vegan parents convicted in child starvation case

Great Debates
61

I’ve been away – at my animal-free farm (except for dogs & cats, snakes in the apple trees, buzzards floating overhead, bluebirds in the houses I put out, other birds that want to eat my cherries, carpenter bees trying to destroy my porch, deer that come out of the woods & stare at me, etc.).

When I worked for the American Cancer Society (c.1990-99) we were not permitted to have a sun tan because having one might mislead those with whom we dealt into believing that sun-tanning is a safe thing to do. We were likewise not permitted to have a “fake”, i.e. out-of-a-bottle sun tan because people would believe it was from the sun (or from an equally unsafe tanning booth).

Point I’m making or attempting to make is: if you believe strongly in something, you also wish to avoid the appearance of not believing in it; if you strongly disapprove of something, you wish to avoid the appearance of condoning it.

That’s why I was musing about vegans & “shoes that look just like leather.”

And, Daniel, if I know you are a vegan & see you in shoes that seem to be leather, I am going to wonder about your veracity, commitment, etc. I may not ask you if your shoes are plastic. I’m polite. I don’t really know you. I make assumptions based on what I see.

As a woman, I’m aware I have more choices than you in wearing apparal, and I would choose fabric over anything that gives the appearance of leather, if I were vegan. A vegan groomsman in my son’s wedding wore black canvas shoes. We had no problem with that.

Guess what I’m saying, & I don’t think I need go to the Pit to say it, is put up or shut up.

62

“Don’t be dumb” is getting a leetle bit close to a personal insult, something which is not suited for GD.

Sure, I know that cows are not smart enough to give legal consent. But- why do they have to? Can’t we tell when an animal is happy? I can. Does this mean that having pets (without their legal consent mind you) is slavery? Well, some radical PETAites would have it so. Broccoli doesn’t give it’s consent to being boiled alaive & eaten either, I’ll point out. Nor can your child give it’s “legal consent” to being forced by you to eat a vegan diet- does that mean it is morally wrong to make your child eat anything? Ah, but he is YOUR child, so you have the right to give consent for him? Fair enough, but it is YOUR cow also. Thus, if it is morally wrong to take your cow’s “right to choose” away :rolleyes: it is morally wrong to take your child’s right to choose away also.

Summer- isn’t having cats & dogs " animal slavery"?

63

Put up what? Put up with weird non-arguments? I won’t do that.

I quoted the first paragraph above because I think you don’t understand the proper use of pronouns. Certainly what you said above doesn’t apply to me, not in the case of wearing faux-leather products, eating meat analogs, etc. I believed strongly in not wearing leather products, but I didn’t wish to avoid the appearance of not believing in it; I didn’t much care about that appearance, and I was convinced that other people didn’t much care about it, either. And given the success of companies like Aesop Shoes and other manufacturers of fake leather products for vegans, I think you’ll find that my position is widely shared.

You seem intent on claiming that I’m something – hypocrite? fool? I’m not sure – because I don’t worry that my wearing of fake leather shoes will contribute somewhow to the deaths of animals. So let me turn this back around on you:

If you want to argue that I’m doing harm by wearing fake leather shoes, give me some evidence. Telling me that you’re willing to make snap judgements about my beliefs but not willing to tell me about those judgements doesn’t constitute evidence. Put up, I think the phrase was, or shut up.

Daniel

64

Daniel, and others: I have no wish to offend anyone. What I’ve said is that pretending to be something you aren’t – a leather-wearer, an alcohol-consumer, a millionaire or whatever – isn’t, strictly speaking, on the up-and-up. I will leave it to you to decide for yourselves. Let’s just end this thread here as things are getting nasty, which I never intended.

65

Okay, then – how about sponges? Sponges are classified as animals, yet we harvest and kill those poor creatures just to mop up our kitchen floors.

66

I am a dog trainer who works on an old dairy farm. Yes, the females must have a calf every year in order to give milk. The females are fed huge amounts of animal protein in thir feed. All that dairy farmers care about is the pounds of protein that an individual cow gives per year. This is now grossly out of proprtion to what a grass-fed grazing cow would produce. As soon as a female is to old to produce, its off to the slaughter house. And you should hear the screaming and crying when their calves are taken away and raised in a separte barn. The cows cry out for days. The same thing happens with beef cows.

Service dogs cannot be forced to serve. They have to want to do it. Dogs that can’t or won’t perform up to standards “flunk out.” Some times this means a trip to the slaughter house, such as for old sled dogs, or until recently Marine unit attack dogs who don’t attack(the Marines have just started an adoption program for the dogs that can be considered safe to be pets).

Humans have selectively bred dogs to be genetically programmed to be helpful. In general, German Shepards love to bite people and Labrodor Retrievers love to find things.

And bees hate to have their hives robbed of honey! Thats why they sting your @ss if you even get near the hive. So many mammals love honey and want to steal it, bees have developed complicated defense systems. They work very hard to develop a surplus of honey, but not for US! If you had extra money in the bank because you worked hard to get, I’m sure you would be pissed if someone stole it. Even if you yourself were 96 years old and near death, you would want your offspring or family to have the money.

I’m not a vegetarian, and yes I eat honey (LOVE IT), I also train dogs for service work (search and rescue-and believe me, you can’t force them to smell things and them look for them) and I know that these actions bring suffering to other beings. Just deal with it, don’t try to rationalize it. Don’t think that the animals are always happy and don’t mind being stolen from or slaughtered for their troubles.

67

Again, not being a vegan I can’t speak for all or even any vegans – all I can do is offer my observations based on knowing vegans and on reading the two seminal works of the AR movement (The Case for Animal Rights by Tom Reagan and Animal Liberation by Peter Singer).

That said, I’d guess you’d encounter two takes on sponges:

  1. Philosophical vegans generally look at it from an ethic of thwarting as few desires as possible (or even satisfying as many desires as possible, or violating as few rights as possible, wherein rights are apportioned to beings with the capacity for pain and pleasure, a psychological identity that exists over time, etc.). Given the paucity of evidence that sponges have any desires, the capacity for pain or pleasure, a psychological identity, etc., I’d guess that most philosophical vegans wouldn’t object to the killing of sponges for animal-rights reasons.
  2. Spiritual vegans tend to oppose the unnecessary taking of life. B ecause their reasons are based more in faith than in reason, I’d have a hard time predicting their responses, but I could easily imagine a spiritual vegan who objected to killing natural sponges.

To anticipate some follow-up questions: different AR folks (or preferential utilitarianism folks – the ones who subscribe to Peter Singer’s philosophy, which technically doesn’t involve moral rights at all) draw the line between moral subjects and moral nonsubjects (i.e., between beings whom you can do wrong to, and beings to whom you cannot do wrong) at different places. Reagan’s book argues for ascribing rights to mentally normal mammals of at least one year of age, and then suggests that similar arguments might be laid out for many other animals, including most other adult vertebrates at least. Singer, IIRC, suggests that we can do wrong even to lobsters and insects.

Daniel