Wheat Kills: vs. Vegan Gains (vs. No Bullshit)

hey guys when I tackle these issues if
I've got a choice now I'm going to tackle them what I like to do is to talk about the controversy at the moment and then talk about the more profound underlying political and philosophical issues in a way that will still be interesting if I come back and watch this video myself five years from now ten years from now when the controversy the moment has been forgotten the controversy of the moment right now really it's a long series of debates vegan gains is right now engaged in a one-man crusade to debate every imbecile who makes excuses for eating meat on the internet and to scoff at and laugh at their ridiculous excuses and rationalizations for why they eat meat one at a time so a shout out to Richard shoutout to vegan gains obviously he is in large part doing this as a form of entertainment for his audience it's not entirely serious but of course there also is a serious message he's trying to deliver you know the one person at a time and of course he has a big audience so in some ways it's reaching a hundred thousand people at a time so obviously I respect the effort he's making even though quite honestly from my perspective I do find many of his arguments logically flawed and counterproductive and needlessly combative and creating a hostility sometimes when he's debating with people who are actually inclined to to not be hostile toward him he is a debate with anti-war ski as an example anti-war ski began that debate as a somewhat humble ex vegan as someone who had tried veganism and felt it didn't work for him as a diet any worse he began that with a really positive fairly warm and conciliatory set of attitudes and they got stuck into this ridiculous debate ridiculous from my perspective about what would you do if space aliens conquered earth and if these space aliens began exploiting human beings human lives for meat in the same way the humans exploit animals I sympathize with why they engaged in that conversation I understand the series of steps that led to that debate and why I took on that form but yeah I do feel that a lot of those debates are ridiculous if you guys find them entertaining and lighting great obviously a lot of people do with that caveat having been said the latest debate as of this moment is between vegan gains and a much more hostile dismissive and derisive character was named in the description of this video um but it seemed to me really significant that in this debate vegan gains was in the early stages I think tripped up and kind of shocked and had to deal with the unwanted assertion that vegans are inevitably and ineluctably killing animals by participating in grain agriculture that by farming wheat by farming other grains by farming rice or what-have-you also we are constantly killing animals and that therefore veganism as an animal rights paradigm does not make sense now this critique it actually does cut pretty deep and I've seen vegans respond to it across the board I have seen Gary frenzy on a struggle to deal with this because Gary Franchione eggs by the way if you haven't heard of them he's probably the single most influential political theorist about veganism today in 2017 I think his views are now going out of fashion but the last five years I think he has been he's led the most successful the most influential school of vegan thought the so-called abolitionist approach I don't subscribe to it but I recognize their success and how Fletcher live in Gary France aione even for him this is really an unwanted and uncomfortable challenge and ultimately when vegan gains was discussing it he ended up appealing to the idea of the ethics of intention so in a sense vegan gains conceded that the difference between a vegan eating wheat and a meat-eater eating a steak is not an absolute and categorical difference it's a difference which if measured in the number of animals being killed the amount of suffering or the amount of harm that we can quantify that we can think of as being on a spectrum it's admitting that wheat farming is also killing some animals even though obviously if you look at the full cycle of production if you scale it up and do the math all the ecological impacts as well as the animal suffering impacts what have you eating the steak is much worse but where we are dealing with a difference of degree and not a difference of kind I think it is really significant I think it is really worth dwelling on and reflecting on the extent to which this issue of grain agriculture the extent to which it is a shocking and unwelcome challenge to most vegans and most vegan schools of thought why do I emphasize that because it is not a challenge to my approach and my school of thought I have a playlist I'll give the link below this channel circle of this video ever playlist here on this channel uh devoted to what I call the wildlife management approach to veganism I differ from other vegans in many many ways I differ in not glorifying pet ownership not glorifying you know taking a dog and castrating it domesticating it turning it into a toy for human entertainment I say no that is not the moral baseline taking care of your pets is not the moral baseline we have to look at how that dog would have lived in the wild if it were a wolf we can't look at photos of a cute little cuddly piglet a piglet that has probably been castrated and domesticated as being raised in someone's living room and say just because it's cute that that's the moral baseline we have to look at a wild boar living in the forest where indeed wild boars will attack and try to eat people it's a very different