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Should we march with vegetarians?
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David Olivier
Animal Guardian
Animal Guardian

Joined: 23 Jan 2008
Posts: 51
Diana wrote:
I don't understand how one can say that a vegan does not have less "blood" on their hands than a vegetarian. It is obvious.


It is “obvious” only if you frame the issue strictly as a consumer one. We are not only consumers but also active (or inactive) citizens of this world, and we can have “blood on our hands” — since you are so fond of pointing out the blood on people's hands — also through what we do or do not do as citizens. A vegan who very strictly avoids consuming any animal products but does nothing to get the slaughter abolished apart from witholding all personal involvement has certainly more “blood on his/her hands” than a vegetarian who occasionally consumes some pastry with dairy, but is actively engaged in the struggle to put an end to the slaughterhouse.

And then even at the plain consumer level, a vegan is defined only by the contents of what she or he consumes, not by the process by which it is produced or transported. A pure vegan who goes by car ten extra kilometers to buy superextravegan margarine has certainly more blood on his or her hands, or perhaps tires, than someone else who is content with buying some almost-vegan margarine next doors.

Diana wrote:
A vegan avoids as much as practicable (practicable, not practical)


I doubt that distinction has anything to it other than rhetoric. Meat eaters too say that they “can't do without meat”, which means that giving up meat is not practicable for them. Actually, it is just not practical, as you well know. Same goes for vegans who fly, use a car, buy clothes produced by underpaid children, or even just by exploited workers, and so on.

Quote:
A vegetarian eats animal products, with all the death and exploitation of animals that that implies, wears leather shoes/jackets, fur coats/accessories and does not avoid products tested on animals.


No, Diana. I am a vegetarian, and I don't eat animal products, I don't wear leather, and I don't wear fur either. Ah yes, I do use products that are tested on animals. So do you, if you ever happen to go close to a computer. (The plastics in the keyboard are tested on animals for toxicity.)

Quote:
All vegetarians are concerned with is a certain aspect of their diet.


I know quite a few vegetarians, and none fit into your description. You are gratuitously insulting a great number of people.

Must I conclude that vegans spend their time gratuitously insulting people just to make a point? No, I won't conclude that, Diana, because fortunately not all vegans behave like you.

Quote:
I do not understand what "movement" David Olivier is talking about. We are not, I believe, in the same movement at all. And no, I am not a vegetarian. I am a vegan.


That sounds like a cat saying, no, I am not an animal, I am a cat!

Quote:
You were saying that whether we liked it or not, we were in that movement, because we are against killing animals for "meat".


I'm sorry, Diana, but now you happen to be the one who is trying to impose a term on people. There are many vegans who, quite rightly, define themselves as vegetarians in addition to calling themselves vegans, and who accept that a vegan is a species of vegetarians. You are trying to twist words and impose on them another definition of vegetarianism. Saying that to be a vegetarian one must eat animal products, wear leather and fur and so on is simply ludicrous.

David

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:25 pm
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Diana
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Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 172
Location: Switzerland
 David: I do not want to say that all vegetarians wear fur, although there are some. I am speaking of the definition of the word vegetarian which can be found in any dictionary in any language.

A vegetarian is someone who does not eat "meat".

I know that the plastic on my computer has been tested on animals. Jesus, they even fucking test ORANGE JUICE on animals. There is probably not one single product in the whole world that has not been tested including soya products. The only way you could avoid not eating ANY food tested on animals would be to starve yourself to death. I recently read a study on CARROTS which had been fed to rats to see how it affected their organs.

No-one can not have any blood on their hands. The only way to avoid that is to throw oneself off a cliff which implies having one's own blood on one's hands. La condition humaine - the human condition - implies immorality.

The person who drives ten kilometers to find superextravegan margarine is a fool.

