human beings house but even if the act of killing is justified nothing further is justified and I have to insist on this if we kill rats in an apartment building for human convenience fundamentally this is being done for human convenience if we kill seagulls at an airport so that airplanes can take off and land on the runway with a difficulty that is fundamentally for human convenience these are human values being imposed animals and I admit and whether we regard it as tragic or not this is inevitable it is absolutely inevitable that airports kill birds on and around runways it's inevitable that we kill rats in big cities and different paths facilities and the fact that it's inevitable doesn't mean it can't be reduced in number if there actually are really important steps we can take to reduce the number of rats living in cities you can see that in Europe I won't get into details but you can see ant just even installing different kinds of spring-loaded plastic flaps over storm drains it's amazing what a difference it can make you can go from having millions of rats to having only a few thousand in a city by just trying to make drainage systems stop having high use of rats living in storm drain today there are things you can do and that's very often the difference in a first world city in a third world city or exactly those steps taken to reduce the number of rats and cockroaches living in sewage systems and such things that are creative again for human convenience but my third example here is that you have a forest forest being managed by human beings it could be a national park Wildlife Sanctuary however you want to put it the forest exists for the sake of the animals that are living at the forest exists for the sake of biodiversity ecology wildlife conservation nevertheless if you make the decision that you have to kill some of the deer or you have to kill let's say better example human beings make the decision that they're gonna kill some of the wolves because if they don't kill the wolves the wolves are gonna drive another species to extinction through predation or through crowding them out in the limited ecosystem this example also is an example of killing animals for human convenience ultimately there is no balance in nature we have a human concept of balance in the ecosystem that we're trying to create its sustain and we're choosing to create and sustain that through violence the same way that we create and sustain a field of wheat on a wheat farm through constant violence against groundhogs and squirrels other creatures that want to come in and burrow and dig tunnels and change the ecology in order to eat the food we're planting or just just to create their own habitat out of it instead so on and so forth so this is all fundamentally about acts of violence for human convenience they are ultimately on the same level human beings need to eat bread so we're gonna grow wheat and therefore it's inevitable that we're gonna kill groundhogs just as I said before Bo rats or even when I said about using tranquilizers and bears I think there are steps we can take to reduce the number of groundhogs were killing and right now in Western society nobody's taking that seriously nobody's taking seriously an ethical responsibility to try to reduce the number of mammals being killed to produce wheat but we could and there were steps we can use to reduce the number of rats were killing but I completely concede the point the number is going to be greater than zero but what I don't accept is the idea that you can make it to a sport that you can make it into a game you can make it into a food industry or a food product or that you should enjoy eating that food I think our you can make the skin into a products make it a leather no I reject all of that and I would reject it for human beings in the in the same situation so the fellow who wrote in to me who does not support me on patreon please support the creation of new content in this channel for $1 a month on patreon give a link below he says that he is not an ecologist and cannot properly scrutinize the hunting as conservation arguments I have a real simple reply to that this is why it's called vegan mind trick hunting is not conservation conservation is conservation nothing else it's conservation do you want to start a charity and do conservation is that what you want to do you want to donate money for constable what do you what do you want to do you want to save the Dolphins you want to restore riverbanks what what does conservation mean okay and what do you want to do oh you want to take a vacation and catch salmon or shoot buck and kill them and melt their head on your wall that's not it's not kind of conservation is it what what does conservation science mean to you what does a conservation charity do what does the word conservation mean I use a kind of aggressive Socratic method here of trying to get down to the real meaning of the terms but no nothing else is conservation and I'm very practicing to having those kinds of arguments because when I worked in the humanitarian sector a lot of time you've retired but what what do we really mean by humanitarian work guys what a really really time yeah so he says I agree with you that unfortunately at least some animals are going to have to die at our discretion but I'm not sure what a practical stance is to take on recreational hunting and laws pertaining to it should culling be restricted to wildlife management personnel and systems hunters only so there's an