1. What if Science is Irrelevant? (vegan / vegans / veganism)
28 April 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
yo what's up I'm gonna ask a somewhat
extreme question here but it's for a an exceedingly moderate reason guy named vegan mojo another YouTube channel that have showed it out here in the recent past I've posted a link to him and so on he took what I think is a useful but extreme position in a recent video in which he basically proposed look veganism essentially and integrally is not about your health because it's not about you now as I say I think that's the kind of extreme position but it's logical and it's useful for testing the limits of our own assumptions of our own ideas now many people could respond to this I haven't seen or heard any more smart people saying what do you mean veganism is not about me in 2016 the discourse around veganism has been co-opted by health and weight loss now you could say something similar happened for many many years with kung fu you know kung fu is supposed to be about military preparedness the martial arts think about the meaning of the word martial arts and I've met people because I've been involved with Asian Studies Asian politics Asian history I've met people who sincerely cared about martial arts and a lot of them were kind of disillusioned with they were upset about the fact that that whole scene basically got diluted by weight loss by martial arts being being packaged for health and fitness and weight loss and what-have-you and catering to the ego trips of the clientele which we certainly do here in veganism we certainly like to cater to tropes of a collect so I don't know I was I was intrigued to take this a step further and ask is science itself actually irrelevant to veganism is Beauty itself irrelevant to veganism because what the vegan mojo has suggested which oversized sympathizer the some extent he suggested the possibility that veganism is essentially about ethics and of course it is an ethos that is global in its perspective or cosmological in its perspective it's ultimately a set of ethics that yes on the one hand is built on animal suffering but on the other hand is built on ecology on taking responsibility for outcomes on a global scale ie the outcomes of animal agriculture animals rotation etc well if so I mean that's interesting both looking back in history and looking forward as I am someone who studied ancient history ancient philosophy in Europe and in Asia see no ancient Greece but also ancient China ancient India ancient Sri Lanka moderately ancient Cambodia Thailand etc um you know I'm someone who has an unusually long view of philosophy politics human condition etc and of course it is very interesting to note the epoch of of pre scientific philosophy all these ideas played out but nobody could have any certainty about what was nutritionally adequate there were different schools of thought that really tried to argue for vegetarianism or for something close to veganism it's never quite exactly our modern idea of veganism that tried to argue for that but of course none of them could ever feel any certainty that the diet they were proposing was adequate for human health and now of course in the other hand historically there have been whole civilizations that had profoundly false notions of nutrition and where the vast majority of people were an extremely bad health for that reason chronically sometimes whole social classes of people I remember one of my professors began a lecture by dramatically describing the unbelievably horrible diseases that the Japanese aristocracy suffered from and how these resulted from totally unscientific notions they had about their diet and health and that meanwhile the peasants in Japanese society did not believe in these things and also did not have the wealth to eat the this somewhat absurd diet of the Japanese aristocrats and therefore did not have these unbelievably horrible diseases there were diseases that relied on nutritional deficiencies you know like scurvy you can't get scurvy unless you first have a deficiency etc in the same way apparently medieval and ancient Japanese society suffered from some diseases that are that are completely absent in the modern world for this reason so that was sort of the theater of ideas that veganism and vegetarianism had to compete in on purely ethical grounds for most of history and of today in 2016 on the contrary we've had the accumulation of certain anecdotes that are powerful but are nevertheless anecdotes about human health scientific discoveries that are anecdotal in and of themselves that vegans have some vegans have tried to construct into a model really of human evolution a model that claims human beings were evolved to be vegan that innately our optimal nutrition can only be achieved through veganism now I don't think that's really I don't think that's scientifically valid and I don't think that's going to be socially effective I'll say a little bit more about why but it's not my main theme in this video I mentioned also there's an earlier video here called my vegan story like the story of how I became vegan when I got involved this I was completely willing to to become strictly vegetarian and later vegan out completely assumed it was worse for my health than eating meat that was comfortable with that as recently like as it back in the year 2000 the whole scene like the animal rights vegetarian