The vegans I know all (without exception - maybe I'm just lucky??) are all aware of social injustices and do much to participate against it, including not buying cheap shoes for instance, or clothes made in countries where working conditions are terrible. Of course... if you are, for instance, a single mother struggling to make ends meet and feeding and clothing your children, these could be considered "circonstances attenuantes".
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"In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:40 pm
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David Olivier
Animal Guardian
Animal Guardian

Joined: 23 Jan 2008
Posts: 51
Diana wrote:
Teenager? Why do you assume I am a teenager? I am probably older than you, I would imagine by quite a few years.

(I am surprised though to see that you brought up age. Ageism is no better than sexism.)


I'd say that you're into identity politics, which is usually something of the far right. And also something many teenagers flock to, because it gives them a sense of belonging. Many fortunately grow out of it.

Quote:
The definition of vegetarian is one who avoids eating animals.


Precisely, Diana. And since vegans fit that definition, they are a variety of vegetarians.

Quote:
I will be around at VeggiePride in order to meet some people I have made appointments with. But I will not march, as I said. And if it is still allowed to take the microphone at the end of the day in order to speak, I will take it and make a speech.


I thought you had nothing to do with vegetarians! Why do you want to speak specifically to vegetarians? At the Veggie Pride in Paris, I hope they will give you a megaphone and tell you to go speak to the meat-eating crowd.

Quote:
I am looking forward to the day when people no longer use animals to make "meat" out of, but I will not participate in the "movement for the abolition of meat", at the exclusion of dairy products, eggs, honey, leather etc. "Meat" is not more important than "dairy" and I do not want to be part of a movement that makes some kind of hierarchy in animal exploitation.


You have invented the fact that dairy products and eggs and leather are excluded from the meat abolition movement.

Quote:
Coherent is not an "amoeba" word. It also has a precise definition.


Perhaps, but it is certainly not a definition that your discourse meets, any more than any other human discourse. You claim to have no contradictions and spend your time demonizing others because they are not as pure as you claim to be. That has nothing to do with rational, loyal, discussion, and only to do with conceit, identity and power rivalries.

David

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:43 pm
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David Olivier
Animal Guardian
Animal Guardian

Joined: 23 Jan 2008
Posts: 51
Diana wrote:
A vegetarian is someone who does not eat "meat".


Thanks. And since vegans don't eat meat (unless I'm missing something...), vegans are a variety of vegetarians.

David

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:46 pm
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David Olivier
Animal Guardian
Animal Guardian

Joined: 23 Jan 2008
Posts: 51
Diana wrote:
I know that the plastic on my computer has been tested on animals. Jesus, they even fucking test ORANGE JUICE on animals. There is probably not one single product in the whole world that has not been tested including soya products. The only way you could avoid not eating ANY food tested on animals would be to starve yourself to death. I recently read a study on CARROTS which had been fed to rats to see how it affected their organs.


OK, so we agree on that. Now, the fact is that you can abstain from orange juice. Or from any one of those specific products you mention. What is practically impossible is to abstain from them all together. But since of any specific one you can say: “you could abstain from that, so if you don't then you are freely choosing to use a product of animal exploitation”, you can always make someone look non-vegan.

So veganism is only really defined by some set of things that some specific group has decided to call off-limits; while accepting the consumption of the other things as “inevitable” (refraining from them being “unpracticable”).

Actually, the same can be said up to a point of vegetarianism in general.

So what? The point is not to become as saintly as possible (or “practicable”) ourselves, but to change the world.

David

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:52 pm
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benio
Animal Friend
Animal Friend

Joined: 11 Feb 2008
Posts: 44
Location: France
Diana wrote:
I will not participate in the "movement for the abolition of meat", at the exclusion of dairy products, eggs, honey, leather etc.


David Olivier wrote:

You have invented the fact that dairy products and eggs and leather are excluded from the meat abolition movement.


I will assume the good faith of Diana, for the moment.