approach that proceeds from normatively looking at how animals would live in the wild but step two of this is that I completely concede the point that the concept of animal rights is a human centered projection I do not believe that animals have souls I also do not believe that human beings have souls I believe that human beings in the same way that we create arbitrary legal distinctions and impose them on one another we create arbitrary legal distinctions and impose them on animals I think a really good example of this that almost everybody accepts very very few people with debate it within the United States and within Canada every state in every province has some legal standard for what's called the age of consent and most people don't really care what it is maybe it's 18 maybe it's 16 but we know there is some age after which people can take moral responsibility for the decisions what age can you drive a car what age can you drink alcohol whatever the age maybe however arbitrary that decision is we all accept the idea that ultimately human being sit down and they draw a line in the sand they write a law that establishes that that barrier and then we all accept it and we all live with it we can debate what the age is but we're not really debating the concept that at some point you're too young to drive a car you're too young to own a gun too young to vote too young to pay your own taxes and that conversely there's some point when you're too old to have another person take responsibility that you must take responsibility for yourself in the same way I think it is completely arbitrary that human beings sit down and they draw a line on the map and they say on that side of the line we have a habitat conservation area and over there the rights of animals are protected whether it's a bear or whether it's Gophers ground squirrels animals that would eat the food we're farming whether they're rats wolves elephants what-have-you and then on the other side of that line if the elephants come into the city if the Bears come into the city if the rats come into your own basement if the cockroaches are crawling on your own walls we do not recognize the animal separates so this is the opposite of a model based on inalienable rights or a model based on the soul or the spirit of the animal or the animals intelligence I embrace the fact that these are ultimately arbitrary distinctions we create and it is to some extent for the animals benefit and it's the some extent for our benefit as human beings because they're just human inventions the human inventions that ultimately have to do with the function of our own society so ultimately governments will sit down and draw lines in a map and decide over there we have grain farming and over here we have habitat conservation now this approach has really many many examples I have I am not at all tripped up by these questions that trip up being gains because my approach to beacon ism is so fundamentally different so fundamentally alien I'm also not tripped up in any way whatsoever when for example meat-eaters raise questions about the ethics of palm oil production I've done videos about that in the past I guess I can put a link below this video to to me what's fundamental is to get across the point look it doesn't matter if you're chopping down the forest to produce wood or if you're chopping down the forest to produce palm oil or if you're chopping down the forest to produce strawberries agriculture absolutely all plant agriculture is created and sustained through violence conceptually speaking it's violence against the wild it's an act of violence that reduces a forest to being a farm and then is it a constant state of war against the weeds to try to take back that farm the new saplings the new trees that are trying to spread up it's a constant state of war against the various species whether you think of them as pests or otherwise the various animals and insects and what-have-you that are going to come in and try to take back that farm ultimately each of those animals is just trying to survive each of those plants is just try to survive but the effect of what they're trying to do is they're trying to take a totally unnatural human invention the farm and have it revert to being you know a forest or a grassy field to be in part of the wild part of the wilderness that is what I see as the underlying struggle that's going on at all times in agriculture of any kind now the good news is with veganism if fewer and fewer people eat meat that means that the land we need to feed the same number of human beings to feed 1 billion people let's say we need dramatically less land the land use to feed 1 billion vegans is dramatically lower than the land that we need to feed 1 billion meat-eaters this is well proven and well attested you can get the stats out of a number of United Nations agencies as well as local national studies or national governments around the world the math is quite simple to do the fundamental reason for that is that animals like pigs and cows don't just live for five minutes they have to be raised up fed a diet of grain before they're slaughtered themselves the amount of water that's needed is dramatically dramatically lower to sustain a population of 1 billion vegans as opposed to 1 billion meat-eaters and so on so actually the potential for wildin the potential to really expand the amount of area on the Earth's surface that's devoted to true animal welfare because true animal welfare is animals living in the wild not animals living as a toy on your carpet the potential is there as more and more people become vegan we will have more and more resources