Is Ethical Veganism Reasonable? Sustainable? Oppressive?

hey what up this video is made in
response to some challenging questions posed for vegans politically by a guy named David J Kelly who is now an ex vegan I also think he's an idiot however to give credit where it's due he is raising important questions and 99% of you vegans on the Internet don't like you know this video is going to consist of a critique and a constructive response to the arguments put forth by David J Kelly you can click on the link I'm gonna provide below this video it's a waste of six minutes of your life you know I think he's a complete idiot but if you look at the videos made on most of these channels from people we respect and celebrate as leaders in the vegan community they're neither asking or answering any of these questions they're not dealing with political or ethical aspects of veganism at all so in some sense I respect them and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something a lot more substantial than what you ate for breakfast this morning or how much fun it is to go swimming jumping off a cliff in copán yang or fill in the blank um picking out three issues from this video I'm gonna react to one is that he uses the words realistic and sustainable throughout the video in an unexamined way and this is something in politics you got to learn to watch you got to learn to jump on people for this kind of weakness hahaha he says it is not sustainable though defining it without explaining why that somehow it's unsustainable to eat absolutely zero meat as if implicitly it would be more sustainable to eat the type of diet he's suggesting which is what we would call a reduce Italian diet it's less meat but not zero meat he's actually proposing eating meat one day a week with some other caveats hahahaha so sustainability has two dimensions here one is ecological environmental sustainability right and you can even wrap it up with economic sustainability why would that be more ecologically sustainable and I don't even have to spell it out there's no argument there there's no argument that is more environmentally sustainable to eat some meat rather than none especially we talk about a minority of people like vegans we're talking about you know a few tens of thousands of people were a tiny minority globally why would you advise those people to shift so the ecological argument is non-starter there's a second dimension to sustainability right and that's psychological that's what he really means he's suggesting you that psychologically it's more sustainable to have a little bit rather than none at all why are parents so alarmed when they find out their children are using cocaine hey let's flip it why were you as a child of any age be alarmed when you find out your parents are using cocaine what if it's just a little bit what if it's just one day a week what if it's just a few times a month or a few times a year a little bit is the hardest thing to sustain in the world that's why we all advocate zero cocaine we don't say use less we don't say use it in moderation we don't say use it once in a while and when you do the research on this I won't mention why I did end up looking at this one point one of the least harmful drugs physiologically that people use is heroin heroin doesn't have the kind of negative effects in your body that many other habits do in our society but nobody in their right mind would tell you that a little bit is more sustainable than not at all okay and I'm not going to spell for you I think you guys know why okay the reality is in terms of what why would it be unrealistic for me to say you know what I went and visited a grade five classroom yesterday a whole bunch of little kids who are all in grade five and I thought I wish that none of you ever even try heroin I hope that you all go through your whole lives with zero heroin use why would that be unrealistic why would that be unstable why would anyone say to me oh come on you should be realistic a little bit of heroin here and there doesn't do any harm now on a scientific and medical level believe it or not there is an argument for that or you can just measure brain damage and effects in your kidneys and whatever and say you know what human body can tolerate you know heroin here and there psychologically if that's the kind of sustainability we're talking about no no no homeboy zero is sustainable a little bit a little bit really is worse than none at all he goes from this into an argument on vegans being politically inflexible and intolerant toward anyone who is non vegan well there's certainly cause for alarm there's certainly plenty of idiots on the internet who make what he says here are sound reasonable but I disagree on this channel in many different videos I've made a political comparison to quitting smoking and to political movements that are trying to get everyone to quit smoking let's say I'm a member of such a movement now I'm not and in many countries in the world that's really in the past I mean normally a lot of the campaigns to get government's to oppose smoking are already over because they've achieved their their ends and it's it's not as highly politicized anymore it's widely accepted that smoking is a bad thing that everyone should either minimize smoking or quit smoking does that mean that on an individual basis if I have a friend who's a smoker by know someone who smokes air at this does that mean I'm going to treat them like a jerk does that mean I'm gonna be cruel to them personally or politically does that mean I'm gonna persecute them does that mean I'm gonna want to physically hurt them if I have a friend who smoke cigarettes and at different times my behalf I have had friends who were smokers I can be their friend I can respect their opinion I can respect them as a human being and still every single time they smoke cigarettes I regard them as doing something wrong I don't think it's a mixed bag I don't think that smoking a little bit is okay and smoking a lot is a problem no I want my friends to smoke zero I would like ideally the whole world the smoke zero that's a goal I want to achieve and politically in socially many societies not all but in many Western countries their governments will openly say yeah ideally in the future our target is to have a zero percent rate of smokers whether or not they're really doing what it takes to achieve that is another story but they'd like to see smoking reduced and eliminated that does not mean I am your enemy if you are a smoker it really doesn't yeah it's a subtle it's a subtle but obvious point I guess I can leave it at that but the fat and again there's no moral ambiguity in that smoking is bad if you smoked two cigarettes a cigarette today you did something bad but that doesn't mean I hate you that doesn't mean I'm angry at you and the other hand if I'm friends with you I'm never gonna say to you that smoking is okay I think that each day that goes past you're wasting an opportunity to quit smoking you really should for your own sake and to make the world a better place and in so many ways but still that does not mean I think the solution of this problem is beating you oppressing you putting you in prison totalitarian measures or any of these other ideas that he attaches to the simple notion of a binary distinction between right and wrong yes smoking is wrong it's a hundred percent wrong every time you do it it's wrong it's not that a little bit as though okay it's never okay nevertheless I can