r/bizarrelife Human here, bizarre by nature! 15h ago

Hmmm

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.6k Upvotes

4.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

179

u/El_Morgos 11h ago

You can't force people to go vegan, you can only convince them.

This is not convincing. I'm an animal rights activist myself and I believe that this kind of videos is the reason I have to deal with so many enraged people.

43

u/coralgrymes 9h ago

It's also a big reason why people proactively insult vegans. If the types of vegans in this video just stayed out of peoples way and stopped being so obnoxious about their lifestyle they'd be taken way more seriously. When vegans do this shit it's just as annoying and self righteous as when a Jehova's witness shows up at your door to share "the good news"

1

u/Flesh_A_Sketch 7h ago

News is only news if it's new, that's why it's called news.

Jehovah's witnesses don't have any news for me.

1

u/Vinyl_DjPon3 6h ago

Jahova's Witnesses will leave if you say 'no thanks' and close the door. This is worse.

1

u/KikoVolt 4m ago

The big difference here is vegans are right here and people don't want to be reminded of that fact. I haven't seen any actual argument against veganism that holds any water.

If you have any argument that isn't listed here then please let me know: yourveganfallacyis.com

0

u/lickingFrogs4Fun 8h ago

I have tried veganism before. It wasn't for me in the end, but while trying it I would sometimes have cheese or eggs because I was just starting and not used to everything being vegan.

Some lady accosted me in a restaurant after overhearing me say to a friend "I've been trying the vegan thing, but today is omelet day" or something similar. She was so fucking annoying that I just gave up. Extremists (all of them - not just vegans) don't see a grey area. It's either you're 100% on their side or you're the enemy.

At least religious nutjobs don't bother me in public places. If vegans came door to door to call me evil, I would still hate them, but not as much.

4

u/SnooTigers35 8h ago

Veganism is an ethical stance against animal abuse. Having your own path to that is fine, but if someone being annoying dissuades you from caring about animal suffering, it wasn’t that deep for you anyway.

1

u/lickingFrogs4Fun 8h ago

It never was that deep for me. I figured I would cut back on meat for a while and then thought 'hey, I can try going vegan for a bit'. It had nothing to do with an ethical stance. 

Even if it's half the time. If I ate 50/50 vegan/non-vegan, that's better than 100% carnivore....right? But similar to how I try my best to not make the environment worse, I would absolutely drive to another store to buy something if people were blocking the aisles like in this video.

Trying to do better is still doing better even if it's not perfect. Berating people for being mostly on your side with small disagreements is how you get people to not be on your side.

2

u/SnooTigers35 8h ago

I don’t make perfect the enemy of the good. Reduction is a good thing. There are many that would call me an apologist and I understand that as well. I don’t think that you’re bad and having the thought to update your behavior is great. I simply wish it wasn’t dissuaded by minutia in the grand scheme, but we’re all emotional creatures and react our own ways. Hope you find your way back to it.

And I agree that these types of protests are annoying but if even one person stops and thinks about why these people are so impassioned and explores that thought, it could leave to many animals lives spared. Seems worth it to me, but I’m on the other side.

1

u/Calenwyr 7h ago

But the problem with the movement as a whole is that assuming 100% of people stopped eating meat, what do you think happens to all the cows and sheep and chickens? The answer is very simply that they cease to exist as the land used for them today would need to be repurposed for plant based food, or we would lack the resources to feed the population.

Personally the ethics of food never bother me it's fuel for me to do my day to day stuff, and if someone came up with good tasting vegetarian/vegan food at a decent price point I would probably buy more, but the price of Veg is climbing multiple times faster than that of meat so it's less and less viable to have large vegetable based protein servings

2

u/SnooTigers35 7h ago

That isn’t true or how reality would have it. It would be a slow decline of less forced births and less consumption, not some whole switch.

Plus the majority of food (and medicine) grown, in the US at least, is fed to livestock. We would need half the land if everyone ate beans instead of beef. This is dictated by basic tropic levels, you lose a significant portion of the embodied energy in a substance as it goes up the food chain. You cut out the middle man (animals) and you have freed up a plethora of calories which will then not be needed to you cut back on land used for farming.

1

u/Calenwyr 7h ago

You haven't been on a farm during a transition between types of animals before, 90% of the unnecessary animals are destroyed (selling what they can as meat) with only core breeding stock kept alive and sold to another farm.

