I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS
oh shit
oh shit
oh shit
And if you think they’re being duly compensated, think again.
WHOOP DER IT IS
*sigh* And who exactly do you think works at slaughterhouses? Happily paid American citizens making $20 an hour?
The point she’s making is a lot of vegans don’t even mention or care about how their food is brought to them. Not that slaughterhouses are cruelty-free for anyone, human or animal.
Not to name names but my sort of friend (we had a falling out) is a vegan and she admits she hates humans and loves animals, so she could care less about the migrant workers and children who toil to pick her vegetables. Which seems super heartless.
Ok, I’m just going to assume my original response got lost and answer it again. :)
I can totally understand where you’re coming from. Frankly, your former friend sounds like kind of a jerk, but she’s really not representative of most of the vegans I’ve known. There are jerks in every group, vegans included. (Although, in my experience, people who “hate” other people usually do so because they’ve had some horrible experiences. I think that’s really sad, but sometimes the only thing you can be is understanding.)
My problem with this kind of joke is that people take this as somehow discrediting the entire argument for veganism. As if the fact that farmworkers are treated poorly somehow negates all of the positive things about veganism. And sadly, many people are actually unaware of the incredibly poor conditions of the mostly illegal immigrants who work in slaughterhouses. They don’t know that they are often made incredibly ill by the work, that they are frequently injured by the animals panicking on their way to the slaughter, that they have such a huge turnover rate because the work is so horrible, and that those who do stay with it become desensitized to cruelty to any living beings frequently because they have no other choice. Most of the vegans I know are very concerned about where their food comes from, which is why they try to buy things fair-trade and often locally. It’s an imperfect system, certainly. But two wrongs don’t make a right, either.
The attitude in this joke is basically the same reasoning that people use when they bring up starving children in other countries as a reason to not care about, say, sexual inequality in the US. They are both issues. Caring about one doesn’t preclude caring about the other, as well. Both should be fixed.
Veganism is a basic principle in various religious beliefs (Jainism, Buddhism). The reason for this, the reason I personally am vegan, is because of the belief that all life, human and animal, is valuable. It’s about compassion for living things. Most of the vegans I’ve met (and I’ve known quite a few) have felt the same way. The majority of people, however, view vegans as being stuck-up, obnoxious, and something that’s easy to make fun of and discredit. That is, unfortunetly, already the majority opinion on veganism. Jokes like this just push that forward even more, and in the process encourage people to ignore the legitimate arguments behind the practice. Arguments that often have the welfare of people as well as animals at their base.
If you’re interested at all in what those arguments might be, there’s a great book by Jonathan Safran Foer called Eating Animals that gives a really great, really open-minded explanation of why this kind of a lifestyle matters, and why he chose it after doing his own research. He’s a fantastic author, and his writing doesn’t come off as an attack on those who don’t agree with him.
Anyway, I hope this gave you a bit of an idea of why this kind of thing bothers me.
(Unrelatedly, you are totally one of my favorite Petlar writers, so rock on!)
Woah hey, that’s nice of you to say! (Speaking of, did you know Milo Ventimiglia is a vegetarian?)
I’m personally not trying to discredit vegans. I have other veggie and vegan friends who are totes cool, and I’ve eaten fair trade food plenty of times. If it were more affordable, that’s all I would buy.
However, I was just commenting on the fact that there are radical vegans out there who apparently don’t care about improving conditions out there for anyone but animals, and if humans are suffering working in slaughterhouses, then that is what they “deserve” for doing that kind of labor. Which is not a cool attitude to have?
I dunno. Like any other kind of group, there are extremists and chill people and people in between. I was just personally commenting on that post because it reminds me SO MUCH of my friend who I lived with for like a year and she literally talked shit about non-vegans all the time and she totally said many times she wants the human race to die out, and it was like, are you nuts? So yeah, this gif set reminded me of her.
Obviously I can see why it would be harmful to someone with your cause, and I respect your point of view.
This motherfucker was walking around Comic-Con in a hyper-realistic Walter White/Bryan Cranston mask
guess who was underneath this Bryan Cranston mask
fucking Bryan Cranston.
Aaron Paul’s face is like a million different cries for help all molded into one expression
Chris Pine, our Prince and Saviour
SCREW CHRIS PINE, LOOK AT THE STEP SISTERS!!!!
One of two of the 2nd generation kaiju created approximately 2 years later after Hans.
Amelia is Newt’s foray into creating a kaiju capable of flight much like Otachi. She inspires Hermann to look into creating Jaegers with flight capabilities (though Gipsy Danger’s encounter with Otachi spurs the research too).
sabellart