interesting thing there so he's alluding to he does earlier in the text to there's the issue of ecology there's the issue of profit motive versus no profit motive so the fact that unlike factory farming this isn't being done for a profit and at least hypothetically could be talking about indigenous tribal people who are doing this to survive not for a profit in a in a cashless society in theory in reality this is 2018 namadeva and he asks would the deaths have more dignity if we sought to use the meat or remains of such animals whenever possible in one stance it can lead to the view of the animals as products but in the other stance we're wasting the animals so that I think is the third point that I already have answered so I already answer the guy in text form and I'll just say I mean maybe the last things first the final point I make in my reply to them in text is ultimately is racist even if unintentionally racist if you say that you would make excuses for an indigenous person eating meat or engaging in hunting that you wouldn't make for a white person a black person and Hispanic person a Chinese person if you just think of yourself actually living in those circumstances I used to know a lot of indigenous people a lot of First Nations people when I was at First Nations University in Saskatchewan um if you actually know people who are Korean a jib way and Mohawk if you know them and you talk to them and if you're not a racist [ __ ] if you're gonna talk to them as equals ultimately what you tell them about eating meat is gonna be the same as what you tell a Chinese person or a black person or a white person why would you dumb it down or be dishonest or make moral excuses for them if you're talking them as a friend and if you care about them I mean it's the same as caring about a cohort or even a relative you know you may have friends who were in that world and they're badly overweight and he's saying look your health is falling apart I hate to tell you this but this traditional lifestyle you talk about it's killing you and here are the hard scientific facts of course you would say that of course if you know someone and care about them and most people watching this video have been to that scenario and you may have been through that scenario with a black person and a white person a Chinese person so it's not any different if there are some other ethnicity now that's of course the example I just use was of addressing it in terms of the health element I can say the same again about addressing the ecology the ecology argument is exactly the same doesn't matter from talking to a black person or white person etc or an indigenous person if I'm gonna discuss ecology with them I'm not gonna lie to them because of their ethnicity that also would be evil and finally the ethical argument I don't I don't believe epics are different for black people and white people because I'm not racist I mean if if anyone really believe that thought there was a different ethical system for different for different races I be a very bizarre and overt form of racism I think the majority people who really are racist it's never even occurred to them to think in those terms so I answered him as follows I'll read this a little bit quickly totally reasonable question number one I am NOT Pro hunting however number two I am willing to admit whereas some vegans are not that when you compare hunting to factory farming it is the lesser of two evils but three the lesser of two evils is still evil interestingly for I would not repeat not regarded as ethical to eat an animal that was doomed to be killed by human needs anyway for example if you need to kill seagulls to make it safe for airplanes to land at an airport I do not think you should proceed to make a food product of the seagulls now explain this playing this video however five my position in just admitting point number two that there in is a meaningful difference between an animal living its whole life in the wild living in a pack exploring in the forest in the jungle whatever the kids may be living its whole life in the wild even if in the end it is shot dead as opposed to living in captivity in a factory farm on a concrete floor under a steel sky surrounded by fences etc etc the fact that I am willing to admit this is still a significant source of debate amongst vegans some vegans regard hunting as more evil or as more sinful using sinful and adjusting manner some regard hunting as more sinful than the passive consumption of factory farmed meat and this is similar to Hindu and Buddhist attitudes in many of those religions they think of doing something intentionally and knowingly as a worse crime or as a worse sin than just participating in it through ignorance and passively on an aesthetic level I really feel the other way about it I find it less repugnant that a hunter kills in butchers a wild animal himself or herself I find that less Republik repugnant than the millions of people I see around me who are kidding themselves that factory farm meat is you know necessary and normal as part of their daily lives and were very often a deep state of denial and cognitive dissonance as to how that animal died and and what it really means the slit and animal's throat and tear the pieces of the tear the pieces of its body apart for food but these this is into the realm of aesthetics and not ethics and not science um some vegans regard vivisection as the ultimate sin etc so that is also an interesting thing if you just think about the