Vegans Kill Rats. REAL TALK.

I'm here to talk about tolerance and I'm
here to talk about the implications of the difference between domesticated animals and the wild human interactions with animals as wild things as opposed to things that depend on our affection to feed them protect them raise them in this world twice to different people on the Internet I've spoken to were rat enthusiasts people who keep rats as pets people who develop the same type of emotional attachments to individual rats that are more commonly developed between people and dogs or cats or bunnies in Western culture now all of those things really are are about equally absurd there's an argument that rats are a little bit more absurd in some ways because you know humans and dogs could do certain types of labor together that kind of thing and you can find some justification dogs are a little bit closer to horses in terms of the type of of exploitation involved here in Canada before Europeans arrived dogs really worth of work animals for example for the Cree they would pull sleds you know the main mode of transport was not using horses it was using dogs and this has never been true for rats and rats are feared as a source of disease and we do have an instinctual reaction to rats for that reason of fear or apprehension the people overcome it people become close to rats to different people I spoke to on the Internet we're really these rat enthusiasts these rat fanciers in both cases they asked me you know and I understand that we're gonna judge me based on my answer and it's all right you know where I stood on rats and if I discovered how wonderful rats were and how they can be loving companions and friends and and so on and in both cases there's significant amount of time was more than a year between talking these two people I said well you know I used to humanitarian work in Laos and so these Asia and I knew other people in similar situations and the real problem we face the real problem we were struggling with out there was of trying to store rice without having rats devour it as you know these are third world conditions and you know I preferred nonviolent methods the most important one was actually designing the stilts you would have the the little Hut where they kept the rice would be elevated on stilts and there were ingenious ways to kind of create obstacles on these stilts take a metal cone and have some some nails sticking out if it's somewhat artistic approach to making this stilts really difficult for the rats to climb up said but yeah but out there let me tell you um I know you think about rats as pets but I think about rats on the one hand as animals that live in the wild and the other hand as you know a real threat to human life on the edge of the jungle or in the middle of the jungle and it's something we struggle with and of course one of the reasons why even people who are not vegan try to be nonviolent in getting rid of rats is that there's almost no point in killing them they're so numerous unless you live on a small island where the rat party you're never gonna win by two rats so you want to design buildings in a way that just prevents rats from coming inside prevents rats from eating the food you've stored but still you know my view was fundamentally one of human hostility to rats and rats do carry disease you know often the fleas living on rats and so on and rats will bite you in your sleep and come into your bed and no human relationship with rats in anything remotely resembling the wild is pretty nasty and now both of these people as say more than a year apart between when I spoke to the internet they reacted this with complete hostility complete contempt and derision and real incomprehension because their worldview their understanding of veganism was completely based on the pet keeping paradigm of keeping dogs as pets cats as pets of having love for animals in this sense of petting them and cuddling them and feeding them keeping them as a house pet and their whole point their whole methodology was to extend this paradigm to include rats in any kind of contrasting view of what it's like living with rats in third-world country and the real practical problems you get into and yeah sometimes it involves violence against rats they didn't want to hear it they wanted to live in a fantasy land where they were morally right and I was morally wrong and hey I can sympathize is really easy for me to imagine the world from their perspective in which basically they're good and I'm evil now um a lot of people love dogs it's a much more common people to love dogs and they love rats I've been attacked by packs of feral dogs packs of dogs have attacked me not at a human command you know dogs that were roaming around I could tell some pretty funny stories about having to defend myself against dogs attacking me I've never had to hurt or kill a dog I've never had to butt in those experiences get in third world countries in Southeast Asia it's easy to imagine that it could have come to that because it really was self-defense with a marauding pack of dogs attacking me and I'm not mad at those dogs those dogs were living in what's much closer to a natural situation for them they weren't my pets they weren't my friends and I love them they don't love me and those dogs you know I mean again that's another reason to respect animals and not to kill them and not to exploit them for food and not to torture them in laboratories you know you could see the main reason the dogs were attacking me was to prove to one another their social status you know as pack animals the biggest dog wants to show that he's stronger than the next dog oh here's here comes this human that I don't think they really expect to be able to eat me but they think this is my chance to improve my status and social group of dogs and you know if you're watching them you can see that they all look at each other the roll judging each other's reactions in one pack this was on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery in a small town with no electricity and dirt roads in the north of Laos this was closer to the border between Laos and China than Laos and Myanmar but up in that area a pack of dogs attacked me and there were actually two Buddhist monks sort of sitting on the wall on the edge of the monastery property that's very common and tera vaada doesn't have a decorative wall around the edge of the monastery it's all I stay decorative the wall is also believed to have supernatural properties we're not gonna do that here um and this big pack of dogs attacked and the largest dog he was trying to show how strong and dominant he was and he actually left for my throat so you know I'm tall I'm 6 foot 3 about about 190 centimeters so this dog made a big jump to try to come in my throat which again is a natural instinct if it were attacking a deer or something that's what their mouth is designed for us to close on your throat and keep it pinned shut now again I think this this dog the big dog was just trying to show off in front of the other dogs it's boldness and now I didn't make any contact with the dog actually but I did have to stand up and I actually raised my foot I didn't even kick the dog but I raised my foot so that the dog would have collided with my foot if it kept going in midair and now unlike a video game in real life when you take a jump you can't really change direction much once your feet have left the ground so in this split-second this dog curled up and curled backwards to avoid slamming into my foot and say it had been trying to lunge for my throat and I I react in this defensive way and the dog ended up inverting and landing on its own head