Vegans vs. the Wildlife Management Paradigm.

I do not want to be part of a political
movement that's based on a lie I do not want to be part of a religion that's based on a lie I've honest yen I totally believe in criticism I think you can criticize other people what I don't like is when people were applied to criticism say you should not criticize others because you owe the vegan community you know need to be me be United you need to support each other despite that you disappeared somebody else well crap I don't need to support the others of the honey I don't need to support vegan gurus I don't even support vegan leaders I owe them nothing I think that veganism first came onto the scene with a set of easy answers to difficult questions and most of those answers were wrong even if you sympathize with them even they appeal to your heart to your soul to your spirit the idea that we can simply hand down this dictum that nobody should ever kill any animal for any reason and then that we can all live by it that we can reinvent modern Western industrialized society on that basis it is a simple answer to a complicated question and inevitably it's wrong no matter how much it might appeal to us emotionally it's like when I get comments well you're not big enough because this is this I made a video yesterday about conservation and wildlife habitat and someone said well you're just not vegan then because you will not argue against wildlife conservation and I said it still doesn't wash away the facts of conservation there are purpose to wildlife conservation I'm against slaughterhouse factory farming for animals I'm against it I am NOT against wildlife conservation because I understand why I like conservation I've been part of that in my own life it's not as black and white as as let's just not kill any animals period through a long series of videos now I've been trying to raise this issue of habitat conservation and wildlife management as a fundamentally different paradigm a different basis for both asking and answering questions about how humans and animals live together and as you guys probably know the most controversial aspect of that was part was the question of pet ownership but other controversies one of it also other people and I believe me I've gotten a lot of very appreciative fan mail appreciative fan mail from people who agreed with me to begin with who felt that they were all alone in a vegan movement that had given in to a mania for pet ownership and the other hand have also gotten some really deep fan mail from people who who said they never really thought about it before but now that I raised the question they did a lot of soul-searching they did a little bit of research and they they came around at the view that yes as a matter of principle what I was saying was right but it's an inconvenient principle because it's a principle that forces us to come up with complicated answers to complicated questions gets into mitigating problems not pretending we can solve them overnight wildlife population management involves killing more than zero animals and as soon as we admit that to ourselves as vegans our therm could get into another more meaningful set of questions questions both a principle and of practice I'm going to choose an extreme example to keep this simple you know in the north of Canada we have polar bears the management of polar bears does sometimes involve tranquilizing them and relocating them you know pretty relatively nonviolent means and it sometimes involves killing them and again any time if you're gonna move past street protests and making hysterical extreme statements the internet to actually lobbying government for change to get a change to a specific law to specific principle you're not gonna pass a law that just says the government will never again shoot a polar bear that's ridiculous I I'm vegan I would love it if we could live without ever shooting polar bears but there's gonna be a statistic every year a certain number of polar bears are gonna be shot dead by human beings including bye-bye you know wildlife management by government officials in various capacities I'm from Wyoming again as I said I live near Yellowstone I like grew up there I don't live there now but and at one point of time the wolves were a problem so people started killing the wolves the problem is back in the day that they didn't they didn't know that if you eradicated the role the wolves are you killed the wolves that the Bison and the elk and the deer and everybody would over populate and since there was no regulation with the animals is that the Bison and the elk and everything would start to Obie over grazing and actually over grazed then eventually they would start starving because there's too many of them the ecosystem cannot handle all of those big-game herbivores and herbivores basically they had to be hunted to conserve the habitat and also eventually Yellowstone had to introduced non-native wolves into Yellowstone now I do not see in that a justification for commercialized hunting and I used the word commercialized for a reason in Canada we have a real problem a chronic problem of bears I'm not gonna speak of bears as a whole not just polar bears bears break through somebody's window most often it's a window leading into a basement or you know a semi sub-basement kind of situation the bear can smell food inside the bear can get into the house and it can't get out and depending on where you live if you live in a remote area even if you make a phone call to the government the government say we can't send anyone to help you you need to get a rifle and kill the bear yourself very sad but these these kinds of things are inevitable and I think you can have government policy and public education that prepares people for those situations or that even makes humane and nonviolent alternatives available maybe maybe that's even that is too idealistic meaning you can you can investigate ways to try to minimize the number of people killing bears but I do not see in that a rationale for the exploitation of the bear population as a form of entertainment or as a basis for for-profit hunting so coming back to polar bears I chose them as a simple example get every year a significant number of Japanese tourists coming to northern Canada to see polar bears they also want to see the night sky up in the Arctic that wants to various things as a cultural difference interestingly the Chinese tourists tend to have a different taste Chinese tourists who go to the Arctic almost always want to see a cliff of ice you know uh and I where ice comes directly onto the ocean they want to see ice breaking up and falling they may also want to see polar bears but if you talk to people who work in tourism they observe these these sort of subtle cultural differences in the chinese japanese i think ethically it's very different to have a japanese tourists come to see a wild polar bear and having a japanese tourists pay money to shoot it wild portrait to me that's a real difference that's a meaningful difference even if we accept that it's inevitable that wildlife management and just people living in homes and in the countryside or in the Arctic that sometimes people are gonna kill these animals and we have to have kind of management managerial set of attitudes towards that I don't see that as being on a slippery slope towards hunting in that sense you know Yellowstone is not a special case this happens within lots of environments now you are not allowed to hunt in national parks but at