pyramid of priorities what vegans think of as the objective of their activism what they think of as their enemy or their hurdles the obstacles they're gonna overcome mmm you can actually define some different sub movements than veganism by thinking about this event and then 0.6 as I've already stated was that I do say that it is ultimately even if unintentionally racist to make excuses for indigenous peoples eating meat to talk to them really in any other way than how you talk to a white person in Hispanic person a Chinese person or or what have you so what is the point why do we have multiple competing approaches to veganism well Gary Fran Sione created what was called the abolitionist approach to try to address and overcome absurdities real absurdities that arose from the approach that existed before him which he likes to call the welfarist approach and it's true the welfarist approach to veganism it has some advantages it has some vendors it also has some disadvantages and in certain contexts those disadvantages start to look ridiculous now by the same token I mean a very simple principle the principle that some people would say this I do not say that some people would say veganism means never killing any animals some people would say regarding animals is all having a soul and a moral worth you go to a human being and and never killing any animals well that leads to some absurdities such as we've already talked about killing rats to prevent infestation killing seagulls especially right at an airport or what they're blocking a radar array killing cockroaches just so that you don't have a cup of kitchen infested with cockroaches all these issues down the line a very simple principle if carried out in a thoroughgoing and consistent way can lead to absurdities of this kind and the wildlife management paradigm wildlife management approach to veganism in contrast the abolitionist approach in contrast to the welfarist approach it starts by saying look utilitarianism leads to certain absurdities and this is a segue my recent videos have talked about our natural vegan or utilitarian approach utilitarians would really claim that there's nothing wrong with wearing second-hand leather because it quote-unquote doesn't do any harm or the harm is already done utilitarians would claim that there's nothing wrong with eating meat if you're gonna kill the rats anyway if you're gonna kill the seagulls anyway so on and so forth if you've already killed a bear that broke into your house you might as well eat it this is one example not the only one of it the type of absurdity that utilitarianism gets into but very broadly speaking almost every approach in veganism I can think of one exception almost every approach at the time I got involved in veganism when I really started talking about it and thinking about and reading about it trying to organize activism almost every approach was fixated on the idea of a pet dog on the carpet as the moral baseline and unnatural vegan Swayze she's a great example of this her standard for how how all animals must be treated ought to be treated her standard for what's normal and for what every animal deserves is that every animal deserves to be treated she says like a dog lying on the carpet watching TV and I say the exact opposite I think that to take a wolf and chop its testicles off literally castrate it train it break its will destroy its independence cut it off from its own species never allow it to live in a pack never allow it to explore the wilderness to take a wolf and turn it into a human toy to turn it into a plaything for our amusement for our diversion for our quote-unquote emotional needs I don't think we have those emotional needs I think that's just as ridiculous as saying that you need cocaine for your emotional needs there are a lot of things people think they need you don't really need you don't need a dog to watch television with you you don't [Laughter] and that dog doesn't need you to enslave it so it can lie there like a living carpet well you watch television it's sick broadly speaking every approach to veganism including Gary Francie on his abolitionist approach they had settled in on this idea of pet ownership caring for Encarta lling pets as their moral baseline and I rejected that and said no we got to get back to the wilderness we've got a look at animals living independent dignified lives in the wild which includes a dignified death we've got to look at that as the baseline from which we derive our ethical and political principles there's a whole playlist of videos you want to hear more but you may not need to hear more this video may have told you everything you need to know now let's roll up our sleeves and save the planet pay $1 a month support me on patreon or don't send me email get in touch with me however you want to get in touch with me I'm going through a really difficult transition in my life I don't know where I'm gonna be living six months from now I'd say I'm running my fingers through my hair but I don't have any hair to run my fingers through I'm really you know turning the phone book upside down and going through all different options a through Zed to figure out what I'm doing with my life because my plans for my career for how I was gonna pay my rent and for how I was gonna pursue vegan activism they all hinged on going to culinary school then ultimately opening up a bakery and within the last month that all fell apart I'm having to make whole new plans so guys I've had a lot of initiative I've tried to start quite a few different projects going in vegan activist in the last four years and you know what I haven't heard from any of you I don't hear from anyone in my audience inviting me to participate in something you've started whether that's you know something as humble as giving a lecture at a veg fest or participating or joining something you do but guys you know I'm only a leader because I don't have the luxury of being a follower by all means get in touched me whether or not you donate to the channel and let's let's start living our life as if we really were trying to save the planet
