I’m being completely serious:
Just curious… do vegans “swallow” (that is to say, the consumption of semen during oral sex)?
Would they consider it consumption of animal by-products, or would they just consider it the happy exchange of bodily fluids?
Based on the fact that most of the Vegans I know breastfed their babies, I am going to posit a WAG that semen too would be OK.
I’ve also seen it argued that placenta is acceptable in a vegan diet, but some arguments get pretty nutty.
Soooo easy to make the obvious tasteless joke here. . . .
::sighs::
aaarg!!! Hehhheheee, just hard to resist 
From what i understand, vegans don’t eat things that come from the DEATH and exploitation of animals. So semen would be ok (bleh). Placenta would be ok as well (double bleh).
Vegans would probably be most likely to breastfeed, I think. Lots of commercial formulas contain derivatives of cow milk (IIRC) Most vegans (the ones that don’t eat animals products because of ethics, anyway), believe that humans drinking other species’ milk is unnatural; after all, other animals species don’t drink other species’ milk…in fact, other animals don’t drink ANY milk past the baby age. So humans drinking milk past a baby age would be unnatural as well. (but, of course, some humans breast feed their kids past that, but that’s another thread).
Lots of vegans don’t eat honey because the gathering of it can lead to the death of bees…besides, it’s the bee’s food! Lots don’t eat sugar, or they’re very picky about their sugar, because in the process, animal bone char is used (don’t know which step, I have no idea how sugar is processed).
They don’t eat eggs, because the chicken industry treats chickens like crap. They don’t eat cheese, because the dairy industry treats cows like crap, and in a lot of cheese, rennet (from the stomach of baby cows, and to get that they gotta KILL the baby cows) is used to curdle the milk.
If there are any vegans out there reading this, and I have it wrong, feel free to give me a dressing down. I think you guys have a lot of guts, personally. I’m a vegetarian, not a vegan. It’s all I can do to give up meat. But I’m picky about the eggs and cheese I eat, if that redeems me any. 
I don’t want to start a flame war over “Who has more vegan street cred?”, but I’m a vegan and swallowing is a-okay in my book. No one is being tortured or killed. No one is deprived of any rights or resources. TMI- while I don’t swallow regularly because it tastes really gross, I have no problem with it, and I can’t really see how anyone could.
As for placenta, I wouldn’t eat it because it seems gross, but like the swallowing issue, nobody’s getting hurt here.
As for cheese, I don’t eat it because of the rennet issue and the cows-being-abused issue, but I enjoy soy cheeses- I like the taste, I just don’t approve of the methods. And SuperLorie, excellent sum up of (many) vegans’ feelings about honey, sugar, milk, etc. I could provide links to many sites about why all this stuff is bad, but they’re all pretty biased, so they’re not going to really help any.
If the OP really wants to know about this stuff, maybe a search on medical research and statistics on milk/cheese consumption and health would help? I’m not sure, and I don’t want to offend, but fatdave, do you think that vegans refuse to consume any protein? I ask because someone asked me this recently, and I explained that protein is an essential component of one’s diet, without which we’d all die, and that vegans choose, usually for ethical reasons, but sometimes also for religious or medical reasons, to consume only those proteins which are derived from non-meat sources. Yep, veggies have lots of protein. (There’s more to this, of course, but I don’t want to get into a big nutrition debate.) There are tons of vegetarian/vegan sites on the web, some good, some bad. A quick search will turn up thousands of sites, and I’m sure more posters will be along with better info soon.
If it makes you feel better, you should know that they don’t have to use calf’s rennet for cheese. They can get the enzyme that’s the active ingredient in rennet (chymosin, also known as rennin) from bacterial or fungal sources.
So if you still want to eat cheese but don’t want to contribute to the death of a calf, check the ingredients to see if it has rennet or not. If it doesn’t have ordinary rennet, it will say something like enzymes or microbial rennet or something. Lots of cheese is made this way.
As a vegetarian and later a vegan, I used to get this crap all the time. "How can you live without any protein???
News flash, dimwit: plants have protein.
Hmmmm…where does the milk come from?
*From what i understand, vegans don’t eat things that come from the DEATH and exploitation of animals. So semen would be ok (bleh). *
Not if you are a French vegan: Le Petit Mort.
(for you non-French speakers, “Le petit mort” is “the little death” and is a french nick-name for orgasm.
I know I’m here late, but here’s a link demonstrating that no matter what question you’re asking, someone (Oh, the shame and ignomy) may have asked it previously
choosybeggar, you’re right, it’s been asked before. As a matter of fact there are rarely any new ideas
in history.
fatdave, I suppose everytime a person swallows their own spit they are also partaking of meat-ish products…
Heh. I asked a similar question of a Christian vegan friend of mine who believes in transubstantiation.
she’s my wife, and I was trying to be a smartass.
It’s missing the forest for the trees, of course. It just seems like vegans are against using any animal product for its own sake.
The real issue for vegans I know is one of consent - animals haven’t agreed to give their milk, or eggs, or honey, or to live in captivity. Humans are consenting, in your example, or else vegans would be against that too.
Hmm…I wonder if my cat knows that…
Given that domesticated animals are basically infantalized – i.e., prevented from coming to full maturity, and kept dependent on a parent-like human – the milk-after-maturity makes a weird kind of sense. But in any event, milk isn’t particularly good for cats.
Sooooooo…
Waitaminit…
Does this mean that Vegans are permitted to eat carrion? I mean, for example, there’s a cow that’s been living an idyllic life in a pasture somewhere, not being used or abused by anyone, and one day it drops dead of natural causes. Would this be acceptable for a Vegan to eat? Just curious because that’s the way the statement read to me. No offense meant. 
It grows on bushes, I think. But I’m not a farmer, so I could be wrong about that.
What I was hinting at is that the commercial production milk itself results in the death of calves (they must give birth in order to commence milk production and most of the calves are slaughtered) dairy cows don’t generally get a chance to live out their natural span and then die of natural causes either.
‘They’ refers to the dairy cows, of course, not the calves.
and that should read the commercial production of milk.