#DOGGATE: An Analysis (Vegan Gains vs. Vegan Cheetah)
27 February 2017 [link youtube]
The domestication of "companion animals"; the killing of other animals to provide them with food; the implications of the abolitionism vs. welfarism debate for "the pet industry" as a whole (in the same sense that we speak of "the meat industry" as a whole and we do not, e.g., make exceptions for second-hand leather), etc.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
on YouTube when you've talked about an
issue a hundred times you get emails asking you to talk about the issue 101 times I'm not complaining I am duly flattered if this is the first time you've seen my channel the first time you've heard my voice have seen my faith let me tell you something if you search this channel for the word dog cat domestication pets these are issues I have weighed in on heavily and I have in a sense taken the fight to other vegan YouTube channels other vegan authorities and opinion makers I have challenged many of the comfortable compromises and assumptions and excuses that vegans make for themselves I have heard vegans say that they are strictly vegan and yet they buy meat they buy dead cows in a metal can to feed to their cats every day and they live with those contradictions and they have their own kooky philosophy making excuses for it I have heard unnatural vegan herself say with a shocking lack of self-awareness that she believes that taking care of a dog entails that you literally cut its balls off that castration is simply part of taking good care of a domesticated animal and therefore there's nothing ethically problematic about it in a very strange boiling frog way he's a very non vegan image it is interesting to me the people who start off from a position of such strident moral purity end up step-by-step coming into terrible unconscionable moral compromises and that is what happened to Richard vegan gains and I say it with all due sympathy when you look at step by step the process vegan gains stumbled through with his dog you can see he had good intentions he feels love for this dog he feels attachment to this dog this dog is a domesticated animal that is dependent on him to care for it and he feels that that care and that responsibility now requires him to buy meat from a butcher and keep pieces of chopped up you know cows and deer in a cooler to feed his dog which for any vegan is horrifying and unethical and I think he himself very well recognizes the you know a moral quandary he's found himself trapped in but he also doesn't feel that he can just put this dog to death that he can kill this dog in order to in an abstract sense save the lives of an animal that are being slaughtered in order to feed the dog okay so it's a terrible unconscionable situation and it's very important in these situations to have sympathy for both sides it's important to have sympathy for the devil why not because sympathy is meaningful in itself but because sympathy is an analytical tool by sympathizing with Richard by sympathizing with the situation he's in we understand this joy she's in and we understand something about veganism itself so I've talked about this issue 100 times and I'm going to talk about it 200 times because this is important for vegans as individuals all kinds of vegans live with these terrible compromises of buying pieces of dead cow meat in a can to feed their cat it's important for the future of the movement okay um I am known for shifting this debate away from the question of the happiness of the animal to instead talking about the dignity of the animal and I think that vegans themselves fail to recognize that they are standing on the same shaky ground meat eaters stand on when meat-eaters make excuses for all the terrible things they do in trying to appeal to the self-evident happiness of these animals I saw a dog here a couple of weeks ago here in this part of China where I live and it has the collar around its neck and a chain going from its neck to the wall and it had a bowl a plastic bowl in front of it with food that was put there by a human hand and in terms of the expression on its face sitting there in the sunshine in this beautiful climate that dog looked as happy as could be as happy as could be in its chains its literal chains but I got to tell you something there's a very real sense in which that dog is not as happy as it could be it is not happy at all this dog has been castrated domesticated broke it never had a relationship with its own mother it's never gonna be a parent itself and raise its own kids it's never gonna know what it's like to run in a pack it's never gonna know what it's like to forage and explore the wilderness it's never gonna know what it's like for a pack of dogs to take down a prey animal to you know to kill a deer and tear it apart and then to have the competition that happens within the dog pack for which dog eats first which dog is alpha and which dog is is beta and so on that is the life of a dog not a wolf a dog and all its happiness and all its joy the full range of what it can experience in this world is defined by that life in its own species you know and can never be replaced by a human hand putting the chopped-up remains of a cow in a plastic bowl for it okay happiness for a dog can never consist of you know a leather collar and a steel chain attaching it to the wall and you know I grew up around cats and dogs like most of you people did I grew up in Canada I've lived in Asia for many many years but you know I'm Canadian originally and you know we're all raised with this myth that the happiest a cat can be is for a cat to be fed this way for a cat to live a life of leisure for a cat to be stroked by a human hand and make this purring noise let me tell you something it's not happiness for a cat and both male and female cats their behaviors are totally transformed by having their their natural hormones their natural instincts ripped out of their bodies you can live around cats that you know cats that have the experience of being in heat cats that have the experience of spraying that have all of these predatory instincts as well as meeting instincts that come from their hormones and when cats are domesticated to be turned into a toy for human entertainment this is this whole range of behaviors is physically torn out of their body and they're deprived of ever having that experience and you know yes you can pet a cat and if it's raised from birth as a kitten being petted with the human hand then they will tolerate it and they'll purr at you and they'll look you in the eye so totally unnatural relationship between species here and it doesn't make the cat happy you may think that's what happiness is forget you may think you're perceiving these animals as happy you may think you're making them happy by domesticating them treating them as a toy having them lie on your rug and watch television next to you that's not what a cat wants that's not what a cat enjoys let me tell you the happiest I've ever seen a cat I was doing humanitarian work in northwestern Laos near the border with Myanmar in villages that are on the official list of the most poverty stricken villages villages where people still experience seasonal starvation our charity was handing out sacks of rice to starving people we were also carrying out improvements to agriculture there was a cat it was not a very large cat and this cat I can't even call it really domesticated it would come around and take some white rice and yellow lentils from the human beings living and we were running this charity the officers you could say at this nonprofit and the only meat in the cat's diet was what it hunted for itself this cat did not like to be pet petted by human hands it didn't try to entertain us it didn't try to make us happy and I saw that cat kill a rat that was almost bigger than the cat I mean the two of them side-by-side were about the same size it was a huge jungle rat and a favorite small adult cat and I don't know honestly I don't know if this cat liked me of everyone in this house it could have brought the near everyone in this village or in a village in northern Laos this cat climbed up through my window to show me this rat had killed lying next to me on the bed and you have never seen such joy and I mean you know just the accomplishment of it this cat had killed a rat it looked like a fair fight they're about the same size the joy this cat experienced you know through this natural predator prey activity was unbelievable let me tell you something so I'm lying there in bed I open my eyes this is this enormous