Castration: vegan excuses for enslaving animals. Unnatural Vegan.

21 July 2016 [link youtube]


For those of you who haven't seen any of the earlier videos on this topic, I actually recommend starting with the most recent: "Vegans vs. the Wildlife Management Paradigm".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atY1BwqPEE0

The full list of videos on the topic of domestication of pets is now fairly long. Take it or leave it, watch it or don't, but please do not bother to write in asking me to address issues that I've probably/actually already addressed in the earlier videos.


Youtube Automatic Transcription

right now the meat industry on a scale
of many billions of animals is castrating pigs for the convenience of human beings do you really feel that it's different to castrate a pig in order to produce meat for human consumption for human enjoyment than it is to castrate a pig so that it can be a household pet for human enjoyment I have no difficulty whatsoever as a vegan in saying to you that castrating a pig so that it will be a better behaved house pet so that it will not developed more of the characteristics of a wild boar of an adult male pig more of the aggressive behaviors more the physical characteristics etc I find that just as immoral as castrating a pig so that it will remain docile on a farm and so that it will not develop the characteristics that human beings do not want in an animal raised to be slaughtered for meat I see no contradiction in that I don't see why this is beyond the absurdity of speciesism I do not see why anyone who is vegan would offer a moral justification for castrating a pig for human use in one scenario as opposed to the other this whole conversation began with my presenting the example of baby pigs of cute baby pigs that are being presented to vegans as a symbol of what this movement is all about and I explained why for me that's actually a deeply problematic morally troubling symbol for people to be rallying around yes baby pigs can be cute but our understanding of what a pig is should be based on the behavior of pigs in the wild wild boars whatever you want to say and we should not be overlooking the really serious moral questions that are involved in taking a pig depriving it of any access to its natural habitat any opportunity to exercise its natural behave here's and indeed harming that pig in some very real ways including castration so that it will sleep next to the couch while you're watching TV so that it will happily run around the living room so that it won't develop the type of aggressive behaviour that would be inconvenient for human beings mutilating a pig for human convenience for human entertainment for human enjoyment is in some ways much more perverse than mutilating a pig in order to produce meat ok meat has some utility even though I'm a vegan and I'm opposed to it I can't deny that meat feeds people I can deny that spending your time taking a pig and forcing it to act like a toy I can deny that that has any real utility for human beings or for the animals themselves I can question what is the point of doing this to a pig and in many ways what vegans are doing in castrating a pig in order to raise it as a household pet really can be seen as more immoral and more perverse than for example hunting in the woods killing a wild boar and eating in at least that wild boar knew what it was like to be alive to be free to be wild before it died and a pig taken away from its parents castrated raised by human hands fed by human hands spending its time in a living room running around behind the couch if we can overcome this hurdle of seeing the difference between a pig being castrated for slaughter and a pig being castrated to be a household pet why do we have such difficulty in comparing the pig to a dog speciesism is a deeply flawed concept it's a rarely useful concept I do not think we can make it the main or central concept of veganism but times its useful I can remember vegans having t-shirts saying why do you love one and kill the other directly contrasting a pig to a dog well I am asking the same question and vegans have responded by offering the same excuses that meat eaters offer arguing that a dog is really intrinsically inherently transcendentally very different from a pig well I disagree and I disagree because I'm vegan and for me this disagreement actually is central to the concept of veganism and the question of what it means to be vegan maybe you don't feel that way and maybe you have an intelligent argument for what that is however one other youtuber Swasey a natural vegan to my eyes completely failed to present any kind of convincing argument on that front now I've had many questions on this topic and I've answered many questions the videos exploring the issue now add up to a couple of hours on my own channel I think domestication pets etc one question I think I've never been asked by anyone on patreon is simply how do I actually feel about Swasey what do I actually think about our natural vegan I think that's because regular viewers in my channel already know without my spelling it out I do think that a natural vegan Swasey is stupid and immoral and dishonest and I think that her conduct on this issue in response to the substance of the core of the issue and in response to myself personally has really demonstrated in a powerful way for me just how stupid and immoral and dishonest a person she is why would anyone who is an ethical vegan present the argument that a dog is not even aware that it is castrated if you castrate it and therefore it does not suffer and therefore you as a human do not do any harm to it in castrating the dog to me that argument is immoral and dishonest and stupid if you genuinely believe that animals are not harmed that you do not do something immoral that you are not harming an animal if for example you kill it while the animal is completely unaware for example a gunshot that hits a wild bird in the head a gunshot that obliterates the skull of the bird so quickly that the bird goes from being alive to being dead immediately and that bird managed to live in the wild live in the forest live a natural life up to the moment it died do you really think there's nothing morally significant in that act do you think there is nothing significant in the difference between a living bird and a dead one and the decision and the action taken by human being and doing that because the bird may be unaware of it secondly I do not accept the notion that a dog a male dog could possibly be unaware that it was castrated and I mentioned