A Vegan Diet DOES NOT Save Animals' Lives. (Brass Tacks)
24 September 2017 [link youtube]
Part of the "Brass Tacks" playlist: practical discussions of "where do we go from here?" —how to make progress (not just propaganda) with/for the vegan movement.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZEkgohG7k7okWjcSH0HnY6BUbMkELHEG
Youtube Automatic Transcription
so we were talking we just did a video
responding to Joey carb strong and one issue that came out of that it's mentioned very briefly in that video is that in fact when we as vegans refused to buy meat we do not save the lives of any animals even though as a propaganda statement as a promotional statement as an ideological statement many vegans will say I am vegan for the animals or I am vegan to save the lives of animals and it's a lot of websites will tell you as a statement of fact that if you are vegan you save maybe four cows a year and so many fish per year and some of you that you are receiving animal lives so what came up in tho that last video we did is that this is not true it may be useful as a propaganda claim but what actually happens in a free-market society is that if you and I as individuals refuse to buy meat the price of meat comes down it makes me cheaper and more readily available for meat-eaters so that's true if just you and I just a few people boycott need the only impact we can have from the boycott itself in terms of supply and demand is making me cheaper because there's there's less demand the same- fly out there right but even when you scale it up even if you're talking about vegans in their thousands vegans and the tens of thousands and vegans are the hive's of thousands all we are doing by boycotting those industries is making their products cheaper and more readily available if you want to scale it all the way up look at an enormous country like India this really puts the lie to the claim that reduce it Aryans are saving animal lives India has millions and tens of millions of people who are variously vegetarian vegan reduce it Aryan somewhere on that end of the spectrum the cows are still getting their throats that it doesn't eliminate the meat industry and you can do the math you can very easily do economic projections if everyone in India ate meat then what would happen to the price and availability meat would become scarce in terms of supply and demand meet with more expensive if suddenly everyone in India ceased being a vegetarian right so on up on a large scale it doesn't stop the cycle of exploitation and suffering I think this came as a surprise to you when we mentioned the last video you said afterwards no I never thought of it that way before that we're not saving the lives of animals because right I come from a family where one dairy is cheap they're like you know my parents were like I buy a bunch of milk you know like right so I can totally see that being the case like my price goes down that doesn't mean that there will be less demands demand or maybe even more so this also happens just due to price shocks sometimes without vegans being a factor you know the less than 1% of people were vegan or whatever the the price of milk goes up and down the price of specific type of meat like pork or beef goes up or down however even when there is some kind of big dislocation in the market like there's a big economic crisis or a recession or a depression or a war breaks out these are things on a huge scale that can suddenly cause me to become more expensive or more cheap to you know sudden dislocations market this also never saves the life of even one animal alright I just wanna I want to emphasize this because many vegans will evade this point they'll say well that may be true on a large scale you're talking about supply and demand the price go up and down but still somehow me personally by me refusing to eat meat at this table there's one cow somewhere at one factory who's not being killed no there isn't you as of one vegan and we as a hundred thousand vegans we can never have as much impact as a recession like the 2008 recession sudden economic change or of a break of a huge war we can never have that kind of impact on the on the market on the economy in the absolute nor on the meat industry specifically however even when that happens even when there's a sudden dislocation so she's talking about her parents go to the store and suddenly find for some reason dairy products are cheaper who knows why there's some temporary some temporary the market feature that's causing this to happen when it is not profitable to raise slaughter and sell the animals they kill them and put them in a ditch some of you know exactly what I'm talking about if you have any experience in the the meat industry or on farms would have you it is true in Canada this happen repeatedly during my lifetime the price the market price of pork drops so low that farmers cull their pigs that they kill them without sending them to a slaughterhouse so even when they have even if the price so again yes you can lower the price by being vegan yes a hundred thousand vegans come with rice but when you lower it more it doesn't save the life of one Pig they don't say oh well you know what pigs are so cheap now I'm gonna take this pig and release it into the forest or I'm gonna take this pig and turn into someone's house but no they call those pigs sometimes through gassing sometimes through bullets so instead of cruel methods like starvation that's actually issue in Canada is trying to enforce against cruel myths because they can just you know not feed them with them let them starve to death the farm and of course this is obviously I've just said this about pigs but cows yeah even deer because some of those smaller meats you know deer raised and not wild deer you know they're raised for their um their horns and so on sorry it's a complex market but that also the price can go up and down and then suddenly that is get rid of a bunch of deer