I look exhausted it's because I am exhausted we just flew into Victoria British Columbia Canada from Detroit I got a letter from viewer asking me about the wildlife management approach to veganism one of the ideas I've been talking about on this channel for years and he was asking specifically about how my thoughts apply to hunting will say why that is and what his interest was when I searched my own channel it's been more than two years since I said anything about hunting so some of you may have been watching this channel for two years already had never heard me comment on hunting one way or another I thought he asked a good question and it's something other people might be confused about especially given how long ago was that I really kind of debated discussed explained it did Q&A videos talking about these ideas many vegans are accustomed to criticizing the meat and dairy industry in terms of the profit motive and I guess what makes this issue of the ethics of hunting different for the guy sending in the question is that the profit motive is removed and that there is a kind of Ethel pardon me a kind of ecological justification offered in the United States of America many people justify eating deer by claiming that the deer are too numerous they're overpopulated and therefore it's inevitable that the deer have to be killed anyway and if it's inevitable that people have to kill the deer then they argue they say why not eat the deer why not make a sport out of killing them why not why not even make a for profit industry and if killing them why not make their skin into garments so and so forth now probably you can already tell by the way I'm framing this question I don't agree with any of those statements it may be inevitable that you have to kill a thief a robber who comes through the window of your home and to try to burgle you to try to steal your belongings now ideally you might have a non-lethal way to tranquilize the thief but let's say in these circumstances you shoot and kill a thief how many thieves are killed per year this way it's inevitable people are going to be shot for home invasions what what would that justify what further steps ethically would be justified eating them raping them and slaving them taking their skin and making into a an articling no none of it absolutely none of it because the necessity of killing the thief in the home invasion the disgust 'ti is only by sheer dint of self-defense it's by those immediate circumstances right and if if the necessity of killing deer or the necessity of killing rats or the necessity necessity of killing wolves if that really is a necessity created by ecology then again that that justification is exhausted with the act of killing and we have no justification for anything further on the contrary I'm quite comfortable and saying that it's evil to eat the deer that you killed I think it's quite evil to make a sport to make a game out of it I think would be evil to make a sport out of killing a human being it breaks in your house too to make a game of it to make so well if you're gonna shoot this robber if you're gonna shoot this in this home invader why not make a game of it why not make it fun why not invite your neighbor to come over for a thief's hunting party why not try to make money out of it why not try to make it skin into leather this is evil now it's also true that we have questions of greater and lesser evil but these things I mean I can make them more closely comparable here in Canada it does happen that Bears break into people's houses I've said this before on the channel bears forced their way through a window often a basement window and then they're in the person's basement and they found food or garbage and they're tearing it apart and can't get the bear back out and it may be that you call animal control and the government is not going to help you and the police aren't going to help you or if the police do come to help you they're just gonna shoot the bear and kill it anyway it may be that there no a simple matter of using a tranquilizer dart or you know some kind of technique you may have imagined or seen in a Batman comic book to remove the bear without hurting it it may indeed be inevitable even if tragic the human beings kill bears when those bears break into a human beings house but even if the act of killing is justified nothing further is justified and I have to insist on this if we kill rats in an apartment building for human convenience fundamentally this is being done for human convenience if we kill seagulls at an airport so that airplanes can take off and land on the runway with a difficulty that is fundamentally for human convenience these are human values being imposed animals and I admit and whether we regard it as tragic or not this is inevitable it is absolutely inevitable that airports kill birds on and around runways it's inevitable that we kill rats