While Oxford, Merriam Webster, Cambridge and the rest of the human population define vegans as "people who don't eat or use animal products", they themselves have come up with an their own definition:
Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
This definition is quite laughable because it is completely vague und unstated, and so vegans can change their ethics on the fly to whatever seems convenient without a framework to judge it. They are therefore able to arbitrarily re-write their ethical stance in order to defend hypocrisy. For example, when they are confronted about the massive exploitation of bees caused by forced pollination, particularly in products like almonds, they will just refer back to this definition and call it a day even though almonds are a completely unnecessary and avoidable food item.
But when it comes to the consumption of animal products, they do not apply the same logic. For example, one could call the Inuit, a carnivorous tribe, vegan because they live in arctic environments where it's not possible to live off of plants - so they would not be able to kill less animals than they already do. Likewise, there's nothing that would inherently stop people from calling themselves vegan because they don't find it "practicable" to give up the taste of bacon.
Jon Venus started to reintroduce eggs after the vegan diet did not work for him, but what he ate remained plant-based. Instead of staying consistent with their own definition, the vegan community decided to attack him. This pattern can be observed in nearly every influencer that quits veganism. The overwhelming majority of them revert to omnivorismn sooner or later, so how could one even call the promotion of such a diet consistent with the philosophy when it doesn't cut the criterion of practicability?
There are already many ethical belief systems around the avoidance of animal suffering that are thousands of years old, like Jain vegetarianism. Many religions have pursued a vegan diet in the past - and all of them failed. Gandhi, for example, was an ex-vegan that nearly starved himself to death. As a result, he warned his followers to not make the same mistakes he did and allowed them to drink milk. The same is true for Buddhism. One could speculate that the current situation is an example of history repeating itself.
But even though these religions are consistent with the vegan definition, they would never be accepted as vegan because they still promote the consumption of animal products. It is immensely arrogant to believe that nobody was able to care about animals before the invention of veganism by Donald Watson in 1944. In the end, veganism is really just the promotion of a 100% plant-based diet under an ethical premise, just how it was originally defined.
Many vegans believe that they are logically consistent because they don't kill or exploit any animals. They argue in black-and-white logic that forbids any animal exploitation. They claim that there is no such thing as humane slaughter. They will say that people who eat meat are murderers and rapists. They think that all animals should be respected equally.
Often, vegans will claim that they don't exploit any animals just because they aren't eating them. This idea is promoted by every one of their leaders, like Joey Carbstrong, Freelee, Vegan Gains and Earthling Ed.
The truth is, they have no problem with killing and exploiting massive amounts of animals for themselves, while somehow arguing it is not morally justifiable to do so. More ironically, every single one of them relies on products that were made from animal corpses. According to their own logic, vegans are murdering, raping animal abusers that engage in the same immoralities that they accuse others of. In short, they are hypocrites.
Only after this is pointed out, vegans are now obligated to point back to their loose definition, drop all the claims they've been making and completely change their moral framework by moving the goalposts from "never murdering anything" to "causing less harm". Now, even if vegans did cause less harm (they don't) and it was immoral to kill animals for food, then this still doesn't make them moral just because they kill less. According to this reasoning, Stalin was a good person because he killed less people than Mao. Besides, vegans already use the same logic to support their black-and-white narrative on diet.
Another thing that they love to do is justify their behaviour by making up reasons why their deaths don't "count". This is a great example of cognitive dissonance, something they often accuse meat-eaters of.
Pollination for US food crops kills 50.000.000.000 bees per year, which is 5 times as many animals as all slaughter combined.
Wheat protection in Lascelles kills 200.000 mice every night during plagues
One meal of wild mushrooms kills more animals than a year on the carnivore diet.
40.000 ducks are shot in New South Wales every year to protect rice crops.
1.000.000 humans are poisoned by pesticides every year, 20.000 of them die.
Pesticides destroyed 75% of insect biomass. 40% of all insect species are threatened and could soon be extinct.
Pesticides endanger 1/3 of all amphibian species and many have gone extinct.
"Safe" doses of pesticides kill frogs at 46 times the rate they do in the wild.
One single fertilizer factory in China caused the death of 110 tons of fish. The dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff can be seen from space.
Olive Oil harvest in Andalusia kills 2.500.000 birds each year.