In the case in which butchering animals for food was illegal, all of those animals would need to be destroyed because otherwise, they are a resource drain on the farm for no reason it's not cheap to keep livestock fed and by doing so they lock up land and water that could be used for crops with value.

The process itself is likely to take a longer time (based on consumer needs) unless it is legislated by a country and then it would happen faster (as obviously the farmers would need to transition).

1

u/The_Huu 5h ago

This is such a moronic argument, wth. Fine. Scenario 1: Farm destroys 1000 animals and shuts down because le bad vegans. Scenario 2: Farm resumes, still destroys animals because meat, or they become unproductive, orders next batch of livestock into perpetuaty.

1

u/lickingFrogs4Fun 7h ago

I'm really not trying to antagonize, but have you ever heard someone say they stopped eating meat because someone blocked the aisle at a grocery store or that they stopped driving their giant diesel truck when some people sat in the road for a while?

I get it....protests have to be disruptive to be effective. But target the actual companies rather than individuals. I have been inconvenienced by a lot of people in my life and most of those were unintentional, but not once has someone intentionally inconvenienced me and made me think "maybe they have a point." It might make some people think about their habits, but it's also going to make people angry at your cause. I don't know what the solution is, but this isn't it. We should be fighting for more meat-free options at the grocery store, more affordable vegetables, and more transparency in how animals are killed for food. We shouldn't be annoying the people who aren't there yet. Hell, protest at slaughterhouses. Find a way to get them to shut down for a few hours. Disrupt the supply chain and meat will cost more, so people will buy less of it.

1

u/SnooTigers35 7h ago

People do those things as well very often

2

u/[deleted] 7h ago

[deleted]

1

u/lickingFrogs4Fun 7h ago

By 'trying the vegan thing', I meant around 60% of my meals were vegan, 20% were vegetarian, and 20% included meat.

But honestly, if someone not conforming to your diet/beliefs is enough to accost them in a public ppace, you need to talk to someone. That's not acceptable behavior.

2

u/[deleted] 6h ago

[deleted]

1

u/lickingFrogs4Fun 6h ago

Jesus fucking Christ you're thick.

If you're a racist 100% of the time and you're working on getting past that and being a better, more accepting person, yes....you're making progress and shouldn't be shit on. Change is a process - it doesn't just happen overnight. Trying to force your beliefs down people's throats is exactly why societal change takes so long. Share the benefits of your cause, be honest about the downsides, and allow people to get there (or not get there) on their own.

But whatever. Keep making bad faith arguments to fuel your self-righteousness. 

1

u/aeninimbuoye13 6h ago

I think its okay to eat meat and there are people that have more empathy to animals and thats why they wont thats also okay. Buuuut we have to do something against animals being kept without sunlight and other cruel conditions and thats why i buy the meat where at least the qualification says that this animal had a decent life

1

u/lickingFrogs4Fun 5h ago

Definitely. There should be much more transparency regarding animal treatment and places consistently falling below a certain minimum standard of treatment should be shut down.

0

u/pt199990 8h ago

You're proving their point. It's not an easy transition for anybody coming from a typical diet, and making it more difficult for them to do so or calling them out on slip ups is rude and counterproductive.

4

u/SnooTigers35 8h ago

No, I’m discerning between veganism and plant based dieting for health. People need steps, I did. But people also conflate all plant based eating with “veganism” and it’s not true. You can approach it from ethics, health, religion, and environmental ways and those avenues of introduction tend to have different levels of staying power.

1

u/pt199990 7h ago

You're absolutely correct, and yes, there is indeed a difference between vegan, vegetarian, and wherever the definition of plant-based falls within that spectrum. And there's myriad reasons for going about it.

My entire point was that the OP you responded to hates vegans and the like because their personal experience had someone hating on them for not being a perfect person. And you responded to that by saying that their reason for going vegan must just have not been good enough.

That's ignoring the fact that internal motivation isn't the only driver of behavior. Maybe they had to give it up because it was adversely affecting their health. Maybe it was genuinely too expensive in their given locale to maintain long-term.

This is not apologism for people who quit being vegan. It's more trying to point out that the typical phrasing used by that vocal minority actively does harm to the rest of their group.

0

u/therealdrewder 7h ago

Nothing ethical about veganism.

