Honey

I think "exploitation" is the wrong word to be used. I'm not vegan, so I really have no bearing on this, but exploitation doesn't equal harm.

This post for example is about bees. They're being exploited (in that we're using them to get resources), but is it harmful? I have trouble saying yes. It seems somewhat ideal for them. They get to go about their lives like normal, though usually in a place with a lot of flowering plants, and they get taken care of. Occasionally honey is gathered from them, but this doesn't actually harm any bees.

I think vegans follow dogma too much. They should consider their reasons for themselves, and consider what food sources fall into that. The dogma is useful for quick communication and sharing of information, but I would suspect honey farming is a lot better for the living things involved than even a lot of plant farming, which requires large swathes of land to be dedicated to farming, which certainly isn't good for native species and arguably plants can feel too.

This is probably a hot take but I have the opinion that nature isn't any more merciful than we are. Existence is suffering and every animal ends up as feed for another.

Is it better to be raised in horrid conditions in a farm, or to spend every moment of your life scavenging for food, running for your life, while probably infested with parasites just to be torn to pieces, alive, by a wolf or other predator?

Humans at least have the decency to sedate or knock unconscious our food. Wild animals have to experience being eaten alive.

Yeah exactly, people arguing whether dragon fruit or some shit is a "super food". The super food is right in front of us, potatoes (and onions).

What other food has been so vital to our survival that its disappearance could ravage a population (Irish potato famine)

No offense to dragon fruit, blue berries or whatever exotic fruit, but if they went extinct, not that much could change.

I'd say the issue is that if honey isn't vegan because you're causing harm to bees, isn't most of modern vegetable agriculture at least equally harmful to bees & other insects due to all the pesticides being used?

Or is it just if we directly involve bees, it's bad, but if we inflict greater harm in a less direct way, it's acceptable?

I mean bees are producing way more than they are using. We just shouldn't take it all.

I rarely judge someone for ignorance unless it is wilful. I pretty harshly judge people who cannot assimilate new information. Over time I think I might be evolving from INTP->INTJ as I age. I used to have more patience and would try to encourage people to learn and adjust.

Or they don't care because they're using it in a colloquial sense and 90+% of people they talk to would understand their intended usage, so they resent being lectured on semantics rather than responding to the meaning behind their words.

I've deleted so many half written comments thinking "If this is what they think, do I really want to deal with the absolute garbage response I'll inevitably get back?"

As for the exploitation, all living things have their own lives. Even plants seem to be able to communicate to some degree and can be stressed and stuff. Either you're OK exploiting living things to some degree or you die. The level of exploitation is what should be discussed. Is beekeeping harmful to bees? I don't know, but it doesn't seem like it.

As for it being sugar, sure. Sugar isn't bad though. Sugar is bad when consumed in the quantities the average American consumes it. It also has other properties that make it pretty good for your health. For example, I think it's good for preventing allergies because it contains pollen (I might be making this up, but it seems like I've read that somewhere).

Plus, it's just weird to want to eat the vomit of other species anyway.

Do you realize that fruit is the ovary of a plant? Life is weird. Get over it. Weird is not a word that should come into a discussion of ethics.

Don't we help bee populations by building homes for them?

Also, and I did wonder about this, what do homestock want out of life more than food, getting laid, and taking a walk or run? I think even the smarter ones like octopuses just want to get food and live until making kids.

Sorry, is this post satire or are you talking about satire you did not recognize? NEVER seen a vegan call breast milk non-vegan and have in fact actually seen more discussion about whether vegans should be breastfeeding children at all, I.e. is it healthy to do so with their diet.

You've put the word debate in quotation marks flippantly like there's an obvious answer, but I'm pretty sure you just misunderstood a conversation rife with sarcasm or taken out of context (or straight up made it up).

Beekeeping family here: who the fuck clips bee wings?

What if the hives are rent controlled?

I've always wondered if vegetables from a farm that uses horse-drawn tills instead of tractors would be vegan... It's a real question, but everyone I ask thinks that I'm trolling.

ethical vegans (and not people who eat plant-based for nutritional reasons, and often get conflated with people doing it for ethics reasons) generally agree on one very simple rule:

To reduce, as much as possible, the suffering inflicted upon animals.

That's it.

Where that line is drawn of course depends on your personal circumstances. Some people require life-saving medicine that includes animal products, and are generally still considered vegan.

I'd like to see what about this confuses you and your epistomology [sic, and that word doesn't mean what you think it means]

What a word salad. Your comment can be applied to anything because people are different lol. All my friends who are dads have different ideas on how to be a dad. Fascinating. It helps to understand the goal of a parent. All my friends with jobs define success in different ways. It’s like they’re all making it up as they go along. Fascinating. It helps to understand the goals of a worker.

It’s ok to set “impossible” goals if you view them as directions rather than destinations.

Fascinating huh?

Reacting to stimuli like the colour of light is irrelevant. My phone camera would fall into the same category, then. A light switch reacts to getting pressed and turns on a light, it's reacting to a stimulus.

What matters is sentience, which plants cannot possess, since they don't have a central nervous system. And even if they did, a diet that includes meat takes more plants, since those animals have to be fed plants in order to raise them.

They all make it up as they go along. It's very similar to religious beliefs in the way it is personal. Each has their own set beliefs on where to draw the line of what is vegan and what is not

The extent to which we are tied to every living thing on Earth means that many vegans have set impossible goals.