Palm Oil production devastates the rainforest and orangutans.
In response to all the death and suffering they are causing, most vegans will now copy-paste a talking point from one of their argument guides and try to blame animal agriculture for it by claiming that more crops have to be grown to feed animals. Typically this is supported by a link to a study made by Mark Middleton, an ethically challenged animal rights activist who went to certain lengths to misrepresent this paper as actual scientific research. Note that this "study" was only published on his personal website, and not in a peer-reviewed journal like the study he wants to debunk.
Despite claiming to record the "total animal deaths" in agriculture, this propaganda paper does not account for the deaths and suffering caused by the crop protection industry at all. It simply ignores the overwhelming majority of deaths which happen in plant agriculture, like vegans do so often.
Because Middleton only includes the deaths of livestock animals and mice that were crushed in grain harvest, even his own data literally shows that meat and milk from grass-fed cattle kill fewer animals than a vegan diet. That is without including any other deaths, such as the 50 billion bees that are killed every year. This is where vegans will now surrender and move the goalposts to environmentalism and create a false dichotomy by implying everyone can only either be vegan or grass-fed carnivore. (Even accepting the fallacious premise of that argument, most cattle around the world are already grass-fed with the US and Canada being exceptions to the rule. A vegan diet is also not sustainable for the entire planet anyway and there is enough land which can only be utilized by grazing ruminants)
Even for animal which are fed "crops", he tries to make innocent cows responsible for the deaths of billions of animals when a global FAO study has clearly shown that their their feed consists of grass and by-products of the harvest that is driven by human demand. The edible grain that is fed to them is gluten, which gets separated at the mill because humans do not digest it well. What this means is that all these deaths would continue to occur even if every farm animal magically disappeared. (see also: Are most crops grown for animals?.)
Going forward, Middleton has done a great job at distorting the data and was likely even aware of it. For instance, the feed conversion ratios he ended up with were around 20:1, which he fabricated by using land usage as a metric (note that he never mentions how he calculated this number). But from the FAO study, we know that this number is actually only 3:1, making milk the best food choice in his chart. He also conveniently used a caloric metric, which was the most favourable for him. Had he chosen one that is based on actual human nutritional requirements (say, protein), then his table would have favoured grain-fed beef with crops deaths included because feedlot cattle upcycloe protein from 0.6:1.
No matter how many deaths vegans make themselves accountable for, they will simply claim that more crops are grown for animals without ever proving it. This one here even straight up tells others to lie and say that they should make animal agriculture responsible for forced pollination, when in truth not a single fodder crop is pollinated by domestic honeybees.
In this episode of Poor Vegan Logic we’ll explore the silly vegan idea that veganism supposedly only kills animals accidentally, and that being indirectly responsible for animal deaths excuses them from doing actions that they themselves consider immoral.
The comment here is a hilarious example of poor vegan logic that it’s adherents obviously have not thought about too much - since it’s so obviously and provably wrong. This is an example of vegans reacting to someone showing them how much death they are really contributing to. Let's go over the most common talking points.
Direct vs Indirect Killing
Many vegans seem to claim that direct killing is less ethical than indirect killing. This is obviously false, and is even encoded in the human legal system whereby someone who contracts for a murder is still responsible for that murder just as if they were to have done it themselves.
If indirect killing was more ethical, regardless of the knowledge one has that it’s your consumption that is having the animal killed or how many are killed, then we could all just let the abattoir kill our meat, buy it in a grocery store, and vegans would be satisfied with this.
Obviously vegans do not believe that meat eaters are absolved of responsibility simply because they didn’t do the killing themselves, so why do they not hold themselves to the same standard? Because someone else applied the pesticides they are absolved of their responsibility for their food choices? This is a typical example of a double standard using bad vegan logic.
Accidental vs Intentional Killing
The other argument made is the accidental vs intentional deaths. This argument is even more ridiculous since one can hardly call the mass killing of insects by intentionally spraying pesticides, the poisoning of mice and rats in fields, the destruction of the homes of spiders and birds during the harvest, and many other animal deaths that occur to bring plants to a vegan’s plate "accidental". Take a moment and realize that there is a 56.5 billion dollar industry dedicated solely to kill animals for the crops they so deeply desire.
Perhaps they mean the deaths that accrue when:
But can those really be called "accidental" when the effects have been studied and are well-known, predictable, and occur year after year after year?