have a compassionate and a strategic approach to how we're gonna bring about that social change and look I've never been a smoker but I mean the studies you read on the on the addictive effects of smoking so I think cigarettes are much much harder to quit than meat dairy leather nobody cuz nobody goes into withdrawal when they quit leather and that's stop wearing wool you don't get the shakes you know when you think about it in many ways the struggle to get people to quit smoking is much more difficult than a struggle to get them to quit meat right even if there were no health benefits that would still be true but there's a positive sense the 21st century that that's a struggle we're all a part of again it's not in all countries in the world it's possible you're living in one of the countries where people are still encouraged by their government to smoke cigarettes and people don't want to admit that it's a problem or what have you but most of the scientifically advanced world now in a sense the debate is over about whether smoking is good or bad and the question now about the ways and means to bring about that kind of change and yes that is politically what I want with veganism that's the progress I want to see and there's no reason to think there's a dictatorship involved in that and if you look around at the governments of the world and say which have been the most effective which have been the least effective in reducing cigarette smoking I don't think you would find historical that dictatorships have been especially successful you know I think you could look on a country-by-country basis who has really had the most effective government measures to try to bring that about but yes it would it would make the better the world a better place if you quit eating meat it would make the world a better place if governments anywhere took up policies to reduce and eliminate meat consumption and yes there's a binary distinction each and every time you eat meat you're doing something immoral and everyone I know eats me I have no vegan friends in real life so me all my friends currently in it you know off speak you to be meat so again this idea um that there's some other kind of conflict in place and that it's nonsense I don't know but he must know it is he this guy was a vegan for nine years on some level I don't think he didn't have any kind of snappy comeback to to what I've said out here um thirdly and finally out of many wrongheaded answers wrongheaded reasons he gives for why he's gone back from being vegan to eating meat after nine years he talks about anthropomorphism he talks about vegans projecting human attributes onto animals and now this is somewhere where my version of veganism is really very different from all you pet loving you know dog cuddling vegans alright I've been very clear on this channel that I also regard the domestication of animals as immoral okay and I do believe that when you take a dog and try to train it to behave in human society that is anthropomorphism I think human beings who own pets who own companion animals are projecting human characteristics and human qualities on animals and that is part of the problem however what this fellow David J Kelly has suggested is that all veganism is based on anthropomorphism that's dead wrong if I respect a lion I can simply respect a lion as a lion I don't need it to behave in human society I don't need it to be cute or cuddly I don't need it to like me or love me I don't need it to appreciate me I don't need to feed it treats or snacks and have it act grateful you know the relationship to a pet involves some very psychologically disturbing aspects you know and I've had all these hell these ridiculous excuses sent to me by emails people claiming that they have a symbol symbiotic relation with their pets symbiosis you kidding me you tied with two animals that have a symbiotic relationship or one animal cuts off the balls of the other animals you know spaying and neutering your pet castration you call that symbiosis lookups impose I've gotten I have gotten from vegans the same stupid excuses that meat eaters make for eating meat in very close parallel made by vegans for pet ownership there is possible hillier video but yes I think that pet ownership does involve anthropomorphism and that that is part of the problem but if I simply look at a wild elephant and in the whole world there are very few places where wild elephants still exist I was watching the last wild elephants disappear in Laos and Myanmar I could say a lot more about that I don't want this elephant to amuse me I don't want it to entertain me I don't want it to reflect any of my human characteristics I'm not looking for that in this elephant I can simply respect its autonomy and independence and not want to disturb it I can simply want human beings to leave enough forests intact so that this animal does not get driven to extinction right so again the wilderness based paradigm the habitat conservation paradigm approaches those issues in a completely different way and I'm not asking you to stop eating pork because a pet can be cute and cuddly because a pig can be just as much of a pet as a dog to me that's completely the wrong way to approach the issue and that does fall prey to this argument that David J Kelly is presented if your argument is don't eat pigs because they will suffer as much as a dog don't eat pigs because pigs can be a cute and cuddly pet if you love them and care for them if you project your human characteristics onto them no no no no no a pet is completely different from the way an animal paves in the wild if a wild boar is out there I got fan mail from someone who lived in so this days a woman in the Philippines she had been attacked by a wild boar she was writing in to me about that what it's like being attacked by a wild boar she wrote in to me about being attacked by packs of feral dogs you know she was this is the one person writing Anthony Moore it's just like all I can say back is yeah I know exactly what you're talking about wild wild dogs feral dogs wild boars and you know she was saying this this vegan stuff about respecting rats and never killing rats well back in the Philippines you know to actually wake up with rats biting through your skin with rats gnawing at you to you know lift up the mattress of your bed and see underneath that there were rats you know there's a nest of rats giving birth and breeding you know yeah there there are self-defense issues there's you know nature red in tooth and claw there are all these contradictions that we as vegans have to have to deal with the point is a willingness based approach means my argument doesn't rest on pigs being cute and cuddly it doesn't rest on asking you to sympathize with the suffering of a pig in the same way as yourself sympathize with the suffering of a dog I'm not asking for that I'm not asking you to sympathize with rats my point is rats should exist out in the woods not in my bedroom pigs should exist out in the woods where they are terrifying to human beings they're not cute and cuddly at all and I want you to let those pigs exist as pigs not as a plaything for human beings not as an accoutrement to human civilization I want you to respect the pig as a pig not as something with human values or characteristics projecting onto it not as something with human emotions projected onto it right in the same way that we respect a lion without imagining that it really has any shall we say common ground with ourselves