rat next to me and this cat leaping up and down with joy to show me this this Rattata kill I've never seen in my life a cat so happy and I took some news prints and I picked up the rat without wanting to touch it with my bare hands and I threw the rat as far as I could into the forest into the trees I tried to go back to sleep and let me tell you something in the darkness I don't know half an hour later I heard this thumping again and when I turned on my flashlight because there was no electricity there's the cat it had gone out and found the rat again and trap didn't serve I would go again just to uh just to show me how prominent was the second time oh I had I had to close up the windows to keep the cat in the rat out look um the claims you're making about making a dog happy by domesticating it our deeply flawed they're logically flawed they're ethically flawed they're morally flawed and I think that this is what this is why I challenge people to compare the attitudes and excuses we have for domesticated animals to the way we approach the same problems with wild animals I'm really open to the range of highly emotional and highly idiosyncratic decisions that that people make on these things we had a situation in Canada when I was there recently where the mother bear was killed but the baby bears there were two bear cubs that looked cute and people wanted to save the lives of these bear cubs well okay the mother bear is is is dead and the official order some Canadian government was that the two the two Cubs should be killed also and but the photos got in the newspaper and people trying to raise money you have to really ask yourself these bear cubs if they can never live in the wild again can they ever be happy you can say you're rescuing them you can say you're giving them life instead of death but the fact that their mother is already dead does that justify castrating them domesticating them does it justify killing dozens of cows in order to feed them beef every day does it justify giving these bear cubs of life where they will never be more than a human toy obviously they're never going to know they're our mother they're never gonna have children themselves what is the life we're offering these bears or these dogs or these cats why is it so easy for vegans to justify as animal liberation what is so obviously slavery and slavery of an especially demeaning kind how did we come to a point in this movement where people will stand up and spit in your face and scream at you that killing a spider is morally equivalent to killing a human being because speciesism and yes we literally justify keeping an animal in a cage keeping an animal in on a chain we justify that as liberation and as sanctuary okay whatever animal liberation looks like to you I am saying loud and clear on this channel and I've always been saying liberation and domestication are mutually exclusive they're incompatible they're not the same thing and we as a movie just stop making excuses we need to stop making excuses for the whole range of activities when you stop making excuses for animal rescue for animal adoption for animal sanctuaries we have to look at the category of how what animal lives in the wild and the dignity in both life and death that an animal has in the forest or in the ocean when it lives on its own terms when it's not dependent on a human hand to train it and it's not dependent on a human hand to feed it and it doesn't suffer a human hand castrating it or defanging it or declawing it okay that has to become the moral baseline for veganism as a movement and not the image of dogs and cats as our toys as our so-called companions all right and guys stop saying that your dog is a member of your family all right we have all the discourse all this rhetoric about the comparison between Animal Liberation and the abolition of slavery do you not know that slave masters said the same things do you not know that the same excuses were made when human beings were in Chains we said oh no he you know this slave is not an employee it's a member of the family the slave is not being exploited slaves literally help people raise their babies you know you had slaves breastfeeding their babies and and putting them in the cradle and helping with day to day activities well this is worldwide this isn't just about American history we have slavery here in Southeast Asia slavery in the history of India all over the world okay it's true people did sleep under the same roof with their slaves the slaves did live with people as members of their family and yet there was a fundamental inequality or there's a fundamental iniquity this is a fundamental ethical question that cannot be waived away by saying this slave is a member of my family and guys it changes nothing you look at a meat-eater in a car test and say when they do it it's animal exploitation it's oppression but when we do it it's animal liberation all of us need to grow up no matter how much sympathy I have for either side so in this case guys it's rare that I can say I'm making a video by popular demand but in this case I know vegan gains personally I know vegan cheetah personally and among the people who wrote to me asking that they wanted to know my my view on this are both vegan gains and finca cheetah and I'm flattered okay it's appreciate getting correspondence for both of them I have my differences both though both of them I have my criticisms of both of them but it's it's interesting they themselves were weren't isn't hearing what I have to say now some of you might be expecting this video to be formatted in such a way as to say well is vegan gains right or is vegan cheetah right because I know them personally I know that both of them actually agree with me on this issue I'm not joking and therefore there's a fundamental sense in which they agree with each other whether or not they will ever recognize it in terms of the deeper and more fundamental ethical issues here we get into a gray area where we're not talking about issues that are simply true or false we're talking about Diaz that are true within limits that are true and meaningful and useful in some circumstances and are misleading or meaningless or false in others okay this word speciesism depending on how we use it and in what context we use it it may be meaningful and it may be meaningless I in practice I do not live my life as if a cockroach and a human being are of equal value I don't I'm divorced now back when my daughter was a newborn baby I was living in the South of France and you know I laid out mats on the floor for her to play on now I don't think the cockroaches were a threat to her life but I did not want my daughter to have cockroaches on her body and I killed cockroaches so that my daughter could play on the floor and I didn't have to worry about cockroaches being on the same floor with her okay it's not a life it's not self-defense it's not justifiable in that sense that is just a contradiction I chose to embrace I chose to live with that to me it was more important in that sense that my home be clean totally human centric notion that I didn't have cockroaches there and I was I was a strict vegan and every other unloved and I really suffered there as a vegan my life was very hard sure I know it sounds ridiculous but here in China in many ways it's much easier for me to be a vegan than it was there in France at that time that was very very tough and I did stick to my principles in so many ways but I could just recognize no I value my daughters I can't even say her life or her well-being I value my daughter's convenience this is a newborn baby crawling around on the floor and I don't want her to have to crawling with cockroaches this is keeping it all the way real so I don't know how many hundred cockroaches I killed and if I actually believed this doctrine of speciesism of all species being equal what do you want me to tell you that I feel the same way about it that I would feel about killing 100 people I don't I'm not going to I don't even regret it I just recognize it as a moral contradiction in my life look guys every single time you get on an airplane you're paying to kill animals we don't actually believe that the value of the life of a bird is equal to the value of the lives of the people that are on the airplanes pretty much every airport in the world has people and devices that are set up to try to kill birds because they got to keep the birds away from the aircraft if a bird flies into an aircraft engine which does happen every year you know it's in in significant numbers when birds get caught in the