scene the word vegan wasn't used my back then it was not based on health at all as I say there were other ideas like of primitivism there were other ideas of being more tough being more self-reliant being more authentic you know back to the land more you know getting away from the decadence of what the 20th century had become and you know I remember that when I was a kid talking about visionary look really really when I was a kid I can remember because I'd seen the statistics I remember saying to people you know our own grandparents didn't eat this much meat our own grandparents didn't use this much electricity like you know the things we assumed we need just a short time ago were not perceived as such necessities and that does not mean my grandparents were angels I mean my grandparents generation they smoked a lot of cigarettes they played cards they had different vices that different ways of wasting their time but so many measures of the decadence what was considered normal in the world around me when I was a child really the 1980s I was aware those things had changed recently they were not permanent and immutable features of Western culture they were they were all too mutable it had become common for people to eat meat three meals a day and that wasn't the case five hundred years earlier but it wasn't even really the case fifty years earlier anyway many many things been profoundly even though the frequency with which people eat in restaurants that's changed my grandmother they were not dirt poor I remember my grandmother telling me when she went on a date she would bring the boyfriend she would bring the young man she was trying to date to eat dinner at her grandmother's house I didn't they didn't go to restaurants and you know they would eat carp nobody get filter fish anyway these were um it's also interesting my mother actually likes to misrepresent that side of the family as if as if they had always been wealthy but from my grandmother self I know I know they weren't and I had enough anecdotes about how they lived anyway sorry this is uh this a digression I think it's interesting and worth asking are we getting caught up on something that's actually irrelevant to the core ecological and ethical claims of veganism in trying to base veganism on scientistic promises of better health or not now on the other hand as history is pressed in the last few decades because I don't know it's not that deep we do have some kind of smoking gun anecdotes I'll use just one for the purposes of this video if you look into cholesterol it's shocking and scary zero dietary cholesterol really is optimal not less not little zero and basically if you want to have zero dietary cholesterol you have to be vegan you know obviously you could still own leather or something and the scariest part of that to me is not the effects on the heart or the circulation below the neck although obviously those are very real and very scary the scariest part is the effect of cholesterol on the brain and I won't say anything more but any of you guys can google this and look into it but the effects of cholesterol the same way we talked about hardening the arteries and it's very well-known you know people say well you know the the veins leading to your heart the arteries around the heart are relatively large the arteries are you know in some other parts of the body are relatively fine well the flow of blood in your brain it relies on very very fine arteries and veins and it is terrifying the effects that a high cholesterol that I have on the brain and I think means sadly once you start looking into it many of the forms of mental dysfunction that are common in elderly people but probably that are common in middle-aged people and so on actually do reflect on a man civ social scale the effects of the high cholesterol meat-based diet that's become normalized necessary so i mean that anecdote alone is powerful it has power over me personally i would be vegan anyway i would be vegan if it were bad for my health because i think it's the right thing to do but also in our heart of hearts as vegans i think we we have to be detached with the fact that as science progresses there will be anecdotes on the other side every so often there's some scientific discovery whether it's about i don't know some species of fish or something you know there's some animal product that turns out to be healthy by some definition the same way the newspapers get so excited whenever there's a study saying that a glass of wine is good for you the newspapers promote the hell out of that any excuse for people to indulge in their bad habits and when I was a kid I could remember there were these scientific studies claiming that chocolate was good for you and you know yeah okay you know chocolate has some nutrients I get it but what this was manufactured into socially it's not really the the science it's the social reproduction of the science oh it's painful oh I had a girlfriend and what she told me about her boss at work a woman who was terribly overweight and who would buy a box of chocolates every day and they were the fancy like Valentine's Day style chocolates you know we have a big disposable box and the chocolates are laid out and she would eat one whole box of that every day and she would remark to her employees including my girlfriend that she did it as health food and she would quote these factoids from the newspapers about you know