and someone says well it's not worth raising these deer the felt of their horns is is valuable yeah as well as their meat they do also sell venison but you can imagine the venison market the price can go up and down quite unexpectedly and so on not because because so yeah culling those am so this is one reality no you as a vegan have not saved even one animal through your diet you as a vegan have not saved one animal by banning this material and I have to put in as a footnote it's possible you've saved an animal by swimming into a pond and rescuing an animal when it was drowning or climbing up a tree and receipe an animal from a tree I'm not saying you've never saved an animal's life you may have hands-on in that sense but the the function of the boycott does not save lives it's a lie it's a propaganda lie and I've said this about why I quit Buddhism I don't want to be part of a religion that's built on a lie I don't want to convert other people to a religion through lying to them I don't want to be part of a political movement that's built on a lie same kind of reasoning for me and I'm not gonna lie I don't lie to others not a lot of myself so whenever I see those charts saying the number of lives you've saved this year by being vegan or how many lives you save I say no and again we can look at real world examples Taiwan Israel India these are countries with big being in populations those are probably the three biggest proportionally and no it doesn't save a single life yeah you know it's not like I would go back to eating meat after you know finding this out like you really think about it more tonight like like now that I realize that I'm not saving animal animal's life I know it's not like I'm gonna go back to buying meat right right because I do feel like that is contributing like I mean other than personal purity like what is what is the reason well there I think I think there are two things here one is about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do yeah you know what I mean that's that's a fundamental question so we have some fancy electronics here you know if you can buy this st. this is a portable speaker if you can buy this made by slaves or say no I refuse to support the slave industry you're symbolic act is to refuse to support slavery it's a choice and in politics I'm going to come back to this symbolic actions matter you know when I was involved in Cambodian politics watching politics in places like Cambodia and Laos much more closely Cambodia had a sham election an election that was not legitimate and was controlled by the government and I remember banging my hand on the desk and saying why don't the Japanese closed their embassy one of the Japanese lower their flag I don't expect Japan to invade Cambodia you know it's ridiculous I respect Japan to even cut off trade with Cambodia but lowering your flag and making a public statement these elections were not legitimate that's powerful and important and it is Bullock in the English language some people are watching this video we always say merely symbolic you think symbolic is nothing you think it's merely symbolic no it wouldn't matter if the Government of Japan lit up and said hey we know the difference between a legitimate election and a fake one and this is a fake election and your government is no legitimacy that matters in politics okay and it matters when people stand up and say look this is a nice electronic trinket but I don't want it if it's made by children or slaves or prisoners you know prison labor is another issue I'm gonna draw the line somewhere now that can be the start of a political process but the boycott in itself doesn't have any of those outcomes right it's the start it's the first step it's not the last step and the next point I want to raise illustrates this further although it's not directly the next step so we're talking about the pricing mechanism which is a fundamental aspect of economics not just in capitalism even in communism in all economic even in feudalism in all economic systems the pricing mechanism is fundamental supply and demand prices go up and down okay even in the cocaine market you know what I was saying no matter what we're talking about these same these same laws of physics if you like are at work what is the impact of government subsidy on the dairy industry of government support for milk and cheese and in many cases meat you know the government supports the production of meat now we can't generalize to simply here it is actually different in the United States than it is in Canada it's very different in New Zealand I did some reading about that cos as some supporters on patreon from New Zealand so it was different in England and France different countries have different mechanisms however the fundamental point I made here was when you boycott meat as a vegan you make meat cheaper and more available what happens when you abolish government support for me when you abolish government subsidy for the dairy industry then dairy products become more expensive they become less readily available less regularly available also you disrupt the market in a way and the only way to take this in and pursue that is on the moral high ground is to say hey we want the government to stop supporting dairy industry the same way 50 years ago people wanted them to stop supporting the cigarette industry and at some extent to stop supporting the alcohol industry that's also been a change you know government attitudes towards alcohol and you know advertising of alcohol most places you know you can't advertise alcohol at a sporting game anymore and this kind of thing you know there's all these kinds of restrictions on the advertising and probe the culture of alcohol is changing including political attitudes towards alcohol and drunk driving all these things you know that change I don't think you can possibly advocate for those changes without first being vegan without the boycott as step 