aircraft engine it can destroy the airplane it cause the airplane to have an emergency landing or to crash all right and it is interesting if you look into it some airports have protect protected species of bird nearby or have endangered species and they try to keep the birds away through various means some of them are mechanical some of them have guide lead teams of dogs barking around the perimeter of the of the or they do all kinds of things try to scare the birds away but at the end of the day if you're running an airport whether it's a military airport a domestic airport we kill birds so that we can fly our planes all right for me as a vegan am I gonna stop flying on airplanes or am I gonna say no we can't do this we have to abolish airplanes for this reason Oh or on the other hand what if I was offered that job what if it was my job at the airport to be the guy who kills birds for human safety on airplanes there is with this concept speciesism there's a point of diminishing returns or there's a limit beyond which this is starting to become surreal and I'm not saying it's good I'm not even saying it's normal or it's okay I'm saying these are the ethical contradictions we all live with as human beings and you can close your eyes to them and you can define veganism in a way that's incompatible with real life on earth or you can face up to them and in a pragmatic sense move on I commented on Twitter recently that we really do have a problem in veganism where people look for leadership to people who are the most morally pure and those are sometimes you know highly eccentric fruitarians living a very strange diet live a very stern lifestyle devoted to just their diet and exercise okay I'm actually not interested in a movement that is completely morally pure and uninterested in the leadership of people who are completely morally pure I'm quite willing to work with people who roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty I am literally willing to work with people have blood on their hands okay because I come out of a political background I'm interested in people who are gonna be getting things done I'm interested in outcomes I'm interested in actually saving the planet I'm interested in taking the vegan movement forward politically in a way that's really gonna change the world and if that means we cooperate with people who are hunters but who really care about conservation and ecology you have a vegan foundation we Quadra those people I can imagine doing that and all of us have blood on our hands the production of bread requires killing insects and killing rats and all these contradictions is this an excuse no I think one of the fundamental contradictions with vegan gains offers that I wouldn't agree with is that vegan gains says that his purchase of the dog if he gave the dog to someone else they would have to make the same purchases anyway they would have to also buy meat so he says logically it doesn't make any difference for him to refuse to buy meat because someone else taking care of the dog would be would be buying me instead you know I care about ecology I try to minimize the number of airplane flights I take with an effort every year and every every month seriously I've taken long bus trips sometimes here within Asia to avoid taking airplanes because I think ecologically we have to do our part that way and really minimize the number of airplane teachers do I don't do it to save the lives of the birds maybe I should but it's a fringe benefit look if there are empty seats on an airplane if only one fewer person buys an airplane ticket the airplane is still gonna fly right with a few more empty seats maybe the airplane is 30% empty anyway right so is there an ecological impact or should I need the enema the attitude of saying it can never make a difference because one person buying one fewer airplane ticket can't impact ecology you can describe this attitude as rational and logical but it is actually immoral morally you have to focus on the difference that you can make not on the difference that you can't make ethically you have to say the difference I can make is this one airplane seat and it is not rational it is not logical it is not reasonable to say that I should buy that seat anyway because I can't control the other 500 seats on the airplane all right ethically veganism is based on the idea I'm not gonna kill this cow all right I'm not gonna pay money for a butcher to kill a cow and give me meat and it is fundamentally unbeaten to look at that same situation say well I can buy this meat because if I don't buy it somebody else will right I have a separate video talking about the boycott mentality the limitations of the boycott mentality boycotting is not the effective way to change the world how are you can eliminate drunk driving you personally boycotting alcohol won't do it how you can eliminate smoking how are you gonna change from having a culture where cigarette smoking is accepted everywhere to a culture where it's regarded very negatively what's more sir it's not gonna be just through boycotts it's not just gonna be me boycotting cigarettes or coming on YouTube and telling everyone else they should boycott cigarettes also there has to be a dynamic process of political change in cultural change there's a lot more to it than that right but I refuse to believe that it is meaningless for me to make the ethically correct decision whether it's the airplane ticket or buying a meat or what-have-you right so logic itself the idea of being logical and pragmatic can be profoundly misleading and ultimately it can be unethical its implications this is an interesting interesting case of that this is I'm done with all you most speciesism for this video I think but likewise this concept nature every time you use the word nature natural etc it doesn't mean it's a logical fallacy doesn't mean it's an error nature is not meaningless sometime the concept of an appeal to nature is a fallacy but not always is it natural for a human being to kiss a dog people literally photograph themselves kissing the dogs and say I don't care if you criticize me because you're a vegan I know my dog is happy here's my dog kissing me really think about what you're doing here really think about what you're doing in terms of the natural order of predator prey in nature a pack of dogs would hunt down and kill and eat a human being okay this is not a natural relationship it's natural for dogs to kiss one another to lick each other or what-have-you in their own species it's natural for them to smell each other's asses I don't see you as a human being smelling your dog's bum right this is a human concept of a kiss this dog has been trained to reciprocate kissing this hairless ape that feeds it it's completely surreal and yet we have an idea of of happiness that this animal is happy and you're a shoeing and evading the question of dignity is this dignified for the animal alright and it's only because it's culturally familiar I think so people post on Facebook them kissing their dog them kissing their cat like it's normal I don't see a lot of people posting a photo of themselves kissing a chimpanzee kissing a monkey kissing an ape if you post that building hey that's weird that's unnatural I don't see people posting a photo of themselves kissing penguin how's the Penguins supposed to live as a penguin supposed to be a toy for human entertainment is a penguin supposed to be taken away from its family as a newborn baby it's a new hatched baby and trained to lie on the carpet next to you while you watch TV a penguin can do all those things right but we think of some animals as wild animals and some we don't think of as those in those terms at all and that is deeply immoral and deeply misleading and deeply problematic and very glad to say that in the last two years by my relentlessly engaging in these debates I have led quite a number of vegans to change their opinions on to wake up and recognize this kind of cognitive dissonance this kind of fundamental problem and among the people who agree with me on this again the vegan lass named Lauren Kensi vegan gains himself vegan treat himself vegan cheetah made videos supporting me on this issue and they were very very controversial at the time many of his own zone followers were shocked challenging vegans on the assumptions behind domestication of animals and Annie as you guys may remember too unnatural vegan in challenging the excuses she makes for keeping pets domestication animals etc so the excuses made for dogs and cats seem to just rely on cultural familiarity I remember