how chocolate had some health benefits so I mean I just say as vegans if we're self-critical and we're honest I don't know I mean those scientific anecdotes can you really play to win that way veganism itself has been so far astray within the last few years by fad diets by scientistic ideas by you know anecdotes misunderstood misrepresented and take it out of context whether it's 30 bananas a day or any other fad diet a lot of vegans have lost patience with the fact that this movement has been discredited by crazy weight-loss ideas and fad ideas within veganism and on the other hand we know we don't have the exclusive rights to this thing right on the other hand you know the other side and multi-million dollar industries that stand a profit out of these things they'll always have their little anecdotes here or there and tit for tat they can sort of play the game in the other way nevertheless and look globally before I move on I don't really believe that anyone becomes vegan because they sat down and read the peer-reviewed scientific literature about those health effects maybe there were one or two people who have broadening it beyond a very I mean a tiny number of people who do scientific research that may be convinced to become vegan by studying those types of health effects anecdotally in isolation or in a more systematic way for humility it's yeah okay a tiny number of people but more broadly when we're talking about veganism as a movement ethical veganism veganism to change society vegan doesn't change the world the type of people who will be moved by those anecdotes like the one I've just shared about cholesterol that I personally find scary and by the way looking at history there were a lot of a lot of political leaders who had very serious forms of brain malfunction that ultimately are indeed caused by cholesterol in the diet Woodrow Wilson was really the most powerful man in the world at the end of the first world war in American history and in world history and Woodrow Wilson had very very serious brain dysfunction ultimately stemming from his diet you know including seizures but seizures are only the most obvious and visible part alas I digress who will be moved to change their lives on the basis of those scientific anecdotes I think it's only people who are already looking for it you know that's the the ultimate weakness of that science and you know I don't think you can assemble those scientific anecdotes into a kind of pseudo religion to then go around converting people to veganism and I respect it that is what some people are trying to do you know whether they use it in terms of an evolutionary model or whether they have some other model of trying to put these anecdotes together into a greater whole I actually see the real significance of science as being at the opposite extreme I think it's I think the significance of science for the most part it is irrelevant to the ethical claims the ecological claims etc I really mean nutritional science here so like in terms of pollution there's also science and measuring how much pollution goes into the river and so on but at the opposite extreme if you deal with people who believe for example in consuming eggs chicken eggs that are raised in very very particular conditions that they consider ethical so there are people there almost always members of religious movements but sometimes they're just people whose grandmother has pet chickens and there are people who send you emails saying these chickens live in these conditions under these circumstances they're not suffering by this person's definition by some subjective definition they say they have invented ethical eggs well the ultimate reason why that's irrelevant even though you know for individual people they may have I mean again whatever it is their grandmother inherited a chicken coop the chickens are themselves rescued and they're laying eggs anyway another the eggs go in the garbage you will I mean as life goes on you will meet people including vegans who actually are in circumstances like that because they've rescued hens or whatever and they say okay look these are relatively ethical eggs and otherwise they'll go in the garbage so why not eat them anyway those are the situations where you say no because eggs are poison you should never even eat one chicken egg in your entire life in terms of the science as it now stands so that to me is interesting is that the science ultimately makes certain ethical questions irrelevant we don't need to devise a more ethical chicken coop we don't need to reform the egg industry we need to abolish it because ultimately eggs are just poison eggs do not have any positive role to play in human nutrition the transition we need to make as a civilization is not from caged hens to free-range hens the transition we need to make is from being a civilization where everything has eggs in it to being a civilization that doesn't depend on the egg industry in any way whatsoever and when I say you know that everything is eggs in it boy if you're honest with yourself if you really go and look traditionally how many you know baked goods you know mass manufactured foods all had egg in them for no reason not when it doesn't really add to the flavor or nutritional but I mean the use of egg is an ingredient all kinds of fluffy stuff like meringues and what-have-you it's insane but over centuries we developed it we developed all these perverse