Other people also eat plants
Another obfuscation tactic is for them to say that "everyone else" eats plants too, and therefore the animal deaths have nothing to do with veganism, even though it’s directly related to eating plants vs animals. And they will continue on in their ignorance of the death, or environmental destruction, or the poor health of their fellow humans they are advocating for.
Remember, vegans only make up about 0.5% of the population, so it’s easy for them to disclaim that vegans have any responsibility for anything.
Sentience
In order to dismiss the majority of death and suffering caused by plant-based diets, many vegans will simply state that the animals are not (or less) "sentient" and can be ignored. Yet, their own definition states that it is about the reduction of cruelty to animals and they are even forced to state themselves that intelligence is not a factor to determine suffering so that they have an argument for pigs and cows. Once again, this is a case of vegans being inconsistent with their own philosophy.
Note that further, sentience as a concept is impossible to quantify or even define. Which is why the government of New Zealand has legally declared that all animals - even worms, mites and zooplankton - are equally sentient, and so vegans discriminating them by not recognizing their sentience.
Self-defense
Finally, a vegan might justify their cruel behaviour by calling the animals pests, implying that their lives are worthless and that they therefore, literally, have no value and don't count. However, these are by far not the only animals that vegans slaughter because they use their weapons of mass destruction to kill innocent bystanders just for the sake of efficiency. If animals had rights, this vould violate the Geneva Convention.
Humans were the ones that conquered the land of the animals in the first place, and they will have to keep doing this in order to expand their crop yields. Vegans contradict their own concept of speciecism by proclaiming that they themselves are worth more than the animals they opress.
What all of these arguments say is that vegans aren’t actually interested in the death toll of their food. They are only interested in making sure they feel good about what they are eating and having their lack of guilt and responsibility be accepted by those who collectively consider themselves morally superior in their ignorance about the total death toll of their food choices. In other words, it’s bad vegan logic that animals on your plate are important, but the small ones that can’t be quantified easily and don’t end up on your plate are not, no matter how many of them are killed or why. The vegan here seems to agree.
The Vegan Society officially states that beekeeping is inhumane, causes animal suffering, and should be opposed. Yet, 75% of all crop species are pollinated by the same domestic honeybees whose slavery vegans actively oppose. These bees are forced to breed, shipped across the country in trucks and then worked to death until 40% of their colonies collapse to parasites, pesticides and disease. Because beekeepers have to take honey to maintain colony health, honey production is directly tied to crop pollination (and thus, crop production). Vegans are once again being hypocrites by supporting the honey industry, which they themselves condemn, more than even the average person.
This same hypocrisy is found in the fact that they use slave cows to make fertilizer: if it’s one thing that vegans hate, it’s conventional dairy farms. Not only are the cows not free to roam and eat grass, but they consider the animals enslaved to create the delicious dairy products they so desperately try to mimic using plants. Yet, there are no stickers for their vegetables that say, “No animals were used in the fertilizing of this product”. Vegans will declare that it is "cruelty free" to keep cows in confinement in order to harvest their waste products, but will sob and weep when same thing is done to harvest their milk.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of vegan animal exploitation. Let's not forget that they also:
Finally, vegans seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that a large portion of their food is coming from actual child slave labour in third-world countries because they require food imports to get their micronutrients. There are around 108 million children working in agriculture - the majority of them being in crop production:
At its core, the vegan ideology promotes the abstinence from any "unnecessary" animal suffering that is inflicted to support human health. While well-intended, this is an extremely harmful line of thinking.
There are many examples of how veganism has negatively affected humans. One of them is the fact that vaccines contain animal products, which has convinced some vegans to stop using them because they can live without them, hence they are consistent with the philosophy. Likewise, the health section mentions the many infants that were permanently crippled because their parents put them on an experimental diet whose only evidence to be safe is a blanket claim from an opinion paper written by three ethical vegans who did not disclose this conflict of interest. Likewise, public vegan communities seem to encourage people to put their carnivorous pets on a plant-based diet to "reduce" the suffering of other animals. In fact, 78% of vegans say they would feed dogs and cats a plant-based diet, while only 27% consider it immoral. There are also animal rights activists that have stolen the puppy of a homeless man.
