Do angry vegans turn you against going vegan?

I can see where he’s coming from tbf

Your confusion between comments and “counter-arguments” is quite interesting.

 

It's a bit of a simplistic crappy non argument. Just because he is passionate in his efforts to stop the exploitation of animals doesn't means he hates humans.

 

No, of course it doesn’t literally *mean* that. It was in the context of the post I was replying to.

 

There's definitely a heavy undertone of misanthropy in animal rights activism though.

<insert defensive denial here>

Defensive denial is irrelevant. I've seen the misanthropy, experienced it, argued for it and also against it. Eventually it drove me away from animal rights activism.

<that guy is just a troll>

 

Animal rights activism isn’t the same as veganism, though.

And veganism isn’t the same as not eating animals or their secretions.

 

Oh there's no confusion, there's a distinct lack of decent quality comments too, mostly carping and baseless accusations.

 

What have the nasty big boys been saying now, dear?

 

More like big girls blouses.

 

Yeah, you tell 'em that. That'll show 'em!

 

Veganism is a form of animal rights activism. We covered that pages ago

And that's why.

 

Hmmm. I'm not sure even of that, necessarily.
But give me a page number and I can check back, I might be convinced...

edit: Or maybe it is and just happens to have a lot of corollary elements that are obscuring things... <ponders...>

 

IIRC, I was having my first barney with old @PabloSanchez, perhaps misguidedly saying that changing diet isn't enough to be an animal rights activist. Jeff Robinson posted something that made me think again and reminded me that yeah, actually, it is a kind of activism because it involves taking active steps to reduce ones contribution to animal suffering. I'd happily go with that now, I think my levels were a bit skewiff because of the years I spent doing rather naughty things in the name of animal rights and it's easy to see ''just'' changing diet as a bit of a cop out. But it's not, not really.

On the other hand, I may have remembered the exchange completely wrong. After 138 pages it's more than conceivable.

 

Yeah, I get that thrust. I think wanting to reduce animal suffering doesn't necessarily presume rights, though, and a person could theoretically end up with a default vegan lifestyle without necessarily considering animals.
Purely for circumstantial or cultural reasons.

 

Haters gonna hate.

 

Yeah OK, but tbf the ''right'' in ''animal right(s)'' is basically the right to live without the needless suffering inflicted by humans. If there are other rights then they come after that one. The aim of veganism is essentially that.

 

Even that has to be given a condition, though - 'needless' - acknowledging that, even in a world that was 100% vegan, we'd still have to kill some animals and take away the habitats of others. That's not really much of a right - 'you have the right to live except where we need to kill you' - and is really nothing like a human right as we normally think of it, which doesn't have those conditions attached to it.

 

The trainee farmer who told the BBC that she had received death threats from vegans because of her work, now admits that she hasn’t received any death threats.

Alison Waugh, 20, featured in a BBC News video and article on January 29th headlined “Vegans call me murderer and rapist”. Ms Waugh appears in the video (embedded here) stating at the very beginning of the piece that “you do get death threats” with the accompanying article confirming that she “has received death threats due to her work”.


Ms Waugh’s claims were repeated in several other publications as fact, and kickstarted a whole series of sensationalist stories about farmers receiving death threats from vegans. Even The Vegan Society ran with the story and used Waugh’s claims as the basis for an article condemning vegans who make death threats, before bowing to pressure from disgusted vegans and amending the article to make it clear that the claims were allegations and that vegans are frequently on the receiving end of verbal and physical abuse.

The young farmer has now backtracked on her claims of receiving death threats, telling The Express that she has “not had people making specific death threats towards me“. Waugh evidently lied to the BBC, with her lies playing a fundamental role in launching the wave of stories which made very serious allegations about vegan activists without providing a single piece of evidence.

I wonder whether the BBC and other publications will amend their stories to make it clear that Waugh now admits she has not received any death threats? Somehow I doubt it.

We need to remain vigilant and treat such claims with extreme scepticism. Those with a vested interest in exploiting animals are feeling very threatened by the growing vegan movement. They will resort to smear campaigns and other underhand tactics to try and make vegans look bad, in order to protect their own dirty business and profits.
--------------------
Liar Liar?
Animal farmer Alison Waugh lied about receiving death threats from vegans

 

Yeah, I'm aware of that, and of the origins and Peter Singer's arguments, which are compelling (most of them).
I think there were vegan Buddhists many years back who wanted not to be part of the chain of animal suffering who wouldn't have framed anything in terms of "rights", though, iyswim.

I think originally what we now call vegans were just called "vegetarians" very early on, then there was some sliding on the eggs and dairy front, which led Donald Watson to take his stand, but take a new name for a more orthodox vegetarianism. I've read a couple of conflicting things on the history of it, though.

Vegetarianism then goes back way further, and there are religious and health as well as moral strands, with a major moral strand being the animal welfare case.

That's my current understanding of things, anyway.

 

Fair enough, what I was doing there was just talking the language. My own views are a bit more complex, and while I remain vegetarian I'm not entirely sure I agree wholesale with the idea of ''animal rights'' any more, mainly because there can be no ''animal responsibilities'' which rights are usually tied to. That might be fallacious but I've never heard any really convincing argument against it. Life is suffering, after all. And as you say, ''needless'' is a pretty subjective idea. And then, there's pets .. guide dogs .. beach donkeys .. racehorses and racing dogs .. ''animal rights'' gets complicated quickly when you dig into it.

 

You're very welcome.

 

Human rights do implicitly follow the same logic though. Not to come over all hippy, but hence "legal wasr."

Rights ultimately rest on the ability to defend them.

 

Wars even.

 

Hmm. No, not really.

 

You think not? Rights can be taken away, ignored, subverted as soon as is politically expedient. The court in Hague isn't as busy as it should be is it.

 

Assuming she lied about death threats, that's really bad, but if we're going to be precise here, did she specifically say she had received death threats? Because "You do get death threats.." when stripped of context could be relating to general cases or friends/family with a far lower special-pleading threshold than has been employed repeatedly in this thread.

 

I can't see how animal rights can work, personally.

I'm also not really bothered by the idea that we exploit other animals to our own ends. We certainly have non-animal alternatives to most things now, but we didn't - and it is a denial of our history to think that we could have got where we are now without exploiting other animals. That's not an argument that we cannot change our ways, but imo it is definitely an argument against using words like rape, murder and slavery to describe the exploitation of animals when these practices are so deeply embedded in human cultures - embedded down to the genetic level in the case of consuming dairy.

The pity of it from my point of view has come up a few times and came up again in that This Morning video: once you start talking the language of rights (which includes using terms such as rape, murder and slavery), there is no common ground, there is no room for compromise. Those concerned with animal welfare who don't necessarily want to end animal exploitation but would like to see it massively reformed are pretty much lumped in with everyone else as 'over there' in the argument.

 

I mean this in the sense that a right can be ignored or violated or subverted (obviously), but it remains a right in the moral sense.
If I punch you in the face in the street I have not taken away your right to not be assaulted - I have violated it.

It's a moral as opposed to "what is" thing.

 

People don't have to receive death threats to be concerned.

 

And if you go around punching other people in the face, you lose some of your rights not to be punched in the face back.

As mojo said, that's the other bit of the rights equation that cannot be there when you try to extend the concept to other animals.

 

Are you familiar with Peter Singer's original thoughts on this (just trying to gauge where you're at with the idea)?

I don't think those terms are the "language of rights" as such. They are just attention seeking.
What PETA might call "unsophisticated marketing", now that they have adjusted their brand strategy.