that I have actually seen studies on this and those studies may be biased but among the very obvious empirical data to consider is the fact that male dogs literally lick their own testicles they see them they smell them they're aware of them they lick them it may be disgusting but this is one of many differences between human beings and canines and yes dogs also have an incredibly keen sense of smell particularly for the hormones of their own species because in the wild a large part of their life has to do with marking their territory smelling other dogs recognizing other dogs knowing their own scent recognizing their own hormones the hormones of other dogs etc okay the hormonal lives of dogs are complex but whether they know it through their eyes through their nose or with their tongue it is totally laughable to suggest that a male dog would be unaware that it was castrated apart from and this is secondary to the question of whether or not you as a human being have done something more have done harm to the dog if it were on a clearly dogs are aware and why are you doing it why would this be different from castrating a pig on a farm or castrating a pig to make it into a pet I think this justification I think it's immoral and I think it's dishonest and I think it's dumb and as a vegan I feel no hesitation in sharing that opinion with you um in reality what people want to know is how dare I be so honest about someone who did support me uh in a conflict with durianrider with another vegan a vegan who threatened to beat me up threatened up put me in prison take me to the cops a vegan who defame me and claim those wife beater and so on let me turn that question around how would my response to this be different and what would you think of me if instead it were durianrider who were offering arguments that were from my perspective so immoral so dishonest so stupid as what Swayze has had to say on this issue of domestication of animals as pets castration is specific I just mean she's been equally I mean the flip side of this argument talk about animals being feral she just very lazily suggests that anyone who disagrees with her is indulging in pseudoscience that it's pseudoscience to claim that domesticated pigs can turn feral can become feral pigs can revert to wild behaviors and within a couple of generations to a remarkable extent even recover their wild physical characteristics said it's not pseudoscience it's time if you have any real-world experience with feral pigs there every continent that human beings and habits now has feral pigs because pigs do escape from POC farms they do go to the forest they do form packs again and start all those behaviors again that you can see this in United States you can see it in Australia you can see it here in Asia I had fan mail from someone in Southeast Asia who would have been attacked by feral pigs and was writing to me saying I can't believe these vegans have no idea what wild pigs are like or what feral pigs are like etc you know kids counter-arguments like oh well you know if domesticated pigs escaped into the forest not all of them survived let me tell you something zero survived okay the mortality rate on planet earth is a hundred percent a hundred percent of animals in the wild died sooner or later immortality is not an option and yes life in the wild for wild animals is nasty brutish and short yes they live in fear they hunt one another they roam they explore life for a wild animal in its natural habitat is in no way comparable to life sleeping next to the couch while a human being watches TV being fed by human hands no they're not comparable they're profoundly different and I think I'm the only person this debate between myself and entropy who's really interested in reflecting on what that difference is and I'm not interested in getting into the sort of self-deception of morally justifying and act like castration least of all when that castration is simply for the entertainment of human beings to make a pet to make an animal more docile to deprive it of its adult behaviors to the private of its hormones to the private of its instincts to the private of the adult male domineering behaviors that animal would have whether we're talking about a pig be a cute baby pig growing up into an ugly scary wild boar or a feral boar or what have you or whether or not we're talking about dogs and cats having their will broken being reduced to playthings for for human entertainment okay I hope you guys get the sense that for me in the beginning in the middle of the end this is not a trivial issue the ethical issue is not trivial it's not incidental to it's not peripheral to veganism for me it gets at many fundamental questions and if during a rider had said the same things that a natural vegan did Swasey did I'm very likely I would have made a very similar video or series of views this might say it's not one video adds up to a lot of footage if you guys aren't aware quite a few videos dealing with this and among the most ridiculous things unnatural begins done is to pretend that I never talked about the subsidies that I only said her comments were beneath contempt and that I wasn't respond well her her perspective is beneath contempt but I have now given a very substantive series of videos talking about this issue from front to back from many different angles dealing with different elements and dealing with some of the intelligent questions that viewers sent me viewers like you people on patreon people on this YouTube channel they didn't rich this discourse and many of you guys have made comments on this that were much more intelligent than anything unnatural vegan said and that's why I responded them so I responded to you guys not to that's your ticket had to say we all have to make hard decisions practical real-life daily decisions about the meaning of life what we want to do for me in this school I'm currently in school if you don't know and on the internet on this strange demi-monde of vegan youtube or what-have-you whatever part of the internet you inhabit if I treated a natural vegan differently from the way I treat durianrider I would feel dishonest I would feel immoral I would feel stupid if Doreen Ryder presented the same stupid immoral argument that unnatural vegan had presented I would have criticized during Ryder in the same way and I do not regret at all that I brought a really honest discussion of one of the most taboo issues in 21st century veganism right to the fore I think a lot more good than harm has come out of this bizarre dispute between myself and unnatural vegan