talking to a tourist in Laos a white person who was in Laos in Southeast Asia and she was deeply horrified she simply got on the bus next to another white person who had a monkey on his shoulder it was a baby monkey and he had paid money he had taken this monkey away from its mother to have on his shoulder as a pet and she was deeply horrified and shocked and she asked all these questions but how did he buy the monkey and what happened to its mother and you know she was just horrified but her final question for this guy was cuz he was there as a tourist he was a white guy in Southeast Asia for only a few months what will you do with the monkey when you fly back to America at the end of this you get in a plane he said oh I don't know I guess I'll just like put it in the forest you know to die presumably you know why and you know it's just creepy seeing a human being pet and kiss and care for a monkey familiar excuses are evil things you know but people would not perceive it as evil if that same guy had gotten on the bus with a puppy or with a kitten right and it's the same evil and if you're making excuses and I've got hundreds of emails like that people right he was saying well a penguin is different from a dog a bear is different from a cat a monkey is different from a puppy that is speciesism that's the sense in which speciesism really is a meaningful concept for us to employ within veganism we have those old t-shirts why do you love one and kill the other why do you make this excuse for dogs and you don't make this excuse for piglets that is the sense of which speciesism is an important and useful concept we need to use and as I say the question of what's natural and what's unnatural for human beings and for monkeys and for dogs and for pigs and for cats it is meaningful okay it is meaningful to talk about natural and unnatural relations between human beings and animals um I had a really short video only two minutes long in which I raised this question of why do vegans think it's different when we do it then when the meat eaters do it and I showed video tape of another youtuber who eats meat a car nests whatever you want to say playing with her pet dog so what when we do this when we basically buy and own animals as our property and so on we are doing exactly the same things as meat-eating pet owners but we valorize it as Animal Liberation or animal rescue the fact that you've rescued a dog doesn't justify castrating it morally it doesn't it doesn't justify keeping it in captivity it doesn't justify reducing it to being your plaything and a declaration of it doesn't this is deeply deeply immoral but vegans have a self perception that they're highly moral highly ethical in doing exactly the same thing that the meat eaters are doing so I've asked that question the channel 4 but I didn't answer the question ok here's the answer vegans are actually making exactly the same excuses for pet ownership for exploitation - desiccated animals we're making exactly the same excuses that meat eaters would make for wearing second-hand leather for wearing secondhand fur the crucial excuse that vegans make is that it's a secondhand pet that's what a rescue is people it's the same industry by wearing leather or by wearing fur you're still supporting the animal exploiting industries you're still supporting the meat industry and the veal industry and the dairy industry and the leather industry they're one industry people those are different stages of the same cycle of suffering the same process of exploitation it's one and the same industry and we recognize that in our refusal to wear leather even if you got the leather at a secondhand shop even if you got the leather from your grandfather and in Candida a lot of people in that position in Canada a lot of us had a grandmother who wore a fur coat the grandmother dies the grandmother gives you the fur coat and vegans got to ask what is the harm in wearing a fur coat if you didn't pay for it you didn't buy it right and a lot of people are approaching vegan gains for this because he did pay some money for this dog as opposed to paying for it to get it from a rescue to get it from a shelter most of those that I know you do have to pay you still pay money to so-called rescue an animal when you go to a kill shelter or no kill shelter it's the [ __ ] reality you're just paying different people okay why do we refuse to recognize that it's a different stage of the same industry one says I do not give a [ __ ] about the difference between vegan gains buying his dog from some woman he met on Facebook as opposed to going to a shelter operated by peda or a shelter off operated by the local dog pound run by the mayor's office okay I don't give a [ __ ] because these are different stages of the same industry if you're wearing a leather coat I don't care if you bought it secondhand I don't care if you bought it at Goodwill I don't care if you bought it at a discount Supercenter I don't care if you bought it at a designer shop I don't care it's still leather it's the same industry these are just different stages of the same industry but this is the excuse that vegans cling to well past the point of absurdity well past the point of oh I rescued this cat therefore I pay money to kill a cow chop it up put it in metal can and feed this cat every day why do you love one and kill the other why do you love dogs and kill pigs right we've seen the slogan on a t-shirt we've seen on a poster well vegans that's what you're doing when you decide that the life of this cat is worth five cows a year or however many cows you're killing to provide this cat with cat food all right this is not an ethical compromise this is an evil that has simply become familiar in our culture so familiar that it's invisible the same way that the evil of wearing leather shoes is invisible because it is ubiquitous and it's observed that I'm making this video not asking me teeters to wake up to this evil I'm asking you I'm asking my fellow vegans I'm asking the people who have sworn they'll never make this compromise to wake up and recognize the evil that's become a part of their daily lives whether that's in buying dog food or cat food or in making these ludicrous excuses for how a so-called rescue animal a so-called animal sanctuary is different from any other form of castrating and domesticated animal keeping in a cage keeping it on a chain all right the idea that what you're doing is morally pure because you are not creating market demand is surreal I can set up a yogurt factory across the street from a dairy farm and I can only buy milk that's gone past its expiration date to make yogurt and then I can claim I'm not creating demand even better example I can sell whey protein whey powder is made into protein and sold the bodybuilders I can only buy dairy products that are expired that would be thrown in the garbage I could say oh this meat would have gone in the garbage anyway this milk would have gone in the garbage and instead of taking that and I've recycled it to make whey powder to make yogurt to make some other derivative highly processed product and sell that on to human beings it's the same industry it's just a different stage of the same industry you're still perpetuating the cycle of human beings buying animal products as food or buying animal products as clothes all right I don't want to hear it to me the idea that you are not creating market demand is actually immoral or at least immoral and meaningless and I've got to tell you something I've educated with veganism for so many years now I've never heard even one other person say that and just recently we had Garry francais on a weighing in on the debate about dumpster diving about taking meat out of the garbage can or what have you and so that was looking at this question of waste meat products from various different angles and yet it seems to never never get to that point of saying simply for the same reason this is the fundamental difference in veganism and vegetarianism as a vegetarian you may accept the argument that vegetarians wear leather but don't eat meat because they feel that the leather is a by-product and the meat is the direct product okay part of the fundamental premise of veganism is that we don't accept that distinction because we ultimately want to abolish the whole industry we want to abolish the whole slaughterhouse want to abolish the leather tannery we want to abolish the production of milk and the production of veal because we recognize they are two separate stages of the same industry and that is a logically clear and coherent and ethical position for us to adopt and now we have to live up to our own hype in applying that same standard to the pet industry to the domestication of animals when it's not for clothing when it's not for food when it's merely for so-called companionship