Please Diana, take a look at what I wrote here: http://www.forumetici.it/viewtopic.php?t=6435

Particlary this:

« [...] nel tuo cartello puoi riprendere la fomulazione di quella risoluzione se vuoi, oppure adottarne un'altra di tua preferenza: l'importante è che sia chiaro il concetto che i prodotti animali vanno aboliti = che il consumo di carne e derivati non dipende dalla scelta personale, che la vita degli animali è più importante della scelta dei carnivori di restare carnivori. »

And this:

« Chi ha dato il via al movimento intende concentrarsi sulla carne per il suo valore simbolico molto forte, ma poiché, come dicevo, non siamo un'associazione o un partito e non abbiamo "politiche ufficiali", ognuno può concentrarsi sull'aspetto della produzione animale che gli sembra più significativo; si può parlare di carne, o di latte, o di prodotti animali in generale. La risoluzione che avete letto è una formulazione, non l'unica possibile. L'importante è che sia chiaro che si parla di abolizione. »

Do you have some evidence that other people, speaking for the movement, said somewhere that it is forbidden to talk of the abolition of animal products other than meat? Did somebody ever say, speaking for the movement, that animal products other than meat are in some way "good", that people can eat/use them?

If you are in good faith, please give some evidence of your assertion, or, if you can't, please admit that you had a wrong picture of the thing.

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:05 pm
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benio
Animal Friend
Animal Friend

Joined: 11 Feb 2008
Posts: 44
Location: France
David Olivier wrote:

So veganism is only really defined by some set of things that some specific group has decided to call off-limits


Another amoeba-word.

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:07 pm
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David Olivier
Animal Guardian
Animal Guardian

Joined: 23 Jan 2008
Posts: 51
Diana wrote:
The person who drives ten kilometers to find superextravegan margarine is a fool.


I'm surprised. I have known over the years quite a few vegans who will look down on you if you happen to eat a spat of non-superextravegan margarine, but are prefectly OK with riding a car for hudreds of kilometers just for a pleasure trip.

Not only that, but if such a person is a “fool”, you are calling a “fool” Professor Gary L. Francione himself. In this discussion that Gary Francione and Estiva Reus were part of, Gary asked her (in particular) if she was vegan. She responded:

Estiva Reus wrote:
Am I vegan ? Well, not perfectly. I'm almost vegan in wearing and eating. But sometimes I buy products with the mention... oh ! how do you call this ? ... in French "traces de lait et d'oeufs" : it means products that are vegan but can contain some molecules coming from eggs or milk because they are cooked in the same recipents that are used to cook non-vegan products.
For cosmetics I'm mainly but not absolutly vegan : I buy toothpaste at the supermarket, instead to drive farther (to an orgnanic store) to find toothpaste certified "no test on animals".


That was quite enough for Gary to conclude that she was not vegan, and add:

Quote:
The mental gymnastics to which some will go to avoid veganism never cease to amaze me.


So I must conclude that Gary was behaving very foolishly when he said that. And others too, who were supporting him in that discussion.

The fact is that trying to be a vegan and brushing with a certain kind of vegan is really like entering a cult. You have to watch your every step. There will always be someone to explain that you are not vegan enough, and thus not dedicated enough, that you are a traitor and disconsider you.

I don't believe the animal movement should be a cult and a terror system. It should accept sincere people who are fighting to bring about a better world for all sentient beings, and accept at face value that they are sincere in that, whether or not how pure and perfect they manage to get on the personal level. And then with these people we should try to build a movement. Instead of spending our time looking down each other's noses.

David

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:23 pm
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benio
Animal Friend
Animal Friend

Joined: 11 Feb 2008
Posts: 44
Location: France
Diana wrote:
The person who drives ten kilometers to find superextravegan margarine is a fool.


David Olivier wrote:

[...] if such a person is a “fool”, you are calling a “fool” Professor Gary L. Francione himself.


Laughing Laughing Laughing

What a "coherence"!

Laughing Laughing Laughing

PostPosted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:27 pm
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Diana
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Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 172
Location: Switzerland
 I will never call Gary Francione a fool.... although we are all fools in some way. A person living in the USA does not normally have a local grocer store on each street corner as in Europe.