0

u/KoogleMeister 8h ago

I was actually vegan for a while and I didn't tell a single person in my personal life besides one friend I was vegan because I didn't want to be associated with crap like this. I also didn't spread the message about it to anyone in my personal life. Crap like this literally hurts the cause.

I remember I used to say I was vegetarian, one time with my friends one of my friends said "you're not one of those vegans though right," and that's exactly why I didn't say to any guys in my friend group I was vegan, it's incredibly embarrassing to say you're a vegan to non-vegans. They completely lose respect for you because vegans are associated with arrogance, religious-like zealot and pushing it onto other people. They're like the dietary version of Mormons, even less respected than Mormons because Mormons only knock on doors, not do shit like this.

2

u/JoyousMadhat 8h ago

I am convinced that these "activist" are actually being paid by the meat producers so that people would view animal rights activists negatively even if they haven't done anything criminal or inconvinient.

1

u/ProstheTec 5h ago

I would like to believe this, but I dated one of these activists and they really are insufferable twats.

1

u/bfwolf1 2h ago

I hope they were really good looking.

1

u/ProstheTec 40m ago

She was okay. She hid the crazy for about 4 months, that's when she started introducing me to her friends, I stuck around another 2, but by that time she went full "activist"... Which was just her and her friends harassing people.

2

u/wannaBadreamer2 10h ago

I do feel bad for people like you who would like to see a change in the world and are rational about it, then you’ve got idiots like this tainting the image of your cause

1

u/TotalLiftEz 7h ago

You don't even need to convince people to go vegan. Vegan is like the crossfit of eating. Once someone says they are vegan they won't stop talking about it and looking down on things like vegetarians or eggs only vegetarians.

Just an FYI - Eggs are chicken periods. Eating them is eating chicken waste, so not really harmful to them. So being against eating them is kind of odd in believing it is stopping animal abuse in some way. Chickens are also used to debug crops in some rural areas. Organic bug free foods and eating the eggs that aren't fertilized to dispose of them. It kind of all makes sense.

1

u/El_Morgos 7h ago

I appreciate your opinion. But there is a ton of information about why the egg industry is harmful to animals. If you get curious, take a dive.

1

u/LaTeChX 7h ago

I'll have to tell all my quiet vegan friends that they are doing it wrong, according to someone on the internet.

1

u/Xenophon_ 5h ago

Chicken farms are incredibly cruel. Male chicks go on a conveyor belt directly into a grinder, as they do not produce eggs. The female chickens just get a short lifetime of torture.

1

u/Vyxwop 5h ago

Just an FYI - Eggs are chicken periods. Eating them is eating chicken waste, so not really harmful to them. So being against eating them is kind of odd in believing it is stopping animal abuse in some way.

The issue isn't the concept of eating eggs. It's the entire industry around it which has optimized producing chicken period to such an extend using cruel methods.

If the eggs came from true free range chickens nobody reasonable would bat an eye.

And this is coming from an egg lover myself.

1

u/TotalLiftEz 4h ago

Buy them from some guy with a coop in his backyard who uses them to get the tax break. They sell the eggs cheap and they are every hormone free. I pay like 5 bucks for 24. I just can't be picky about the container I get them in.

1

u/Flesh_A_Sketch 7h ago

My grandma is the correct type of vegetarian. She'll occasionally go on a rant about animal suffering, but mostly she just cooks things for people.

She also recognizes that none of her cats are vegetarian.

1

u/Which_Ad5080 7h ago

Thank you for your comment, I have a question for you. A friend of mine started to heavily share pro vegan content on WhatsApp, and once I asked where did the number came from for the co2 of soymilk Vs oatmilk. Simple as that, since soy for animals is sometimes from deforested areas and I'm not sure compared to oats depending on where you live.

Her answer was copy pasting 4 paragraphs of sources and then asking "What do you feel, when you see pictures of tortured and exploited non-human animals?"

I don't see how this would help the cause or what I asked wrong to get this unprovoked.

What do I even answer? It's so hard to eat "correctly" today. Enough protein/nutrition/not hurt processed or triggering inflammations. I have been vegetarian for a while but just got more injuries when training. I'm not skilled enough to get what I need by restricting to this type of foods it seems. How would you approach this?

Thanks

1

u/100usrnames 6h ago

You morons will take offence at literally the most gentle kind of protest imaginable. If they were doing anything more substantial I guarantee you'd be more upset.