uses for egg whites to be used in every imaginable type of food deserts and main courses and what-have-you and yeah ultimately all that needs to stop and the reason for that ultimately I think is scientific that the whole question there are all the ethical questions but at a certain point the f the ethical questions become banal precisely because there is no nutritional justification and on the other hand it's just poison so that is interesting to me under that heading people likewise asked about so-called ahimsa dari if you want to sound like you studied sanskrit university you can say i hing say dari by the way um you know cows that are raised in captivity sometimes by Hindu religious fundamentalists cows that are raised in conditions that again some people consider ethical I don't on this channel I've made it very clear by man see domestication period so to me it doesn't matter how comfortable the chicken coop is it doesn't matter how comfortable the dairy is I regard it all as perverse and wrong because I even regard raising a dog as a household pet it's wrong I don't think dogs should decorate carpets I think dogs should live as close to their natural habitat as possible and you know they should be able to engage in their hunting behaviors their mating behaviors and you know likewise I I don't think there's any moral form of domestication of animals and domesticating cows to exploit them for their milk I think is always going to be perverse and messed up even though there are these dairies that so they're a tiny tiny minority but probably for Hindu religious reasons maybe for some other reason are producing a tiny fraction of the world's milk by ethical standards now that would be a very different question if scientifically we had learned that milk really was something positive or wonderful for human nutrition if nutritionally we had learned that it was essential for some people like what if what if there was some health condition where people needed milk to live there is there is no such health condition but hypothetical question so there - I mean again I think it's interesting that the role of science is not employed in providing the motivation for veganism it's not in providing the the validation for veganism it's actually in providing a limit to the ethical discourse where it's like look we all agree factory farming is immoral and terrible we may agree that vivisection is immoral and terrible we agree that you know all kinds of things are immoral and terrible but then when you get down to the opposite extreme of how shall we say the humanitarian ization of egg and dairy production when you get down to that extreme there are different questions but as vegans we don't have to ask or answer those questions because of the science to me that is interesting
extreme question here but it's for a an exceedingly moderate reason guy named vegan mojo another YouTube channel that have showed it out here in the recent past I've posted a link to him and so on he took what I think is a useful but extreme position in a recent video in which he basically proposed look veganism essentially and integrally is not about your health because it's not about you now as I say I think that's the kind of extreme position but it's logical and it's useful for testing the limits of our own assumptions of our own ideas now many people could respond to this I haven't seen or heard any more smart people saying what do you mean veganism is not about me in 2016 the discourse around veganism has been co-opted by health and weight loss now you could say something similar happened for many many years with kung fu you know kung fu is supposed to be about military preparedness the martial arts think about the meaning of the word martial arts and I've met people because I've been involved with Asian Studies Asian politics Asian history I've met people who sincerely cared about martial arts and a lot of them were kind of disillusioned with they were upset about the fact that that whole scene basically got diluted by weight loss by martial arts being being packaged for health and fitness and weight loss and what-have-you and catering to the ego trips of the clientele which we certainly do here in veganism we certainly like to cater to tropes of a collect so I don't know I was I was intrigued to take this a step further and ask is science itself actually irrelevant to veganism is Beauty itself irrelevant to veganism because what the vegan mojo has suggested which oversized sympathizer the some extent he suggested the possibility that veganism is essentially about ethics and of course it is an ethos that is global in its perspective or cosmological in its perspective it's ultimately a set of ethics that yes on the one hand is built on animal suffering but on the other hand is built on ecology on taking responsibility for outcomes on a global scale ie the outcomes of animal agriculture animals rotation etc well if so I mean that's interesting both looking back in history and looking forward as I am someone who studied ancient history ancient philosophy in Europe and in Asia see no ancient Greece but also ancient China ancient India ancient Sri Lanka moderately ancient Cambodia Thailand etc um you know I'm someone who has an unusually long view of philosophy politics human condition etc and of course it is very interesting to note the epoch of of pre scientific philosophy all these ideas played out