the same time if the Bisons over populate the park employees or those who they hire are in charge of removing some bison so again this for me fits into the same paradigm that I raised relatively long time ago in videos where I talked about the problem of gambling and that one of the halfway solutions that existed in the Western world I can remember when I was a kid was that some countries allowed a non-profit gambling but did not allow for-profit gambling so it was ridiculous but in Canada used to be that churches could have gambling in order to raise money for charity but you couldn't actually have a casino operating on a for-profit basis now over time those laws changed be more and more permissive and today there are tons of casinos in Canada and nobody can tell that it was ever regulated okay I'm exaggerating slightly but things things have sort of rolled downhill from there with vivisection some of you guys will remember this and we won't I I raised the issue of I don't think ethically vivisection should be allowed to exist on a for-profit basis to me that's important is that we say even if there's a justification where I put it to you this way I for me it's completely unforgivable for any human being to wear leather boots so now I sound like an extremist right well leather boots are not functional in any way if leather boots had an advantage over you know rubber and canvas and vegan materials then the US Marine Corps would wear leather boots every day if there was any technological advantage US Marine Corps and other military services would be wearing boots leather boots in action and they don't need more a hundred years ago they did things have changed mountaineering teams who have a huge budget do not wear leather boots do not wear leather gloves they did a hundred years ago so the use of leather for boots is totally obsolete and from my perspective ethically totally unforgivable there is no excuse for anyone ever to wear leather boots and yet an incredibly small percentage of the population agrees to this even though leather boots have no benefit and we can provide a 100% perfect substitution we can actually provide a technologically superior substitute walk into any army surplus store and look at the current models not of parade boots but of the boots that army guys wear in combat in inaction of various kinds okay I have been honest in admitting to you on camera that I cannot say this about the exploitation of animals for medical science research it's not the same we don't have a simple technological replacement the same way we can replace leather boots and that's very sad for me I've seen videotape of horseshoe crabs being tortured for medical science and the horseshoe crab is a very simple creature in terms of its the size of its brain they don't actually have eyes so you know there are they can detect light but they are they're considered in terms of evolutionary science a simple creature deeply upsetting to me horrifying to me I regard that as an abomination you know I regard that as a crime I'll leave it to me it's completely repugnant even when it's a horseshoe crab being exploited even when it's being done to produce medicines that are truly necessary that we truly have no other substitute for so the particular article is reading about actually discussed the the attempt scientifically to try to make this obsolete that so far have failed that so far we have no substitute for it's actually the blood of the the horseshoe crab okay I wish that wasn't true but I do not want to be part of a political movement that's based on a lie I do not want to be part of a religion that's based on a lie you guys laughed at this but I said before I'm gonna give it to you raw I'm gonna tell you the honest truth as heartbreaking as it is for me I'm in a position to morally condemn wearing leather boots and I'm not in a position to condemn you for using medicine that's a product of vivisection or using you know or scientists who you know are reduced to or who embrace this kind of animal is exploitation this kind of animal experimentation all right now there are things we can do and I sorry so this is the reason why I raised vivisection in parallel that conservation to to wildlife management I do think we can still argue look when this is a necessity we cannot have that necessity determined by the push and pull of the free market we cannot just have for-profit short-term profit motives paying for you know monkeys or horseshoe crabs to be tortured death and laboratories I think we have to separate the pure pursuit of research from the profit motive when torturing animals to death is involved and again I can give other parallels I think there's a very real question ever could how can you possibly have prisons operating on a for-profit basis I believe prisons are necessary I'm not an anarchist I believe that prisons need to exist um however I do not think we can have prisons operated by a company on a for-profit basis if prisons exist for the sake of necessity then it can't be built on the profit motive so my point here is when we move past the overly simplistic questions and the overly simplistic answers that veganism offered the world I'd say in its first first few steps towards becoming a movement it doesn't mean we give up our own moral principles at all I think it means we look at the more complex and nuanced solutions step by step we have to engage in in the next 200 years or more than 200 years as we make the transition from being a civilization that was absolutely built on the exploitation of animals the unquestioned exploitation and slaughter of animals you know in the Chinese language the character for home is a roof over a pig in English we say home is where the heart is in Chinese when you look at that written character home is where the pig is because this whole civilization for thousands of years was built on killing and eating pigs and European civilization was built on riding horses anyhow that's the reality of what humanity has been for thousands and thousands of years and you know the answers these questions are gonna come step by step and the fact that you're willing to get into the nitty-gritty of okay what is the ethical way to manage a polar bear population what are the terrible compromises we have to make now and in the next 10 years what how are we going to manage a scientific and medical establishment that relies on torturing animals to death for scientific research and for the production of some medicines as in the case of the horseshoe crab what is what is that going to mean in the next 10 years and you know first things last how are we going to motivate even 10% of the population to care enough to just stop wearing leather boots when leather boots deliver no benefit to them at all because it's not as black white as as let's just not kill any animals period shoutout to the channel formerly known as plant-based hippie she just changed her name she's now called American unicorn she has a video reflecting on how actually a conversation she had with me was part of the reason why she changed her name I remember that conversation it's a happy memory for me obviously as you guys know I'm keeping up this thing where I really try to support and shout out other vegan channels any kind that that talk about something real that are not trying to sell you a diet they're not trying to sell you a dream but that are asking the difficult questions and she's one of them she's one of the good ones even though obviously politically very different people