1 say hey this is immoral not a part of it but the point is it's only the first step and what's absolutely necessary after that is exactly political militant to militate for real political changes and the impact in Canada as an example the impact of abolishing government support for dairy would be devastating and would be devastating to the whole industry because let me tell you something veal and leather and dairy they're one industry there are different steps of the same cycle of suffering and exploitation you can't have one without the other leather is not going to be produced at the same price if the government isn't subsidizing dairy veal isn't gonna be available at the same price and with the same quantity and regularly regularity without the government supporting dairy so these things are linked if you take one brick out of the wall the whole wall gets weaker and in the process of militating as I say for political change of organizing and demanding that kind of political change you galvanize your whole society you challenge cultural values things start to change in all kinds of ways tangible and intangible and the first step towards that is to define yourself as vegan and to refuse to buy these things and as we just talked to another video at the same time the difference between vegans and reduced Aryans we have to admit is one of degree it's true when you buy a car the car may invisibly contains non vegan things the tires may be convinced you know actually no chemicals that are in these things even the roads you know the actual paving it turns out they use some animal products so I need oh I mean these kind of unbelievable things you find out about wallpaper or can be non-vegan and so on this is true you know you okay if you even wanna puts but the point is are veganism as opposed to reduce at arianism is a firm basis to pursue that kind of political change to say no to start with we will not take taxpayers dollars and support and subsidize the expansion of you know the Canadian dairy industry or the New Zealand dairy industry or whatever it is right and then beyond that you know very easy next step is to say hey let's talk about positive taxation let's the same way cigarettes almost every country in the world now I think there's a tax on cigarettes and it's not the same as the tax on schoolbooks there's an extra high tax we could very easily put a 10% extra tax on dairy milk and recycle some of money haven't have reverse taxation make soy milk cheaper or whatever kind of thing we can start this kind of process of engineering social change without throwing anyone in prison it's not gonna be like the drug war it's not gonna be like cracking down on opium and cocaine users we're not going to be throwing people in prison because they're they're smoking yogurt you know what I mean but we can start that step by step so yeah for us as a community as a would be community for us as a movement or a proto movement defining yourself through that boycott through their refusal to buy meat and dairy it's important it's meaningful it gives us a sense of identity and purpose but that's all it does and now if you want change you got to go out and get it
responding to Joey carb strong and one issue that came out of that it's mentioned very briefly in that video is that in fact when we as vegans refused to buy meat we do not save the lives of any animals even though as a propaganda statement as a promotional statement as an ideological statement many vegans will say I am vegan for the animals or I am vegan to save the lives of animals and it's a lot of websites will tell you as a statement of fact that if you are vegan you save maybe four cows a year and so many fish per year and some of you that you are receiving animal lives so what came up in tho that last video we did is that this is not true it may be useful as a propaganda claim but what actually happens in a free-market society is that if you and I as individuals refuse to buy meat the price of meat comes down it makes me cheaper and more readily available for meat-eaters so that's true if just you and I just a few people boycott need the only impact we can have from the boycott itself in terms of supply and demand is making me cheaper because there's there's less demand the same- fly out there right but even when you scale it up even if you're talking about vegans in their thousands vegans and the tens of thousands and vegans are the hive's of thousands all we are doing by boycotting those industries is making their products cheaper and more readily available if you want to scale it all the way up look at an enormous country like India this really puts the lie to the claim that reduce it Aryans are saving animal lives India has millions and tens of millions of people who are variously vegetarian vegan reduce it Aryan somewhere on that end of the spectrum the cows are still getting their throats that it doesn't eliminate the meat industry and you can do the math you can very easily do economic projections if everyone in India ate meat then what would happen to the price and availability meat would become scarce in terms of supply and demand meet with more expensive if suddenly everyone in India ceased being a vegetarian right so on up on a large scale it doesn't stop the cycle of exploitation and suffering I think this came as a surprise to you when we mentioned the last video you said afterwards no I never thought of it that way before that we're not saving the lives of animals because right I come from a family where one dairy is cheap they're like you know my parents were like I buy a bunch of milk you know like right so I can totally see that being the case like my price goes down that doesn't mean that there will be less demands demand or maybe even more so this also happens just due to price shocks sometimes without vegans being a factor you know the less than 1% of people were vegan or whatever the the price of milk goes up and down