but nobody could have any certainty about what was nutritionally adequate there were different schools of thought that really tried to argue for vegetarianism or for something close to veganism it's never quite exactly our modern idea of veganism that tried to argue for that but of course none of them could ever feel any certainty that the diet they were proposing was adequate for human health and now of course in the other hand historically there have been whole civilizations that had profoundly false notions of nutrition and where the vast majority of people were an extremely bad health for that reason chronically sometimes whole social classes of people I remember one of my professors began a lecture by dramatically describing the unbelievably horrible diseases that the Japanese aristocracy suffered from and how these resulted from totally unscientific notions they had about their diet and health and that meanwhile the peasants in Japanese society did not believe in these things and also did not have the wealth to eat the this somewhat absurd diet of the Japanese aristocrats and therefore did not have these unbelievably horrible diseases there were diseases that relied on nutritional deficiencies you know like scurvy you can't get scurvy unless you first have a deficiency etc in the same way apparently medieval and ancient Japanese society suffered from some diseases that are that are completely absent in the modern world for this reason so that was sort of the theater of ideas that veganism and vegetarianism had to compete in on purely ethical grounds for most of history and of today in 2016 on the contrary we've had the accumulation of certain anecdotes that are powerful but are nevertheless anecdotes about human health scientific discoveries that are anecdotal in and of themselves that vegans have some vegans have tried to construct into a model really of human evolution a model that claims human beings were evolved to be vegan that innately our optimal nutrition can only be achieved through veganism now I don't think that's really I don't think that's scientifically valid and I don't think that's going to be socially effective I'll say a little bit more about why but it's not my main theme in this video I mentioned also there's an earlier video here called my vegan story like the story of how I became vegan when I got involved this I was completely willing to to become strictly vegetarian and later vegan out completely assumed it was worse for my health than eating meat that was comfortable with that as recently like as it back in the year 2000 the whole scene like the animal rights vegetarian scene the word vegan wasn't used my back then it was not based on health at all as I say there were other ideas like of primitivism there were other ideas of being more tough being more self-reliant being more authentic you know back to the land more you know getting away from the decadence of what the 20th century had become and you know I remember that when I was a kid talking about visionary look really really when I was a kid I can remember because I'd seen the statistics I remember saying to people you know our own grandparents didn't eat this much meat our own grandparents didn't use this much electricity like you know the things we assumed we need just a short time ago were not perceived as such necessities and that does not mean my grandparents were angels I mean my grandparents generation they smoked a lot of cigarettes they played cards they had different vices that different ways of wasting their time but so many measures of the decadence what was considered normal in the world around me when I was a child really the 1980s I was aware those things had changed recently they were not permanent and immutable features of Western culture they were they were all too mutable it had become common for people to eat meat three meals a day and that wasn't the case five hundred years earlier but it wasn't even really the case fifty years earlier anyway many many things been profoundly even though the frequency with which people eat in restaurants that's changed my grandmother they were not dirt poor I remember my grandmother telling me when she went on a date she would bring the boyfriend she would bring the young man she was trying to date to eat dinner at her grandmother's house I didn't they didn't go to restaurants and you know they would eat carp nobody get filter fish anyway these were um it's also interesting my mother actually likes to misrepresent that side of the family as if as if they had always been wealthy but from my grandmother self I know I know they weren't and I had enough anecdotes about how they lived anyway sorry this is uh this a digression I think it's interesting and worth asking are we getting caught up on something that's actually irrelevant to the core ecological and ethical claims of veganism in trying to base veganism on scientistic promises of better health or not now on the other hand as history is pressed in the last few decades because I don't know it's not that deep we do have some kind of smoking gun anecdotes I'll use just one for the purposes of this video if you look into cholesterol it's shocking and scary zero dietary cholesterol really is optimal not less not little zero and basically if you want to have zero dietary cholesterol you have to be vegan you know obviously you could still own leather or something and the scariest