issue a hundred times you get emails asking you to talk about the issue 101 times I'm not complaining I am duly flattered if this is the first time you've seen my channel the first time you've heard my voice have seen my faith let me tell you something if you search this channel for the word dog cat domestication pets these are issues I have weighed in on heavily and I have in a sense taken the fight to other vegan YouTube channels other vegan authorities and opinion makers I have challenged many of the comfortable compromises and assumptions and excuses that vegans make for themselves I have heard vegans say that they are strictly vegan and yet they buy meat they buy dead cows in a metal can to feed to their cats every day and they live with those contradictions and they have their own kooky philosophy making excuses for it I have heard unnatural vegan herself say with a shocking lack of self-awareness that she believes that taking care of a dog entails that you literally cut its balls off that castration is simply part of taking good care of a domesticated animal and therefore there's nothing ethically problematic about it in a very strange boiling frog way he's a very non vegan image it is interesting to me the people who start off from a position of such strident moral purity end up step-by-step coming into terrible unconscionable moral compromises and that is what happened to Richard vegan gains and I say it with all due sympathy when you look at step by step the process vegan gains stumbled through with his dog you can see he had good intentions he feels love for this dog he feels attachment to this dog this dog is a domesticated animal that is dependent on him to care for it and he feels that that care and that responsibility now requires him to buy meat from a butcher and keep pieces of chopped up you know cows and deer in a cooler to feed his dog which for any vegan is horrifying and unethical and I think he himself very well recognizes the you know a moral quandary he's found himself trapped in but he also doesn't feel that he can just put this dog to death that he can kill this dog in order to in an abstract sense save the lives of an animal that are being slaughtered in order to feed the dog okay so it's a terrible unconscionable situation and it's very important in these situations to have sympathy for both sides it's important to have sympathy for the devil why not because sympathy is meaningful in itself but because sympathy is an analytical tool by sympathizing with Richard by sympathizing with the situation he's in we understand this joy she's in and we understand something about veganism itself so I've talked about this issue 100 times and I'm going to talk about it 200 times because this is important for vegans as individuals all kinds of vegans live with these terrible compromises of buying pieces of dead cow meat in a can to feed their cat it's important for the future of the movement okay um I am known for shifting this debate away from the question of the happiness of the animal to instead talking about the dignity of the animal and I think that vegans themselves fail to recognize that they are standing on the same shaky ground meat eaters stand on when meat-eaters make excuses for all the terrible things they do in trying to appeal to the self-evident happiness of these animals I saw a dog here a couple of weeks ago here in this part of China where I live and it has the collar around its neck and a chain going from its neck to the wall and it had a bowl a plastic bowl in front of it with food that was put there by a human hand and in terms of the expression on its face sitting there in the sunshine in this beautiful climate that dog looked as happy as could be as happy as could be in its chains its literal chains but I got to tell you something there's a very real sense in which that dog is not as happy as it could be it is not happy at all this dog has been castrated domesticated broke it never had a relationship with its own mother it's never gonna be a parent itself and raise its own kids it's never gonna know what it's like to run in a pack it's never gonna know what it's like to forage and explore the wilderness it's never gonna know what it's like for a pack of dogs to take down a prey animal to you know to kill a deer and tear it apart and then to have the competition that happens within the dog pack for which dog eats first which dog is alpha and which dog is is beta and so on that is the life of a dog not a wolf a dog and all its happiness and all its joy the full range of what it can experience in this world is defined by that life in its own species you know and can never be replaced by a human hand putting the chopped-up remains of a cow in a plastic bowl for it okay happiness for a dog can never consist of you know a leather collar and a steel chain attaching it to the wall and you know I grew up around cats and dogs like most of you people did I grew up in Canada I've lived in Asia for many many years but you know I'm Canadian originally and you know we're all raised with this myth that the happiest a cat can be is for a cat to be fed this way for a cat to live a life of leisure for a cat to be stroked by a human hand and make this purring noise let me tell you something it's not happiness for a cat and both male and female cats their behaviors are totally transformed by having their their natural hormones their natural instincts ripped out of their bodies you can live around cats that you know cats that have the experience of being in heat cats that have the experience of spraying that have all of these predatory instincts as well as meeting instincts that come from their hormones and when cats are domesticated to be turned into a toy for human entertainment this is this whole range of behaviors is physically torn out of their body and they're deprived of ever having that experience and you know yes you can pet a cat and if it's raised from birth as a kitten being petted with the human hand then they will tolerate it and they'll purr at you and they'll look you in the eye so totally unnatural relationship between species here and it doesn't make the cat happy you may think that's what happiness is forget you may think you're perceiving these animals as happy you may think you're making them happy by domesticating them treating them as a toy having them lie on your rug and watch television next to you that's not what a cat wants that's not what a cat enjoys let me tell you the happiest I've ever seen a cat I was doing humanitarian work in northwestern Laos near the border with Myanmar in villages that are on the official list of the most poverty stricken villages villages where people still experience seasonal starvation our charity was handing out sacks of rice to starving people we were also carrying out improvements to agriculture there was a cat it was not a very large cat and this cat I can't even call it really domesticated it would come around and take some white rice and yellow lentils from the human beings living and we were running this charity the officers you could say at this nonprofit and the only meat in the cat's diet was what it hunted for itself this cat did not like to be pet petted by human hands it didn't try to entertain us it didn't try to make us happy and I saw that cat kill a rat that was almost bigger than the cat I mean the two of them side-by-side were about the same size it was a huge jungle rat and a favorite small adult cat and I don't know honestly I don't know if this cat liked me of everyone in this house it could have brought the near everyone in this village or in a village in northern Laos this cat climbed up through my window to show me this rat had killed lying next to me on the bed and you have never seen such joy and I mean you know just the accomplishment of it this cat had killed a rat it looked like a fair fight they're about the same size the joy this cat experienced you know through this natural predator prey activity was unbelievable let me tell you something so I'm lying there in bed I open my eyes this is this enormous rat next to me and this cat leaping up and down with joy to show me this this Rattata kill I've never seen in my life a cat so happy and I took some news prints and I picked up the rat without wanting to touch it with my bare hands and I threw the