These straw man arguments are tiring and useless.

Some of the aggressiveness in this thread is getting personal, and I do not have the desire to respond to personal attacks and mockery.

Veganism has nothing to do with "purity".

As to the "oranges" debate, it is not under the control of vegans to decide whether oranges are tested on animals or not. Animal Rights vegans will though fight against this usage in their struggle for Animal Liberation. However, it is obviously clear that leather is produced always through the exploitation and killing of an animal, which is not the case with oranges - whatever the abusers decide to do WITH the oranges which grow on an orange tree.
_________________
"In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

PostPosted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 11:42 am
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David Olivier
Animal Guardian
Animal Guardian

Joined: 23 Jan 2008
Posts: 51
Diana wrote:
I will never call Gary Francione a fool....


You don't mind calling people fools in general, but of course if Gary Francione says something, it cannot be foolish!

I'm surprised you don't spell his name G**y, out of respect!

Quote:
A person living in the USA does not normally have a local grocer store on each street corner as in Europe.


What does that have to do with the issue? Whether in the city or in the countryside, people go miles to supermarkets and other places. Vegans do just like non-vegans. If you happen to have a drop of buttermilk in your margarine, you will be ostracized from calling yourself a vegan, but if you drive ten miles to a supermarket, killing insects on your way, and there buy your superextravegan margarine, no one will criticize you, or only marginally.

Estiva stated that she did not qualify as a vegan because she is not superextrapure. Gary used that as an “admission” that she was not vegan, and framed our political positions about the meat abolition movement as if they were motivated by our desire to avoid the moral obligation to be vegan.

Quote:
Some of the aggressiveness in this thread is getting personal, and I do not have the desire to respond to personal attacks and mockery.


I don't know exactly what you call personal. When you say, as you did (in your second message in this thread):

Diana, in her second message in the thread, wrote:
Vegetarians are not [against animal exploitation].


you were making an assertion that many, I among them, can take as very personal. I am a vegetarian and I am against animal exploitation; for you to say otherwise is insulting.

Quote:
Veganism has nothing to do with "purity".


To say that is just as absurd as it gets. Vegans are constantly reading labels up to the tinyest weenyest micro-ingredient. You will be called a non-vegan just because you happen to eat cereals containing vitamin D made from lanolin!

Quote:
As to the "oranges" debate, it is not under the control of vegans to decide whether oranges are tested on animals or not. Animal Rights vegans will though fight against this usage in their struggle for Animal Liberation. However, it is obviously clear that leather is produced always through the exploitation and killing of an animal.


That distinction does not seem so obviously clear to me. Or in a sense it does: it is clear on the symbolic level. But that is a level you have always poo-pooed...

Apart from that, the distinction depends completely on the personal situation. If someone wants shoes badly, of a certain style, and finds those shoes only made in leather, that person can say, just as you do about orange juice, that it is not under his or her control that the shoemaker decided to use leather, rather than equivalent plastic substitutes.

That doesn't make it right for that person to buy those shoes. But that means that it is not in a different category with buying orange juice that is tested on animals. If people are sincerely against the oppression of animals, they naturally make efforts to lessen their participation in that oppression. To what degree depends on many factors. They can be criticized for not doing enough, but that does not justify the kind of ostracism that you and others are used to meting out, as in your so kind...

Quote:
Vegetarians are not [against animal exploitation].


David

PostPosted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 12:13 pm
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benio
Animal Friend
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Joined: 11 Feb 2008
Posts: 44
Location: France
Diana wrote:
Vegans (except for "health vegans) are against animal exploitation.


So Diana, you admit that there are people who are vegan for their health: I suppose that these people wear fur and leather, and have no problems going to zoos and circuses, since all this is not bad for their health.