part of that to me is not the effects on the heart or the circulation below the neck although obviously those are very real and very scary the scariest part is the effect of cholesterol on the brain and I won't say anything more but any of you guys can google this and look into it but the effects of cholesterol the same way we talked about hardening the arteries and it's very well-known you know people say well you know the the veins leading to your heart the arteries around the heart are relatively large the arteries are you know in some other parts of the body are relatively fine well the flow of blood in your brain it relies on very very fine arteries and veins and it is terrifying the effects that a high cholesterol that I have on the brain and I think means sadly once you start looking into it many of the forms of mental dysfunction that are common in elderly people but probably that are common in middle-aged people and so on actually do reflect on a man civ social scale the effects of the high cholesterol meat-based diet that's become normalized necessary so i mean that anecdote alone is powerful it has power over me personally i would be vegan anyway i would be vegan if it were bad for my health because i think it's the right thing to do but also in our heart of hearts as vegans i think we we have to be detached with the fact that as science progresses there will be anecdotes on the other side every so often there's some scientific discovery whether it's about i don't know some species of fish or something you know there's some animal product that turns out to be healthy by some definition the same way the newspapers get so excited whenever there's a study saying that a glass of wine is good for you the newspapers promote the hell out of that any excuse for people to indulge in their bad habits and when I was a kid I could remember there were these scientific studies claiming that chocolate was good for you and you know yeah okay you know chocolate has some nutrients I get it but what this was manufactured into socially it's not really the the science it's the social reproduction of the science oh it's painful oh I had a girlfriend and what she told me about her boss at work a woman who was terribly overweight and who would buy a box of chocolates every day and they were the fancy like Valentine's Day style chocolates you know we have a big disposable box and the chocolates are laid out and she would eat one whole box of that every day and she would remark to her employees including my girlfriend that she did it as health food and she would quote these factoids from the newspapers about you know how chocolate had some health benefits so I mean I just say as vegans if we're self-critical and we're honest I don't know I mean those scientific anecdotes can you really play to win that way veganism itself has been so far astray within the last few years by fad diets by scientistic ideas by you know anecdotes misunderstood misrepresented and take it out of context whether it's 30 bananas a day or any other fad diet a lot of vegans have lost patience with the fact that this movement has been discredited by crazy weight-loss ideas and fad ideas within veganism and on the other hand we know we don't have the exclusive rights to this thing right on the other hand you know the other side and multi-million dollar industries that stand a profit out of these things they'll always have their little anecdotes here or there and tit for tat they can sort of play the game in the other way nevertheless and look globally before I move on I don't really believe that anyone becomes vegan because they sat down and read the peer-reviewed scientific literature about those health effects maybe there were one or two people who have broadening it beyond a very I mean a tiny number of people who do scientific research that may be convinced to become vegan by studying those types of health effects anecdotally in isolation or in a more systematic way for humility it's yeah okay a tiny number of people but more broadly when we're talking about veganism as a movement ethical veganism veganism to change society vegan doesn't change the world the type of people who will be moved by those anecdotes like the one I've just shared about cholesterol that I personally find scary and by the way looking at history there were a lot of a lot of political leaders who had very serious forms of brain malfunction that ultimately are indeed caused by cholesterol in the diet Woodrow Wilson was really the most powerful man in the world at the end of the first world war in American history and in world history and Woodrow Wilson had very very serious brain dysfunction ultimately stemming from his diet you know including seizures but seizures are only the most obvious and visible part alas I digress who will be moved to change their lives on the basis of those scientific anecdotes I think it's only people who are already looking for it you know that's the the ultimate weakness of that science and you know I don't think you can assemble those scientific anecdotes into a kind of pseudo religion to then go around converting people to veganism and I respect it that is what some people are trying to do you know whether they use it in terms of an evolutionary model or whether they have some other model of trying to put these anecdotes together into a greater whole I actually see the real significance of science as