rat as far as I could into the forest into the trees I tried to go back to sleep and let me tell you something in the darkness I don't know half an hour later I heard this thumping again and when I turned on my flashlight because there was no electricity there's the cat it had gone out and found the rat again and trap didn't serve I would go again just to uh just to show me how prominent was the second time oh I had I had to close up the windows to keep the cat in the rat out look um the claims you're making about making a dog happy by domesticating it our deeply flawed they're logically flawed they're ethically flawed they're morally flawed and I think that this is what this is why I challenge people to compare the attitudes and excuses we have for domesticated animals to the way we approach the same problems with wild animals I'm really open to the range of highly emotional and highly idiosyncratic decisions that that people make on these things we had a situation in Canada when I was there recently where the mother bear was killed but the baby bears there were two bear cubs that looked cute and people wanted to save the lives of these bear cubs well okay the mother bear is is is dead and the official order some Canadian government was that the two the two Cubs should be killed also and but the photos got in the newspaper and people trying to raise money you have to really ask yourself these bear cubs if they can never live in the wild again can they ever be happy you can say you're rescuing them you can say you're giving them life instead of death but the fact that their mother is already dead does that justify castrating them domesticating them does it justify killing dozens of cows in order to feed them beef every day does it justify giving these bear cubs of life where they will never be more than a human toy obviously they're never going to know they're our mother they're never gonna have children themselves what is the life we're offering these bears or these dogs or these cats why is it so easy for vegans to justify as animal liberation what is so obviously slavery and slavery of an especially demeaning kind how did we come to a point in this movement where people will stand up and spit in your face and scream at you that killing a spider is morally equivalent to killing a human being because speciesism and yes we literally justify keeping an animal in a cage keeping an animal in on a chain we justify that as liberation and as sanctuary okay whatever animal liberation looks like to you I am saying loud and clear on this channel and I've always been saying liberation and domestication are mutually exclusive they're incompatible they're not the same thing and we as a movie just stop making excuses we need to stop making excuses for the whole range of activities when you stop making excuses for animal rescue for animal adoption for animal sanctuaries we have to look at the category of how what animal lives in the wild and the dignity in both life and death that an animal has in the forest or in the ocean when it lives on its own terms when it's not dependent on a human hand to train it and it's not dependent on a human hand to feed it and it doesn't suffer a human hand castrating it or defanging it or declawing it okay that has to become the moral baseline for veganism as a movement and not the image of dogs and cats as our toys as our so-called companions all right and guys stop saying that your dog is a member of your family all right we have all the discourse all this rhetoric about the comparison between Animal Liberation and the abolition of slavery do you not know that slave masters said the same things do you not know that the same excuses were made when human beings were in Chains we said oh no he you know this slave is not an employee it's a member of the family the slave is not being exploited slaves literally help people raise their babies you know you had slaves breastfeeding their babies and and putting them in the cradle and helping with day to day activities well this is worldwide this isn't just about American history we have slavery here in Southeast Asia slavery in the history of India all over the world okay it's true people did sleep under the same roof with their slaves the slaves did live with people as members of their family and yet there was a fundamental inequality or there's a fundamental iniquity this is a fundamental ethical question that cannot be waived away by saying this slave is a member of my family and guys it changes nothing you look at a meat-eater in a car test and say when they do it it's animal exploitation it's oppression but when we do it it's animal liberation all of us need to grow up no matter how much sympathy I have for either side so in this case guys it's rare that I can say I'm making a video by popular demand but in this case I know vegan gains personally I know vegan cheetah personally and among the people who wrote to me asking that they wanted to know my my view on this are both vegan gains and finca cheetah and I'm flattered okay it's appreciate getting correspondence for both of them I have my differences both though both of them I have my criticisms of both of them but it's it's interesting they themselves were weren't isn't hearing what I have to say now some of you might be expecting this video to be formatted in such a way as to say well is vegan gains right or is vegan cheetah right because I know them personally I know that both of them actually agree with me on this issue I'm not joking and therefore there's a fundamental sense in which they agree with each other whether or not they will ever recognize it in terms of the deeper and more fundamental ethical issues here we get into a gray area where we're not talking about issues that are simply true or false we're talking about Diaz that are true within limits that are true and meaningful and useful in some circumstances and are misleading or meaningless or false in others okay this word speciesism depending on how we use it and in what context we use it it may be meaningful and it may be meaningless I in practice I do not live my life as if a cockroach and a human being are of equal value I don't I'm divorced now back when my daughter was a newborn baby I was living in the South of France and you know I laid out mats on the floor for her to play on now I don't think the cockroaches were a threat to her life but I did not want my daughter to have cockroaches on her body and I killed cockroaches so that my daughter could play on the floor and I didn't have to worry about cockroaches being on the same floor with her okay it's not a life it's not self-defense it's not justifiable in that sense that is just a contradiction I chose to embrace I chose to live with that to me it was more important in that sense that my home be clean totally human centric notion that I didn't have cockroaches there and I was I was a strict vegan and every other unloved and I really suffered there as a vegan my life was very hard sure I know it sounds ridiculous but here in China in many ways it's much easier for me to be a vegan than it was there in France at that time that was very very tough and I did stick to my principles in so many ways but I could just recognize no I value my daughters I can't even say her life or her well-being I value my daughter's convenience this is a newborn baby crawling around on the floor and I don't want her to have to crawling with cockroaches this is keeping it all the way real so I don't know how many hundred cockroaches I killed and if I actually believed this doctrine of speciesism of all species being equal what do you want me to tell you that I feel the same way about it that I would feel about killing 100 people I don't I'm not going to I don't even regret it I just recognize it as a moral contradiction in my life look guys every single time you get on an airplane you're paying to kill animals we don't actually believe that the value of the life of a bird is equal to the value of the lives of the people that are on the airplanes pretty much every airport in the world has people and devices that are set up to try to kill birds because they got to keep the birds away from the aircraft if a bird flies into an aircraft engine which does happen every year you know it's in in significant numbers when birds get caught in the aircraft engine it can destroy the airplane it cause the airplane to have an emergency landing or to crash all right and it is interesting if you look into it some airports have protect protected species of bird nearby or have endangered species and they