Therefore, there are vegans who have more blood on their hands than vegetarians who are against animal exploitation and not only don't wear fur and leather, but eat little animal products (as I did in my last years as a vegetarian).

Not only you are contradicting yourself, but you helped to prove that "vegan" is another amoeba-word, whose meaning changes everytime following the intentions of the speaker (to declare his/her purity, to look down on the activism of vegetarians, etc.)

As for personal attacks, you slandered people who are in the movement for the abolition of meat saying that they are not against dairy products, eggs, etc., and this is indeed a personal attack. I gave you an evidence that it is not true and I gave you the chance to give your evidence or admit that you were wrong, but you did neither. Of course you don't answer because you have no evidence - I know for sure that nobody in the movement would say that it is prohibited to speak against dairy products and eggs. And of course, you don't answer because you don't want to admit that you were wrong. And this is childish.

DIana, you arrived in this thread to provoke, with your "I'm-not-going-to-the-Estivales-not-to-the-VP" proud declaration, but unfortunately you don't seem even able to give evidence of the affirmations you make. Not only you are contradictory, you are not reliable either.

PostPosted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 7:47 pm
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Dave_81
Senior Animal Rights Activist
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Joined: 16 Aug 2006
Posts: 745
Location: London, UK
David Olivier wrote:
No, Diana. I am a vegetarian, and I don't eat animal products, I don't wear leather, and I don't wear fur either. Ah yes, I do use products that are tested on animals. So do you, if you ever happen to go close to a computer. (The plastics in the keyboard are tested on animals for toxicity.)


So there is no nonarbitrary way to distingush veganism from nonveganism. Good luck with finding an effective application for that theory on the animal rights movement.

However not even you, David, subscribe to this theory; for you claim that it is not arbitrary to distingush meat from other animal products. You do, however, think it is arbitrary to distingush veganism from vegetarianism; or, at any rate, you think that the difference between them is so theoretically/morally negligible that one can only make sense of strict veganism in the light of the concept of personal purity; or, to put it more concretely, that vegans must be preciously concerned with personal purity to distinguish veganism from vegetarianism.

But, first - to claim that it is nonarbitrary to distingush meat from dairy and eggs, but arbitrary to distinguish vegetarians from vegans who use keyboards, seems, at best, difficult to take seriously. For among other things, the dairy and egg industries cause more suffering than the meat industry (at least, dairy cows and egg laying hens are exploited for much longer than animals who are used for their meat), and exponentially more than the keyboard industry. Yet we are being asked to believe that it is arbitrary to distingush vegetarians from vegans who use keyboards, but nonarbitrary to distingush meat from dairy and eggs.

Second, you must have a very superficial conception of what it is for something to be morally the same as something else if you think that, for example, someone who directly violates human rights is morally the same as someone who uses roads (in the Southern United States, for example) that were built using slave labour - that, indeed, anyone who refuses to work with the human rights violators, but who works with those who use roads that were built using slave labour, is a "divisive" human rights advocate who can only be preciously concerned with their integrity because the differences between these acts is so morally negligible.

Third, since the concept of personal purity plays no role in the structure of abolitionist arguments, it is difficult to see what role it could play in a serious critique of abolitionism.

Benio:

Earlier in the thread you claimed that refusing to work with vegetarians would be like refusing to work with people from other social and political movements (at least those that we found problematic): anti-capitalism, for example. The problem is that the denial of anti-capitalism is not strictly incompatible with animal rights, whereas there is a profound inconsistency (theoretical/moral) between a movement that is composed (at least in part) of people who consume animal products and the animal rights movement. It would doubtless be high-mindedness borne of theoretical confusion for vegans to refuse to work with feminists and anti-capitalists. But it would be plain commonsense for feminists to refuse to march with wife beaters, and for anti-capitalists to refuse to march with pro-capitalists.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 9:52 pm
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Diana
Rookie Animal Activist
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Joined: 05 Nov 2005
Posts: 172
Location: Switzerland
 David and Benio: If you had not begun some under the belt mockery, personal insults and some glaring attempts to try and humiliate me, I would have gladly continued talking with you. But under the present circumstances, I will not. I participate in many discussions on the internet, and have for a number of years, with vegans, vegetarians and omnivores. Many of these discussions are heated and passionate, but I have rarely come across the underhand kind of mockery/insults that you have both aimed at me. The last time I received such kind of comments was from a red-neck Republican who was an avid hunter.