without coming in to cut yeah and the two Buddhist monks sitting on the wall laughed and laughed it was so absurd it was so Charlie Chaplin asked I don't know if you could train a dog to this intention it was so ridiculous but then the other thing was all the other dogs in this pack they also reacted you know like dogs can't laugh but wow you could see this whole range of reactions in the dogs and look man out there as I said you know you get to see turkeys and chickens with more of their natural pack mentality and competing with each other and fighting with each other and all those things going on and we're not even going to talk about wild animals here we talk about feral animals seven animals they have a little bit of independence from human beings but look when I was talking about this stuff with these guys who who were rat enthusiasts all this was unthinkable to them I've had a couple of videos recently they have not been as popular as as my other videos talking about this issue of domesticated animals versus the wild and what the implications are for our moral baseline for how we conceptualize activism how we think about veganism how we're engaged the problems before us and you know these people fundamentally had no tolerance for someone coming from a radically different background and it really is tolerance we're talking about here maybe I'm wrong maybe it's morally wrong for me to do volunteer humanitarian work that involves feeding starving people in small villages in Laos maybe maybe that is morally wrong because the lives of rats are more important than the lives of human beings and my need to keep the rats out of the grain storage the rice rice storage is impossible to morally just like maybe but you know what if I'm wrong I don't need you to agree with me I need you to tolerate it I need you to tolerate that difference and if you can then you can learn something from my experience you can learn something from my perspective but step 1 or step 0 is to be tolerant say hey this guy is also vegan but he really comes from a different perspective than I do you know the first argue let's say they were living in California and they only think of a rat as a host pet like a rabbit or something well then do you experience the rabbits in the wild either wild rabbits wild hares hair and a rabbit are two different species but in English we confuse these terms a wild hare they're terrified of human beings sorry I could tell stories about that too but encountering huge wild hare out on the plains of Saskatchewan they're enormous creatures and I don't want to be your pet they don't wanna be your friend they're defiant and proud and haughty and scared from their perspective you are a predator any contact you have with a lot wild hare Orwell rabbit they perceive you as trying to kill them and you know they act accordingly I'm one of the realest conversations I've ever had with another vegan he's this guy was vegan with more than a decade of experience as an activist and organizer not gonna say too much about his background but I remember we were talking about vivisection and I said we were keeping it a hundred percent real I said look you know like because abolitionism is the current fashion and veganism I pretend that I'm against absolutely all vivisection underwear also everything so that's what that's what the political movement demands for me you know but the reality is I can think of very rare circumstances in which one or two vivisections would be necessary or would have to be approved like I see vivisection as being like war I don't think we should start a war without having not just a vote in parliament let's have a referendum you know the Soviet Union sent a dog into space dog called Lika was the first mammal to go into outer space go into orbit around the Earth and Lika died that dog was killed for the progress of science now if only one dog were killed by the progress of science every ten years under extraordinary circumstances like that it's like well we're gonna send an animal into space and we don't actually understand the physics of the Kuiper belt and of radiation in orbit and you know we need to test a bunch of things um even though I'm a vegan and I would describe myself as net wishes vegan yes I can imagine a house of parliament having a vote and say okay you know what this one dog and this one spaceflight okay you know this one dog is gonna die and maybe I'm wrong maybe I'm morally evil maybe human exploration of space does not justify the death of even one dog and maybe saving the lives of people who are starving to death doesn't justify the death of one rat maybe that's your immoral perspective but even if I'm wrong I'm asking you to tolerate me okay as one vegan to another just as one human being to another I want you to recognize that I have good intentions even if I come to this with a somewhat different perspective from what you do the reason I told this trans way is that this guy I think he'd probably never said it out loud before but this guy who was an experienced vegan activist years and years of experience doing it full-time - he he like it was like he came out of the closet he admitted that actually that was what he believed also he said yeah actually for years he'd been saying absolutely no vivisection is acceptable but he said actually really he believed that an incredibly small amount of vivisection only four incredibly good reasons would be acceptable now the reality is when you look up the statistics governments around the world pass resolutions and say they're only going to do vivisection when it's medically necessary and it doesn't work and it's a failure of democracy it's a failure of the parliamentary system and some countries are better than others New Zealand right now has better laws than Europe Europe has better laws than America America has better laws than Canada and what we can all torture Apes to death with impunity or in candidates ridiculous but hey and hate Canada probably has better laws than China I've never looked at legislation about vivisection in China it's true the failure of the legal system in this regard is so terrible it has been so terrible for decades that yes the abolitionist answer is the simple thing to do and we haven't really gotten to the point where these debates have happened but they're gonna happen and before we ever get to that stage and activism so they've said again and again here if you really want to get organized on to the session you need to build common ground with the scientists who are not vegan who are not a hundred percent abolitionist but scientists who really understand how the institutions work where the money comes from how the protocol gets set up how the ethics committee works how government oversight relates to the university or the lab and people who those I anticipate a percent they probably see tremendous waste and suffering for happening for no good reason you know torturing rabbits to death so you can have a slightly redder shade of lipstick torturing animals to death for the you know we at we had animals being tortured death for dentistry at my University in Toronto it wasn't even to me totally unforgivable unconscionable immoral etc okay but the point is that scientist who only wants to see an 80% reduction not a 100 percent reduction or me I want to see a 99.99% reduction but I can think of just like you know the desert island thing with you what if you were on a desert island okay I can think of the equivalent to what if you want a desert island fur for vivisection even if that guy is wrong that scientist is wrong there was a really good reason why I'm asking you not to agree with them but to have tolerance