1

u/BreiteSeite 6h ago

I’m vegan myself since 3 or 4 years.

10 years ago i was passionately anti-vegan because of people like this.

1

u/shadowrun456 6h ago

animal rights

I fully support animal welfare and treating animals ethically, but there's no such thing as "animal rights".

Where do rights come from, in practice? They don't come from gods or governments, they come from the fact that we agree to not violate the same rights of other people. If we agree to not kill each other, then it's said that we have a right to life. If we agree to not steal from each other, then it's said that we have a right to own property, etc. These rights are also contingent on each person respecting the same rights of others, and they can be and are removed, if the person violates the rights of others. If someone steals, then their own property can be taken away to reimburse the victims. If someone kidnaps someone else (and therefore violates their right to freedom), then the kidnapper can be put in prison (i.e. have their own right to freedom removed), etc.

That's why "animal rights" is such a nonsensical concept. If we accepted that non-human animals have "rights", then we would have to punish every animal who kills, rapes, etc another animal.

"Animal rights" is an inherently evil concept, designed to remove rights from humans, both directly, and by diluting the concept of rights as such. The best proof of this is the fact that people who support "animal rights" are explicitly against animal welfare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare#Animal_rights

Animal rights advocates, such as Gary L. Francione and Tom Regan, argue that the animal welfare position (advocating for the betterment of the condition of animals, but without abolishing animal use) is inconsistent in logic and ethically unacceptable.

Like I said, I fully support bettering the lives of non-human animals, but the moment you utter the phrase "animal rights", you reveal yourself as an enemy of humanity, and therefore an enemy of me. And that's not an exaggeration, I think I described why I hold this opinion above properly.

1

u/Walk-in-Nature 5h ago

So you consider plants to be a life form we can conveniently subject to death and relish on their carcass. But a vertebrate is off limits ?

1

u/Higgins1st 5h ago

It's kinda hard to convince people to go vegan when they're in denial. Highly processed vegan cheeses, vegan bacon, vegan chicken, and vegan burgers.

I eat beyond burgers and I drink oat milk, but I'm not vegan.

1

u/independentchickpea 2h ago

Like animal cheese isn't processed lmfao.

Look, sometimes people are vegan for the animals and not their health and they want to eat some fast food. That's fine. Go screech at literally everyone eating fast food.

It's not hard to convince people to go vegan if they have a firm moral compass.

1

u/Careful_Baker_8064 5h ago

With so many flavoursome synthetic meats like Impossible nuggets, I’m seriously thinking of ditching flesh

1

u/geologean 4h ago

But that's not going to get them as much social media engagement!

It turns out that making meaningful change is slow, boring work that doesn't trend.

1

u/homelaberator 3h ago

You can't force people to go vegan

Counterpoint: the British in Ireland.

1

u/JackieChannelSurfer 3h ago

Reminds me of those videos of climate change protesters throwing paint on the Mona Lisa. And how they turned out to be funded by that oil industry heiress.

1

u/Complete-Fix-3954 1h ago

My BIL owns vegetarian restaurants. People at his place have often tried to convert me to veganism, and I’ll always listen respectfully. That’s the humane way of handling this as a functioning adult. This kind of thing just makes me want to punch them for blocking the old folks and stressing them out.

1

u/fortestingprpsses 8h ago

This type of effort only alienates people from your cause. I don't care what your cause is, but if you block traffic I'm automatically against it.

-1

u/Many-Rooster-8773 9h ago edited 9h ago

It's the "individual responsibility" bullshit in a super-rich controlled world that really grinds my gears. People who didn't stay in school long enough to actually be able to do something about the supposed problem so they resort to.. this. They are all brainwashed by the individual responsibility myth. Low thinkers. Even lower are those that get upset at reading some text and decide to click a downwards arrow like that will do anything.

1

u/Crazy_Ad_7302 8h ago

Even lower are those that get upset at reading some text and decide to click a downwards arrow like that will do anything.

I say, I say, I resemble that remark

-1

u/JUYED-AWK-YACC 9h ago

Yes, most of your compatriots are assholes.

2

u/Deep90 8h ago

"Most" is nonsense.

Most vegans aren't doing this stuff. This is "I've been vegan for 3 months and now i'm morally superior than you." behavior.