the price of specific type of meat like pork or beef goes up or down however even when there is some kind of big dislocation in the market like there's a big economic crisis or a recession or a depression or a war breaks out these are things on a huge scale that can suddenly cause me to become more expensive or more cheap to you know sudden dislocations market this also never saves the life of even one animal alright I just wanna I want to emphasize this because many vegans will evade this point they'll say well that may be true on a large scale you're talking about supply and demand the price go up and down but still somehow me personally by me refusing to eat meat at this table there's one cow somewhere at one factory who's not being killed no there isn't you as of one vegan and we as a hundred thousand vegans we can never have as much impact as a recession like the 2008 recession sudden economic change or of a break of a huge war we can never have that kind of impact on the on the market on the economy in the absolute nor on the meat industry specifically however even when that happens even when there's a sudden dislocation so she's talking about her parents go to the store and suddenly find for some reason dairy products are cheaper who knows why there's some temporary some temporary the market feature that's causing this to happen when it is not profitable to raise slaughter and sell the animals they kill them and put them in a ditch some of you know exactly what I'm talking about if you have any experience in the the meat industry or on farms would have you it is true in Canada this happen repeatedly during my lifetime the price the market price of pork drops so low that farmers cull their pigs that they kill them without sending them to a slaughterhouse so even when they have even if the price so again yes you can lower the price by being vegan yes a hundred thousand vegans come with rice but when you lower it more it doesn't save the life of one Pig they don't say oh well you know what pigs are so cheap now I'm gonna take this pig and release it into the forest or I'm gonna take this pig and turn into someone's house but no they call those pigs sometimes through gassing sometimes through bullets so instead of cruel methods like starvation that's actually issue in Canada is trying to enforce against cruel myths because they can just you know not feed them with them let them starve to death the farm and of course this is obviously I've just said this about pigs but cows yeah even deer because some of those smaller meats you know deer raised and not wild deer you know they're raised for their um their horns and so on sorry it's a complex market but that also the price can go up and down and then suddenly that is get rid of a bunch of deer and someone says well it's not worth raising these deer the felt of their horns is is valuable yeah as well as their meat they do also sell venison but you can imagine the venison market the price can go up and down quite unexpectedly and so on not because because so yeah culling those am so this is one reality no you as a vegan have not saved even one animal through your diet you as a vegan have not saved one animal by banning this material and I have to put in as a footnote it's possible you've saved an animal by swimming into a pond and rescuing an animal when it was drowning or climbing up a tree and receipe an animal from a tree I'm not saying you've never saved an animal's life you may have hands-on in that sense but the the function of the boycott does not save lives it's a lie it's a propaganda lie and I've said this about why I quit Buddhism I don't want to be part of a religion that's built on a lie I don't want to convert other people to a religion through lying to them I don't want to be part of a political movement that's built on a lie same kind of reasoning for me and I'm not gonna lie I don't lie to others not a lot of myself so whenever I see those charts saying the number of lives you've saved this year by being vegan or how many lives you save I say no and again we can look at real world examples Taiwan Israel India these are countries with big being in populations those are probably the three biggest proportionally and no it doesn't save a single life yeah you know it's not like I would go back to eating meat after you know finding this out like you really think about it more tonight like like now that I realize that I'm not saving animal animal's life I know it's not like I'm gonna go back to buying meat right right because I do feel like that is contributing like I mean other than personal purity like what is what is the reason well there I think I think there are two things here one is about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do yeah you know what I mean that's that's a fundamental question so we have some fancy electronics here you know if you can buy this st. this is a portable speaker if you can buy this made by slaves or say no I refuse to support the slave industry you're symbolic act is to refuse to support slavery it's a choice and in politics I'm going to come back to this symbolic actions matter you know when I was involved in Cambodian politics watching politics in places like Cambodia and Laos much more closely Cambodia had a sham election an election that was not legitimate and was controlled by the government and I remember banging my hand on the desk and saying why don't the Japanese closed their embassy one of the Japanese lower their flag I don't expect Japan to invade Cambodia you know it's ridiculous I respect Japan to even cut off trade with Cambodia but lowering your flag and making a public statement these elections were not legitimate that's powerful and important and it is Bullock in the English language some people are watching this video we always say merely symbolic you think symbolic is nothing you think it's merely symbolic no it wouldn't matter if the Government of Japan lit