try to keep the birds away through various means some of them are mechanical some of them have guide lead teams of dogs barking around the perimeter of the of the or they do all kinds of things try to scare the birds away but at the end of the day if you're running an airport whether it's a military airport a domestic airport we kill birds so that we can fly our planes all right for me as a vegan am I gonna stop flying on airplanes or am I gonna say no we can't do this we have to abolish airplanes for this reason Oh or on the other hand what if I was offered that job what if it was my job at the airport to be the guy who kills birds for human safety on airplanes there is with this concept speciesism there's a point of diminishing returns or there's a limit beyond which this is starting to become surreal and I'm not saying it's good I'm not even saying it's normal or it's okay I'm saying these are the ethical contradictions we all live with as human beings and you can close your eyes to them and you can define veganism in a way that's incompatible with real life on earth or you can face up to them and in a pragmatic sense move on I commented on Twitter recently that we really do have a problem in veganism where people look for leadership to people who are the most morally pure and those are sometimes you know highly eccentric fruitarians living a very strange diet live a very stern lifestyle devoted to just their diet and exercise okay I'm actually not interested in a movement that is completely morally pure and uninterested in the leadership of people who are completely morally pure I'm quite willing to work with people who roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty I am literally willing to work with people have blood on their hands okay because I come out of a political background I'm interested in people who are gonna be getting things done I'm interested in outcomes I'm interested in actually saving the planet I'm interested in taking the vegan movement forward politically in a way that's really gonna change the world and if that means we cooperate with people who are hunters but who really care about conservation and ecology you have a vegan foundation we Quadra those people I can imagine doing that and all of us have blood on our hands the production of bread requires killing insects and killing rats and all these contradictions is this an excuse no I think one of the fundamental contradictions with vegan gains offers that I wouldn't agree with is that vegan gains says that his purchase of the dog if he gave the dog to someone else they would have to make the same purchases anyway they would have to also buy meat so he says logically it doesn't make any difference for him to refuse to buy meat because someone else taking care of the dog would be would be buying me instead you know I care about ecology I try to minimize the number of airplane flights I take with an effort every year and every every month seriously I've taken long bus trips sometimes here within Asia to avoid taking airplanes because I think ecologically we have to do our part that way and really minimize the number of airplane teachers do I don't do it to save the lives of the birds maybe I should but it's a fringe benefit look if there are empty seats on an airplane if only one fewer person buys an airplane ticket the airplane is still gonna fly right with a few more empty seats maybe the airplane is 30% empty anyway right so is there an ecological impact or should I need the enema the attitude of saying it can never make a difference because one person buying one fewer airplane ticket can't impact ecology you can describe this attitude as rational and logical but it is actually immoral morally you have to focus on the difference that you can make not on the difference that you can't make ethically you have to say the difference I can make is this one airplane seat and it is not rational it is not logical it is not reasonable to say that I should buy that seat anyway because I can't control the other 500 seats on the airplane all right ethically veganism is based on the idea I'm not gonna kill this cow all right I'm not gonna pay money for a butcher to kill a cow and give me meat and it is fundamentally unbeaten to look at that same situation say well I can buy this meat because if I don't buy it somebody else will right I have a separate video talking about the boycott mentality the limitations of the boycott mentality boycotting is not the effective way to change the world how are you can eliminate drunk driving you personally boycotting alcohol won't do it how you can eliminate smoking how are you gonna change from having a culture where cigarette smoking is accepted everywhere to a culture where it's regarded very negatively what's more sir it's not gonna be just through boycotts it's not just gonna be me boycotting cigarettes or coming on YouTube and telling everyone else they should boycott cigarettes also there has to be a dynamic process of political change in cultural change there's a lot more to it than that right but I refuse to believe that it is meaningless for me to make the ethically correct decision whether it's the airplane ticket or buying a meat or what-have-you right so logic itself the idea of being logical and pragmatic can be profoundly misleading and ultimately it can be unethical its implications this is an interesting interesting case of that this is I'm done with all you most speciesism for this video I think but likewise this concept nature every time you use the word nature natural etc it doesn't mean it's a logical fallacy doesn't mean it's an error nature is not meaningless sometime the concept of an appeal to nature is a fallacy but not always is it natural for a human being to kiss a dog people literally photograph themselves kissing the dogs and say I don't care if you criticize me because you're a vegan I know my dog is happy here's my dog kissing me really think about what you're doing here really think about what you're doing in terms of the natural order of predator prey in nature a pack of dogs would hunt down and kill and eat a human being okay this is not a natural relationship it's natural for dogs to kiss one another to lick each other or what-have-you in their own species it's natural for them to smell each other's asses I don't see you as a human being smelling your dog's bum right this is a human concept of a kiss this dog has been trained to reciprocate kissing this hairless ape that feeds it it's completely surreal and yet we have an idea of of happiness that this animal is happy and you're a shoeing and evading the question of dignity is this dignified for the animal alright and it's only because it's culturally familiar I think so people post on Facebook them kissing their dog them kissing their cat like it's normal I don't see a lot of people posting a photo of themselves kissing a chimpanzee kissing a monkey kissing an ape if you post that building hey that's weird that's unnatural I don't see people posting a photo of themselves kissing penguin how's the Penguins supposed to live as a penguin supposed to be a toy for human entertainment is a penguin supposed to be taken away from its family as a newborn baby it's a new hatched baby and trained to lie on the carpet next to you while you watch TV a penguin can do all those things right but we think of some animals as wild animals and some we don't think of as those in those terms at all and that is deeply immoral and deeply misleading and deeply problematic and very glad to say that in the last two years by my relentlessly engaging in these debates I have led quite a number of vegans to change their opinions on to wake up and recognize this kind of cognitive dissonance this kind of fundamental problem and among the people who agree with me on this again the vegan lass named Lauren Kensi vegan gains himself vegan treat himself vegan cheetah made videos supporting me on this issue and they were very very controversial at the time many of his own zone followers were shocked challenging vegans on the assumptions behind domestication of animals and Annie as you guys may remember too unnatural vegan in challenging the excuses she makes for keeping pets domestication animals etc so the excuses made for dogs and cats seem to just rely on cultural familiarity I remember talking to a tourist in Laos a white person who was in Laos in Southeast Asia and she was deeply horrified she simply got on the bus next to another white person who had a monkey on his shoulder it was a baby monkey and he had paid money he had taken