And I want to say again that I am not interested in straw man discussions. They end up nowhere, because they have no basis.

As to my not going to the Estivales, I said I would not be going because I prefer to go to the Animal Rights Gathering, where grassroots Animal Rights activists get together from all over the world and where there are dozens of workshops taking place. There is no such other gathering in Europe where such a wide network of activists get together. I wouldn't miss it for the world. I never "proudly" stated that I will not go to the Estivales. I probably would go if they did not both take place in the summer and at the same time. (I also said I would be coming to the VeggiePride... but not to march. I will of course also distribute abolitionist literature. And when I take the microphone, I will address specifically the vegetarians.)
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"In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

PostPosted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 10:28 pm
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panthera
Senior Animal Rights Activist
Senior Animal Rights Activist


Joined: 30 Aug 2006
Posts: 809
Location: College Park, MD
 Hi David! I have a few comments:

David Olivier wrote:
I strongly object to the warped use of words that some vegans have been promoting in the recent years. . Vegans are vegetarians.


I think you're going to have to accept that at least in American English, "vegetarian" has come to mean "ovo-lacto-vegetarian." I usually add the "ovo-lacto" part just to be absolutely clear, but in common parlance, "vegetarian" strongly connotes "ovo-lacto." Yes, vegans are actually vegetarians, but they (we) are so different from the commonly conceived vegetarian that we are different animals! I myself resist many linguistic changes for as long as possible, but we all have to accept that language changes.

David Olivier wrote:
That means that the consumption of meat in France accounts for over 90% of the animals killed (not counting fish). That means that a vegetarian who is not vegan has cut out over 90% of the “blood on his/her hands”, just by abstaining from meat.

The decision to stop eating animals is not only the big step in symbolic terms. It is also the big step in terms of the number of animals killed.


I think it unwise to jump from numbers applying to France-as-a-whole to individual vegetarians. Your conclusion would only hold if individual vegetarians had started out as omnivores who reflected the same 90%meat - 10%dairy-eggs ratio, and then they did NOT increase their dairy-egg consumption after becoming vegetarian. My impression is that most people increase their dairy/egg consumption after cutting out meat.

Dave_81 has addressed the problem in comparing nitpicky details to major differences in life-and-death choices. Perhaps on the fringes there is fuzziness and overlap between some vegans and some minimally ovo-lacto-vegetarians, but on the whole, (ovo-lacto-)vegetarians are responsible for substantially more suffering, exploitation, and death. The connection is a direct and unavoidable one, as opposed to one that happens to be true in this society but can be changed or avoided, as with orange juice.

David Olivier wrote:
What I do know is that those people who constantly resort to divisive “holier than thou” behaviour and finger-pointing, while our task is to build and strengthen a movement to stop the ongoing massacre (perhaps two thousand animals killed every second in the world, most of them for meat — plus uncountable fish), have, for that reason alone, an ocean of blood on their hands.


I, too, hate to see divisiveness that deflates an important effort. However I truly think that a push for just vegetarianism (read: most likely, ovo-lacto-vegetarianism) leaves such a gaping hole that it needs to be addressed immediately. We cannot afford to waste precious energy and resources on such a faulty premise. While I deeply appreciate any sincere efforts on behalf of exploited animals, I cannot in good conscience stop pointing out what I believe to be an egregious wrong! It would hurt my very soul.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 11:21 pm
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Bringing Animal Rights closer. Offering support for a pure vegetarian, fruitarian or raw food (plant based) diet and a vegan lifestyle.

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