being at the opposite extreme I think it's I think the significance of science for the most part it is irrelevant to the ethical claims the ecological claims etc I really mean nutritional science here so like in terms of pollution there's also science and measuring how much pollution goes into the river and so on but at the opposite extreme if you deal with people who believe for example in consuming eggs chicken eggs that are raised in very very particular conditions that they consider ethical so there are people there almost always members of religious movements but sometimes they're just people whose grandmother has pet chickens and there are people who send you emails saying these chickens live in these conditions under these circumstances they're not suffering by this person's definition by some subjective definition they say they have invented ethical eggs well the ultimate reason why that's irrelevant even though you know for individual people they may have I mean again whatever it is their grandmother inherited a chicken coop the chickens are themselves rescued and they're laying eggs anyway another the eggs go in the garbage you will I mean as life goes on you will meet people including vegans who actually are in circumstances like that because they've rescued hens or whatever and they say okay look these are relatively ethical eggs and otherwise they'll go in the garbage so why not eat them anyway those are the situations where you say no because eggs are poison you should never even eat one chicken egg in your entire life in terms of the science as it now stands so that to me is interesting is that the science ultimately makes certain ethical questions irrelevant we don't need to devise a more ethical chicken coop we don't need to reform the egg industry we need to abolish it because ultimately eggs are just poison eggs do not have any positive role to play in human nutrition the transition we need to make as a civilization is not from caged hens to free-range hens the transition we need to make is from being a civilization where everything has eggs in it to being a civilization that doesn't depend on the egg industry in any way whatsoever and when I say you know that everything is eggs in it boy if you're honest with yourself if you really go and look traditionally how many you know baked goods you know mass manufactured foods all had egg in them for no reason not when it doesn't really add to the flavor or nutritional but I mean the use of egg is an ingredient all kinds of fluffy stuff like meringues and what-have-you it's insane but over centuries we developed it we developed all these perverse uses for egg whites to be used in every imaginable type of food deserts and main courses and what-have-you and yeah ultimately all that needs to stop and the reason for that ultimately I think is scientific that the whole question there are all the ethical questions but at a certain point the f the ethical questions become banal precisely because there is no nutritional justification and on the other hand it's just poison so that is interesting to me under that heading people likewise asked about so-called ahimsa dari if you want to sound like you studied sanskrit university you can say i hing say dari by the way um you know cows that are raised in captivity sometimes by Hindu religious fundamentalists cows that are raised in conditions that again some people consider ethical I don't on this channel I've made it very clear by man see domestication period so to me it doesn't matter how comfortable the chicken coop is it doesn't matter how comfortable the dairy is I regard it all as perverse and wrong because I even regard raising a dog as a household pet it's wrong I don't think dogs should decorate carpets I think dogs should live as close to their natural habitat as possible and you know they should be able to engage in their hunting behaviors their mating behaviors and you know likewise I I don't think there's any moral form of domestication of animals and domesticating cows to exploit them for their milk I think is always going to be perverse and messed up even though there are these dairies that so they're a tiny tiny minority but probably for Hindu religious reasons maybe for some other reason are producing a tiny fraction of the world's milk by ethical standards now that would be a very different question if scientifically we had learned that milk really was something positive or wonderful for human nutrition if nutritionally we had learned that it was essential for some people like what if what if there was some health condition where people needed milk to live there is there is no such health condition but hypothetical question so there - I mean again I think it's interesting that the role of science is not employed in providing the motivation for veganism it's not in providing the the validation for veganism it's actually in providing a limit to the ethical discourse where it's like look we all agree factory farming is immoral and terrible we may agree that vivisection is immoral and terrible we agree that you know all kinds of things are immoral and terrible but then when you get down to the opposite extreme of how shall we say the humanitarian ization of egg and dairy production when you get down to that extreme there are different questions but as vegans we don't have to ask or answer those questions because of the science to me that is interesting