just in the form of unused available land that we can devote to being wildlife preserves to being habitat preservation areas to benefit animals but in my way of thinking that is the only way human beings benefit animals we set up a fence and the main purpose of that fence is not to keep the animals inside it's to keep human beings out it's to keep the hunters out is to keep anyone who wants to exploit the animals or cut down the trees exploits have set out ultimately we have to employ guards around every National Park just to prevent illegal logging this is a reality in third world countries it's a reality within Canada everywhere there's always economic pressure to start destroying the wild as soon as it's regenerated or as soon as you have an intact forest but the idea that there is some kind of stark ethical difference between farming palm oil on a palm oil plantation and farming mangoes in the same climate is deeply deeply flawed to me and I don't see why vegans or meteors want to trade in this now conversely as vegan gains has just argued there is a very very deep ethical difference between eating beef and eating lentils or eating wheat or what-have-you but in how we approach this problem I think that vegans who want to imagine either they think really about the ethics of the soul or they construe the ethical argument another way you set yourself up for failure if the reality of human being is needing to eat wheat needy rice needy beans if that comes in as an unwanted distraction at the of your line of thinking I think you should turn around 180 degrees and put that first and foremost the grim reality of the 21st century is that we live on a planet that is almost 100% subordinated to human needs and human conveniences we're almost the entire surface of the world exists for our exploitation whether that's for the production of food the production of electricity the production of plastic items and factories you name it and the only thing you can contrast that to are the areas where again human laws human governments humans have sat down and projected their own values onto the map and decided no it has to stop somewhere somewhere we have to draw a dotted line and have armed guards and have some land that exists not for our benefit but for the benefit of the forest itself for the benefit of all the species of animals that live within that forest itself that's where our domain ends and their domain begins I think that is the ultimate ethical difference that we should base our arguments for veganism on that we have to base a vegan philosophy on and the result is a much more coherent and meaningful approach to vegan activism then these other approaches that frankly people fill up my email box with arguing our spirit amount so you can contrast this to an argument where people claim any oppression of animals is speciesism well is it speciesism if you kill cockroaches inside your own apartment a lot of vegans say well that's an exception to the rule but they still want to cling to the species this paradigm is it speciesism if every time you eat bread you are paying someone to kill Gophers and squirrels ground squirrels the other animals is it speciesism if every time you use edible oil like palm oil you're indirectly paying for orangutangs to be killed and again it's just as true of mangoes as it is of palm oil there is no difference the same species of animals like monkeys and orangutangs will want to come onto a mango farm or a durian farm and there are mean old farmers with with rifles there shoot the monkeys so they don't ruin the mango crop or the durian crop wherever the example may be say well that's an exception to the rule but still this species is paradigm this is how we have to think of it or still this idea that animals all have souls or have rights equivalent human rights I don't see it that way at all I I killed cockroaches just last night inside this apartment I'm a vegan but I don't want to be part of a political movement that's built on a lie I don't want to be part of a religious movements built in a lie and to some extent when you get into these more spiritual approaches to veganism it starts to resemble both it starts to resent a phony pseudo spiritual religious movement masquerading as a political movement that to me just rings hollow and it does set us up for reputation by anyone who will just say well what about growing wheat what about eating bread for me instead I embrace entirely that these are human created values human created laws ultimately reflecting human responsibilities human civilization is destructive and in many ways ineluctably tragic I can't live in this apartment without killing cockroaches without occasionally killing mosquitoes I think it would be better not to morally it would be better if I could catch the cockroaches and put them outside without harming them it would be better if we could grow wheat without killing all kinds of different mammals but we can't and we won't what we can do is recognize our responsibility our unique position as human beings in the 21st century in a period of our history when there is no great untamed wilderness what we have our little patches here and there of carefully controlled wilderness under human sovereignty under human management when our responsibility to the animals and to the planet is to make those decisions on their behalf for their benefit and for ours for where the exploitation is going to end for where there are no more farms for where there's no more factories where the land exists for the sake of the animals themselves and yes indirectly for the ecology for the air for the water that we over lie on