in big cities and different paths facilities and the fact that it's inevitable doesn't mean it can't be reduced in number if there actually are really important steps we can take to reduce the number of rats living in cities you can see that in Europe I won't get into details but you can see ant just even installing different kinds of spring-loaded plastic flaps over storm drains it's amazing what a difference it can make you can go from having millions of rats to having only a few thousand in a city by just trying to make drainage systems stop having high use of rats living in storm drain today there are things you can do and that's very often the difference in a first world city in a third world city or exactly those steps taken to reduce the number of rats and cockroaches living in sewage systems and such things that are creative again for human convenience but my third example here is that you have a forest forest being managed by human beings it could be a national park Wildlife Sanctuary however you want to put it the forest exists for the sake of the animals that are living at the forest exists for the sake of biodiversity ecology wildlife conservation nevertheless if you make the decision that you have to kill some of the deer or you have to kill let's say better example human beings make the decision that they're gonna kill some of the wolves because if they don't kill the wolves the wolves are gonna drive another species to extinction through predation or through crowding them out in the limited ecosystem this example also is an example of killing animals for human convenience ultimately there is no balance in nature we have a human concept of balance in the ecosystem that we're trying to create its sustain and we're choosing to create and sustain that through violence the same way that we create and sustain a field of wheat on a wheat farm through constant violence against groundhogs and squirrels other creatures that want to come in and burrow and dig tunnels and change the ecology in order to eat the food we're planting or just just to create their own habitat out of it instead so on and so forth so this is all fundamentally about acts of violence for human convenience they are ultimately on the same level human beings need to eat bread so we're gonna grow wheat and therefore it's inevitable that we're gonna kill groundhogs just as I said before Bo rats or even when I said about using tranquilizers and bears I think there are steps we can take to reduce the number of groundhogs were killing and right now in Western society nobody's taking that seriously nobody's taking seriously an ethical responsibility to try to reduce the number of mammals being killed to produce wheat but we could and there were steps we can use to reduce the number of rats were killing but I completely concede the point the number is going to be greater than zero but what I don't accept is the idea that you can make it to a sport that you can make it into a game you can make it into a food industry or a food product or that you should enjoy eating that food I think our you can make the skin into a products make it a leather no I reject all of that and I would reject it for human beings in the in the same situation so the fellow who wrote in to me who does not support me on patreon please support the creation of new content in this channel for $1 a month on patreon give a link below he says that he is not an ecologist and cannot properly scrutinize the hunting as conservation arguments I have a real simple reply to that this is why it's called vegan mind trick hunting is not conservation conservation is conservation nothing else it's conservation do you want to start a charity and do conservation is that what you want to do you want to donate money for constable what do you what do you want to do you want to save the Dolphins you want to restore riverbanks what what does conservation mean okay and what do you want to do oh you want to take a vacation and catch salmon or shoot buck and kill them and melt their head on your wall that's not it's not kind of conservation is it what what does conservation science mean to you what does a conservation charity do what does the word conservation mean I use a kind of aggressive Socratic method here of trying to get down to the real meaning of the terms but no nothing else is conservation and I'm very practicing to having those kinds of arguments because when I worked in the humanitarian sector a lot of time you've retired but what what do we really mean by humanitarian work guys what a really really time yeah so he says I agree with you that unfortunately at least some animals are going to have to die at our discretion but I'm not sure what a practical stance is to take on recreational hunting and laws pertaining to it should culling be restricted to wildlife management personnel and systems hunters only so there's an interesting thing there so he's alluding to he does earlier in the text to there's the issue of ecology there's the issue of profit motive versus no profit motive so the fact that unlike factory farming this isn't being done for a profit and at least hypothetically could be talking about indigenous tribal people who are doing this to survive not for a profit in a in a cashless society in theory in reality this is 2018 namadeva and he asks would the deaths have more dignity if we sought to use the meat or remains of such animals whenever possible in one stance it can lead to the view of the animals as products