Regarding these two, is this any different from human rights? Where people draw the line regarding slave labour, child labour, which type of humans they care about (considering racism, homophobia, trans phobia, ableism etc). I'm sure lots of people have impossible goals regarding human rights, but working to get as close to those as possible is still sensible.

Veganism has and always will be just dogma. I find it quite annoying how individuals can so freely push their moral philosophy onto others. Veganism should always be a personal philosophy.

Also, there are now many vegans (considered bottom-up vegans) taking the communist route and basically advocating for revolutions in order to cease animal food production.

I feel so kindred with the way you see things. You're making an observation and you're curious about the "why" of everything. I feel people often read my similar interest in a subculture as critical. Kind of like how bluntness can be perceived as rude, I guess. Do you ever have a similar response happen to you?

Can't eat bread or drink alcohol, because that'd be making yeast our slaves!

Bees are a symbol of labour. You couldn't make them work harder if you tried. European honey bees collect far more nectar than they will ever eat, it's like they're planning for fimbulwinter

So what exactly is the problem with using honey?

honey bees are bad for pollinators

Hm? What do you mean?

From this paper:

A. mellifera appears to be the most important, single species of pollinator across the natural systems studied, owing to its wide distribution, generalist foraging behaviour and competence as a pollinator.

This is a genuine question btw.

I thought you were kidding but no, they do and the reason is otherwise they wouldn't fit under environmental protection laws.

But renouncing honey is very easy, while not eating plants would mean starving to death. Since veganism is about reducing harm as far as possible, unavoidable suffering doesn't make anything non vegan.

Bees can kill their queen and make a new one no problem.

This doesn't make the mutilation of the queen bee any less bad. It's still harming the bee. I am not aware if a bee has the ability to make an informed decision on whether to kill the queen and relocate, so I cannot make an informed decision about whether the bees actually want to be in their current hive.

If the colony would want to move away they would just do that.

I don't know if this is true. It's possible the bees are being manipulated into staying at their current hive in some way.

I don't think clipping the queen wings would do nothing

It would hurt the queen, which is more than I want to be involved in.

But I doubt any beekeeper colony would want to move as they are keep at a perfect environment so they can produce more honey that they would actually need to survive. Even industrial ones. It's part of basic beekeeping that bees must be in a good place so they produce the most honey

Making an assumption about what the bees want is not strong enough of an excuse for me to be ok with their exploitation. I don't believe we should have the right to make decisions for other organisms, and the bees are not able to tell us how they want to be treated, so we should not try to control them or take what they produce.

Hurt of mistreated bees would not produce honey.

This appears to also be an assumption. I do not know if it is true, so I cannot use it to make a decision

If they are mistreated the try to leave (and as stated they can just kill their Queen if she is crippled), they eat all the honey, or just die.

If this is true, there is likely to be a minimum amount of mistreatment before they take action. I do not know how much mistreatment a bee can take, so I cannot use this to make a decision.

Bees are really complicate to get advantage of. Our relationship with them need to be symbiotic to work.

I do not know if this is true. We take advantage of many animals without giving them much in return, so I am not sure if the bee-beeker relationship is actually symbiotic.

You are correct. There is more that i can and need to do. That still does not make it good to use honey.

"and other bodily fluids"

Animals aren't just used, they are tortured on a industrial scale. That's mainly why vegans oppose animal products.

One good argument for this: A vegan diet not only minimizes animal deaths but plant deaths as well, since livestock obviously has to be fed on many, many individual plants before they can get slaughtered. So even if we for some reason prioritized saving the lives of plants going vegan would still be the way to go.

There are varieties of Jainism that won't pluck fruits (will only eat what has naturally fallen) and many mainstream varieties of Jainism that won't eat any root vegetables (because digging them up would harm insects), or seeded vegetables (eating it harms the plants ability to reproduce).

Can human meat be vegan?

Beekeeping is exploitation, but don't the bees benefit from it too vs. being in the wild?

I think it’s more accurate to think of you trapping humans in your basement and leaving them a bag of groceries every once in a while. Then you go down there and take whatever they cooked with the produce. They get to eat what they make, you just get the leftovers. They also can’t leave.

What level of involvement in producing the food makes it vegan or not vegan?

It's about A) exploitation and B) harming the animal.

Pollination is done by all kinds of insects, but they are part of our ecosystem and happen to be pollinating the plants that we eat. We don't breed them, we don't kill them (pesticides, sure), we simply coexist.

Honey isn't vegan because we breed the bees, take their food and often kill the entire hive because they get sick and cannot survive winter without their honey. It's also not sustainable, because honey bees are being bred en masse and are pushing out native pollinators that are highly specialized in certain kinds of plants, causing them to go extinct.

The bees make more than they need. They'll keep filling up cells till there's no room for larvae then swarm. That takes a while but in a meantime, the honey sitting there attracts pests and predators that can harm the colony.

No, I can't save them. Because systematic problems cannot be solved through individual action

That being said, it's bold of you to assume someone conscious of the suffering of plants isn't eating as sustainably as they can with the choices they have available

Also, this is about honey - honey production encourages freely planting wild fields rather than mono crops, and it discourages killing the bees. I don't share your moral system, but in mine this is about as good as it gets