this monkey away from its mother to have on his shoulder as a pet and she was deeply horrified and shocked and she asked all these questions but how did he buy the monkey and what happened to its mother and you know she was just horrified but her final question for this guy was cuz he was there as a tourist he was a white guy in Southeast Asia for only a few months what will you do with the monkey when you fly back to America at the end of this you get in a plane he said oh I don't know I guess I'll just like put it in the forest you know to die presumably you know why and you know it's just creepy seeing a human being pet and kiss and care for a monkey familiar excuses are evil things you know but people would not perceive it as evil if that same guy had gotten on the bus with a puppy or with a kitten right and it's the same evil and if you're making excuses and I've got hundreds of emails like that people right he was saying well a penguin is different from a dog a bear is different from a cat a monkey is different from a puppy that is speciesism that's the sense in which speciesism really is a meaningful concept for us to employ within veganism we have those old t-shirts why do you love one and kill the other why do you make this excuse for dogs and you don't make this excuse for piglets that is the sense of which speciesism is an important and useful concept we need to use and as I say the question of what's natural and what's unnatural for human beings and for monkeys and for dogs and for pigs and for cats it is meaningful okay it is meaningful to talk about natural and unnatural relations between human beings and animals um I had a really short video only two minutes long in which I raised this question of why do vegans think it's different when we do it then when the meat eaters do it and I showed video tape of another youtuber who eats meat a car nests whatever you want to say playing with her pet dog so what when we do this when we basically buy and own animals as our property and so on we are doing exactly the same things as meat-eating pet owners but we valorize it as Animal Liberation or animal rescue the fact that you've rescued a dog doesn't justify castrating it morally it doesn't it doesn't justify keeping it in captivity it doesn't justify reducing it to being your plaything and a declaration of it doesn't this is deeply deeply immoral but vegans have a self perception that they're highly moral highly ethical in doing exactly the same thing that the meat eaters are doing so I've asked that question the channel 4 but I didn't answer the question ok here's the answer vegans are actually making exactly the same excuses for pet ownership for exploitation - desiccated animals we're making exactly the same excuses that meat eaters would make for wearing second-hand leather for wearing secondhand fur the crucial excuse that vegans make is that it's a secondhand pet that's what a rescue is people it's the same industry by wearing leather or by wearing fur you're still supporting the animal exploiting industries you're still supporting the meat industry and the veal industry and the dairy industry and the leather industry they're one industry people those are different stages of the same cycle of suffering the same process of exploitation it's one and the same industry and we recognize that in our refusal to wear leather even if you got the leather at a secondhand shop even if you got the leather from your grandfather and in Candida a lot of people in that position in Canada a lot of us had a grandmother who wore a fur coat the grandmother dies the grandmother gives you the fur coat and vegans got to ask what is the harm in wearing a fur coat if you didn't pay for it you didn't buy it right and a lot of people are approaching vegan gains for this because he did pay some money for this dog as opposed to paying for it to get it from a rescue to get it from a shelter most of those that I know you do have to pay you still pay money to so-called rescue an animal when you go to a kill shelter or no kill shelter it's the [ __ ] reality you're just paying different people okay why do we refuse to recognize that it's a different stage of the same industry one says I do not give a [ __ ] about the difference between vegan gains buying his dog from some woman he met on Facebook as opposed to going to a shelter operated by peda or a shelter off operated by the local dog pound run by the mayor's office okay I don't give a [ __ ] because these are different stages of the same industry if you're wearing a leather coat I don't care if you bought it secondhand I don't care if you bought it at Goodwill I don't care if you bought it at a discount Supercenter I don't care if you bought it at a designer shop I don't care it's still leather it's the same industry these are just different stages of the same industry but this is the excuse that vegans cling to well past the point of absurdity well past the point of oh I rescued this cat therefore I pay money to kill a cow chop it up put it in metal can and feed this cat every day why do you love one and kill the other why do you love dogs and kill pigs right we've seen the slogan on a t-shirt we've seen on a poster well vegans that's what you're doing when you decide that the life of this cat is worth five cows a year or however many cows you're killing to provide this cat with cat food all right this is not an ethical compromise this is an evil that has simply become familiar in our culture so familiar that it's invisible the same way that the evil of wearing leather shoes is invisible because it is ubiquitous and it's observed that I'm making this video not asking me teeters to wake up to this evil I'm asking you I'm asking my fellow vegans I'm asking the people who have sworn they'll never make this compromise to wake up and recognize the evil that's become a part of their daily lives whether that's in buying dog food or cat food or in making these ludicrous excuses for how a so-called rescue animal a so-called animal sanctuary is different from any other form of castrating and domesticated animal keeping in a cage keeping it on a chain all right the idea that what you're doing is morally pure because you are not creating market demand is surreal I can set up a yogurt factory across the street from a dairy farm and I can only buy milk that's gone past its expiration date to make yogurt and then I can claim I'm not creating demand even better example I can sell whey protein whey powder is made into protein and sold the bodybuilders I can only buy dairy products that are expired that would be thrown in the garbage I could say oh this meat would have gone in the garbage anyway this milk would have gone in the garbage and instead of taking that and I've recycled it to make whey powder to make yogurt to make some other derivative highly processed product and sell that on to human beings it's the same industry it's just a different stage of the same industry you're still perpetuating the cycle of human beings buying animal products as food or buying animal products as clothes all right I don't want to hear it to me the idea that you are not creating market demand is actually immoral or at least immoral and meaningless and I've got to tell you something I've educated with veganism for so many years now I've never heard even one other person say that and just recently we had Garry francais on a weighing in on the debate about dumpster diving about taking meat out of the garbage can or what have you and so that was looking at this question of waste meat products from various different angles and yet it seems to never never get to that point of saying simply for the same reason this is the fundamental difference in veganism and vegetarianism as a vegetarian you may accept the argument that vegetarians wear leather but don't eat meat because they feel that the leather is a by-product and the meat is the direct product okay part of the fundamental premise of veganism is that we don't accept that distinction because we ultimately want to abolish the whole industry we want to abolish the whole slaughterhouse want to abolish the leather tannery we want to abolish the production of milk and the production of veal because we recognize they are two separate stages of the same industry and that is a logically clear and coherent and ethical position for us to adopt and now we have to live up to our own hype in applying that same standard to the pet industry to the domestication of animals when it's not for clothing when it's not for food when it's merely for so-called companionship