but in the other stance we're wasting the animals so that I think is the third point that I already have answered so I already answer the guy in text form and I'll just say I mean maybe the last things first the final point I make in my reply to them in text is ultimately is racist even if unintentionally racist if you say that you would make excuses for an indigenous person eating meat or engaging in hunting that you wouldn't make for a white person a black person and Hispanic person a Chinese person if you just think of yourself actually living in those circumstances I used to know a lot of indigenous people a lot of First Nations people when I was at First Nations University in Saskatchewan um if you actually know people who are Korean a jib way and Mohawk if you know them and you talk to them and if you're not a racist [ __ ] if you're gonna talk to them as equals ultimately what you tell them about eating meat is gonna be the same as what you tell a Chinese person or a black person or a white person why would you dumb it down or be dishonest or make moral excuses for them if you're talking them as a friend and if you care about them I mean it's the same as caring about a cohort or even a relative you know you may have friends who were in that world and they're badly overweight and he's saying look your health is falling apart I hate to tell you this but this traditional lifestyle you talk about it's killing you and here are the hard scientific facts of course you would say that of course if you know someone and care about them and most people watching this video have been to that scenario and you may have been through that scenario with a black person and a white person a Chinese person so it's not any different if there are some other ethnicity now that's of course the example I just use was of addressing it in terms of the health element I can say the same again about addressing the ecology the ecology argument is exactly the same doesn't matter from talking to a black person or white person etc or an indigenous person if I'm gonna discuss ecology with them I'm not gonna lie to them because of their ethnicity that also would be evil and finally the ethical argument I don't I don't believe epics are different for black people and white people because I'm not racist I mean if if anyone really believe that thought there was a different ethical system for different for different races I be a very bizarre and overt form of racism I think the majority people who really are racist it's never even occurred to them to think in those terms so I answered him as follows I'll read this a little bit quickly totally reasonable question number one I am NOT Pro hunting however number two I am willing to admit whereas some vegans are not that when you compare hunting to factory farming it is the lesser of two evils but three the lesser of two evils is still evil interestingly for I would not repeat not regarded as ethical to eat an animal that was doomed to be killed by human needs anyway for example if you need to kill seagulls to make it safe for airplanes to land at an airport I do not think you should proceed to make a food product of the seagulls now explain this playing this video however five my position in just admitting point number two that there in is a meaningful difference between an animal living its whole life in the wild living in a pack exploring in the forest in the jungle whatever the kids may be living its whole life in the wild even if in the end it is shot dead as opposed to living in captivity in a factory farm on a concrete floor under a steel sky surrounded by fences etc etc the fact that I am willing to admit this is still a significant source of debate amongst vegans some vegans regard hunting as more evil or as more sinful using sinful and adjusting manner some regard hunting as more sinful than the passive consumption of factory farmed meat and this is similar to Hindu and Buddhist attitudes in many of those religions they think of doing something intentionally and knowingly as a worse crime or as a worse sin than just participating in it through ignorance and passively on an aesthetic level I really feel the other way about it I find it less repugnant that a hunter kills in butchers a wild animal himself or herself I find that less Republik repugnant than the millions of people I see around me who are kidding themselves that factory farm meat is you know necessary and normal as part of their daily lives and were very often a deep state of denial and cognitive dissonance as to how that animal died and and what it really means the slit and animal's throat and tear the pieces of the tear the pieces of its body apart for food but these this is into the realm of aesthetics and not ethics and not science um some vegans regard vivisection as the ultimate sin etc so that is also an interesting thing if you just think about the pyramid of priorities what vegans think of as the objective of their activism what they think of as their enemy or their hurdles the obstacles they're gonna overcome mmm you can actually define some different sub movements than veganism by thinking about this event and then 0.6 as I've already stated was that I do say that it is ultimately even if unintentionally racist to make excuses for indigenous peoples eating meat to talk to them really in any other way than how you talk to a white person in Hispanic person a Chinese person or or what have you so what is the point why do we have multiple competing