up and said hey we know the difference between a legitimate election and a fake one and this is a fake election and your government is no legitimacy that matters in politics okay and it matters when people stand up and say look this is a nice electronic trinket but I don't want it if it's made by children or slaves or prisoners you know prison labor is another issue I'm gonna draw the line somewhere now that can be the start of a political process but the boycott in itself doesn't have any of those outcomes right it's the start it's the first step it's not the last step and the next point I want to raise illustrates this further although it's not directly the next step so we're talking about the pricing mechanism which is a fundamental aspect of economics not just in capitalism even in communism in all economic even in feudalism in all economic systems the pricing mechanism is fundamental supply and demand prices go up and down okay even in the cocaine market you know what I was saying no matter what we're talking about these same these same laws of physics if you like are at work what is the impact of government subsidy on the dairy industry of government support for milk and cheese and in many cases meat you know the government supports the production of meat now we can't generalize to simply here it is actually different in the United States than it is in Canada it's very different in New Zealand I did some reading about that cos as some supporters on patreon from New Zealand so it was different in England and France different countries have different mechanisms however the fundamental point I made here was when you boycott meat as a vegan you make meat cheaper and more available what happens when you abolish government support for me when you abolish government subsidy for the dairy industry then dairy products become more expensive they become less readily available less regularly available also you disrupt the market in a way and the only way to take this in and pursue that is on the moral high ground is to say hey we want the government to stop supporting dairy industry the same way 50 years ago people wanted them to stop supporting the cigarette industry and at some extent to stop supporting the alcohol industry that's also been a change you know government attitudes towards alcohol and you know advertising of alcohol most places you know you can't advertise alcohol at a sporting game anymore and this kind of thing you know there's all these kinds of restrictions on the advertising and probe the culture of alcohol is changing including political attitudes towards alcohol and drunk driving all these things you know that change I don't think you can possibly advocate for those changes without first being vegan without the boycott as step 1 say hey this is immoral not a part of it but the point is it's only the first step and what's absolutely necessary after that is exactly political militant to militate for real political changes and the impact in Canada as an example the impact of abolishing government support for dairy would be devastating and would be devastating to the whole industry because let me tell you something veal and leather and dairy they're one industry there are different steps of the same cycle of suffering and exploitation you can't have one without the other leather is not going to be produced at the same price if the government isn't subsidizing dairy veal isn't gonna be available at the same price and with the same quantity and regularly regularity without the government supporting dairy so these things are linked if you take one brick out of the wall the whole wall gets weaker and in the process of militating as I say for political change of organizing and demanding that kind of political change you galvanize your whole society you challenge cultural values things start to change in all kinds of ways tangible and intangible and the first step towards that is to define yourself as vegan and to refuse to buy these things and as we just talked to another video at the same time the difference between vegans and reduced Aryans we have to admit is one of degree it's true when you buy a car the car may invisibly contains non vegan things the tires may be convinced you know actually no chemicals that are in these things even the roads you know the actual paving it turns out they use some animal products so I need oh I mean these kind of unbelievable things you find out about wallpaper or can be non-vegan and so on this is true you know you okay if you even wanna puts but the point is are veganism as opposed to reduce at arianism is a firm basis to pursue that kind of political change to say no to start with we will not take taxpayers dollars and support and subsidize the expansion of you know the Canadian dairy industry or the New Zealand dairy industry or whatever it is right and then beyond that you know very easy next step is to say hey let's talk about positive taxation let's the same way cigarettes almost every country in the world now I think there's a tax on cigarettes and it's not the same as the tax on schoolbooks there's an extra high tax we could very easily put a 10% extra tax on dairy milk and recycle some of money haven't have reverse taxation make soy milk cheaper or whatever kind of thing we can start this kind of process of engineering social change without throwing anyone in prison it's not gonna be like the drug war it's not gonna be like cracking down on opium and cocaine users we're not going to be throwing people in prison because they're they're smoking yogurt you know what I mean but we can start that step by step so yeah for us as a community as a would be community for us as a movement or a proto movement defining yourself through that boycott through their refusal to buy meat and dairy it's important it's meaningful it gives us a sense of identity and purpose but that's all it does and now if you want change you got to go out and get it