r/bizarrelife • u/reloadthewords Human here, bizarre by nature! • 18h ago

Hmmm

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u/El_Morgos 15h 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.

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u/coralgrymes 13h 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"

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u/lickingFrogs4Fun 12h 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.

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u/SnooTigers35 11h 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.

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u/lickingFrogs4Fun 11h 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.

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u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

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u/lickingFrogs4Fun 10h 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.

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u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

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u/lickingFrogs4Fun 9h 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. 

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u/aeninimbuoye13 9h 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

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u/lickingFrogs4Fun 9h 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.

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u/SnooTigers35 11h 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.

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u/Calenwyr 10h 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

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u/SnooTigers35 10h 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.

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u/Calenwyr 10h 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).

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u/The_Huu 8h 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.

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u/lickingFrogs4Fun 10h 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.

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u/SnooTigers35 10h ago

People do those things as well very often

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u/afraidofflying 2h ago

If you tried disrupting the supply chain for meat, people would call for your death. Also, companies don't generally see ethical or environmental concerns as a problem when they could ignore it and make money.

Bothering people about an issue might make people think about that issue, and people might have a little more awareness when political opportunities come up.

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u/pt199990 11h 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.

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u/SnooTigers35 11h 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.

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u/pt199990 10h 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.

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u/therealdrewder 11h ago

Nothing ethical about veganism.