approaches to veganism well Gary Fran Sione created what was called the abolitionist approach to try to address and overcome absurdities real absurdities that arose from the approach that existed before him which he likes to call the welfarist approach and it's true the welfarist approach to veganism it has some advantages it has some vendors it also has some disadvantages and in certain contexts those disadvantages start to look ridiculous now by the same token I mean a very simple principle the principle that some people would say this I do not say that some people would say veganism means never killing any animals some people would say regarding animals is all having a soul and a moral worth you go to a human being and and never killing any animals well that leads to some absurdities such as we've already talked about killing rats to prevent infestation killing seagulls especially right at an airport or what they're blocking a radar array killing cockroaches just so that you don't have a cup of kitchen infested with cockroaches all these issues down the line a very simple principle if carried out in a thoroughgoing and consistent way can lead to absurdities of this kind and the wildlife management paradigm wildlife management approach to veganism in contrast the abolitionist approach in contrast to the welfarist approach it starts by saying look utilitarianism leads to certain absurdities and this is a segue my recent videos have talked about our natural vegan or utilitarian approach utilitarians would really claim that there's nothing wrong with wearing second-hand leather because it quote-unquote doesn't do any harm or the harm is already done utilitarians would claim that there's nothing wrong with eating meat if you're gonna kill the rats anyway if you're gonna kill the seagulls anyway so on and so forth if you've already killed a bear that broke into your house you might as well eat it this is one example not the only one of it the type of absurdity that utilitarianism gets into but very broadly speaking almost every approach in veganism I can think of one exception almost every approach at the time I got involved in veganism when I really started talking about it and thinking about and reading about it trying to organize activism almost every approach was fixated on the idea of a pet dog on the carpet as the moral baseline and unnatural vegan Swayze she's a great example of this her standard for how how all animals must be treated ought to be treated her standard for what's normal and for what every animal deserves is that every animal deserves to be treated she says like a dog lying on the carpet watching TV and I say the exact opposite I think that to take a wolf and chop its testicles off literally castrate it train it break its will destroy its independence cut it off from its own species never allow it to live in a pack never allow it to explore the wilderness to take a wolf and turn it into a human toy to turn it into a plaything for our amusement for our diversion for our quote-unquote emotional needs I don't think we have those emotional needs I think that's just as ridiculous as saying that you need cocaine for your emotional needs there are a lot of things people think they need you don't really need you don't need a dog to watch television with you you don't [Laughter] and that dog doesn't need you to enslave it so it can lie there like a living carpet well you watch television it's sick broadly speaking every approach to veganism including Gary Francie on his abolitionist approach they had settled in on this idea of pet ownership caring for Encarta lling pets as their moral baseline and I rejected that and said no we got to get back to the wilderness we've got a look at animals living independent dignified lives in the wild which includes a dignified death we've got to look at that as the baseline from which we derive our ethical and political principles there's a whole playlist of videos you want to hear more but you may not need to hear more this video may have told you everything you need to know now let's roll up our sleeves and save the planet pay $1 a month support me on patreon or don't send me email get in touch with me however you want to get in touch with me I'm going through a really difficult transition in my life I don't know where I'm gonna be living six months from now I'd say I'm running my fingers through my hair but I don't have any hair to run my fingers through I'm really you know turning the phone book upside down and going through all different options a through Zed to figure out what I'm doing with my life because my plans for my career for how I was gonna pay my rent and for how I was gonna pursue vegan activism they all hinged on going to culinary school then ultimately opening up a bakery and within the last month that all fell apart I'm having to make whole new plans so guys I've had a lot of initiative I've tried to start quite a few different projects going in vegan activist in the last four years and you know what I haven't heard from any of you I don't hear from anyone in my audience inviting me to participate in something you've started whether that's you know something as humble as giving a lecture at a veg fest or participating or joining something you do but guys you know I'm only a leader because I don't have the luxury of being a follower by all means get in touched me whether or not you donate to the channel and let's let's start living our life as if we really were trying to save the planet