If it is immoral to kill animals in order to support human health, then that's irrational and anti-human. Other than giving up meat, we would also have to have to stop using pesticides, killing mosquitoes, rats, fleas, termites, roaches and so on. We would also be obligated to malnourish ourselves so that we burn less calories, and therefore kill less animals.
There are terrorist organizations like ALF who have send bomb letters and stalked children. Activist groups have attacked the food supply so often that there now is a law that makes it illegal for them to trespass. Indigenous people like the Inuit are living in poverty because anti-sealers have damaged their economy for the animals. Many activists also use their concept of speciecism to justify insulting minorities and crime victims by equating them to animals with analogies to rape, murder and slavery.
The typical response to this is that "not all vegans are like this", but that doesn't change the underlying events. The observation that there are nice vegans does not reverse the all suffering that was - fundamentally - caused by an ideology that uses good intentions to justify immoral actions. In fact, it is a common symptom of cults to blame the people instead of the ideology.
Ultimately, veganism is promoting an ethical stance that has started to include false health and environmental claims as a means for propaganda so that it can dismiss counterarguments - and this is what makes it an evil anti-human movement. Giving rights to animals will logically require us to reduce or give up basic physiological needs such as food and clothing. Vegans are encouraging activism in order to guilt-trip or even legally force people into a man-made diet that is understudied, reliant on synthetic pills and factually deficient in important brain nutrients. Their diet is adding malnutrition to wealthy countries. By attaching morality to food, they are also promoting disordered eating that is heavily linked to mental illness and depression. And because they have to portray this diet as healthy and appropriate to gain new members, 50% of UK vegans do not even take B12 supplements and will eventually suffer from psychosis and irreversible nerve damage if they don't quit or educate themselves.
There are many ex-vegans who suffered from health failure, but the vegan cult is obligated to pretend they don't exist, just how it has to pretend to not kill any animals. Rather, it is typically argued that ex-vegans did the diet wrong, that they never really cared about animals, or that they could have just taken more supplements.
If we wanted to see how a true vegan utopia looks like, we could point to the blue zone of India which is often used as an example to support nationwide plant-based diets because they have been practising vegetarianism for thousands of years. They have one of the lowest meat consumptions in the world, yet also have an average life expectancy of 69 years and are subject to every modern disease that is supposedly caused by an ancestral food source - diabetes, heart-disease and cancer. More than 1/3 of Indian children under 5 years suffer from stunting due to lack of animal products. They also have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, of which 68% are attributed to malnutrition. 52% of their women are suffering from anemia due to iron deficiency.
Animal rights activists love to quote Gandhi's pro-vegetarian remarks, so here is what he had to say about veganism after nearly dying from it:
"No wonder that mortality figures are on the increase and there is lack of energy in the people. It would appear as if man is really unable to sustain life without either meat or milk and milk products. Anyone who deceives people in this regard or countenances the fraud is an enemy of India."
The definition of a cult is one that is often contentious because it is often considered a pejorative and also because the general definition is very broad. The general definition is either a "relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister" or "A misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing." Despite this common misconception, the study and definition of cults especially how they form and what they are, is far more concise then generally known and very important to society; not least because it names and describes the behaviors of extremists and radical groups but also of demagogues and abusers. What makes a cult a cult (or a cult ideology) has been extensively researched and determined by a set of symptoms of thought and recognizable group behaviors by many in academia.
These forms of measurement of cult behaviors don't require that in order for a cult to be a cult, it needs to have all the signs. If enough symptoms are present however, it's most likely you are dealing with at minimum, a "thought-stopping" ideology which prioritizes identity and feelings over critical thought, at maximum, an anti-social, and potentially dangerous cult group, such as a pyramid scheme, fascist political ideology, abusive family unit, or militant religion.
So how does veganism fall under the definition of a cult beyond the most broad application of the term?
According to CultEducation.Com, warning signs of a cult are:
1. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
Veganism does not accept non-vegan views within the paradigm, no matter how specialized a person is regarding a subject that aligns with their cause (environmentalism, health, agriculture). Vegans will disavow people even with Ph.D qualifications if the person is not a member of their cause. They will demand a person become vegan first in order to be accepted by them. Even if the person is a world-renowned activist or expert, they will be discarded or demonised for not being vegan.
This also extends to other activist groups not just individuals who may align with "vegan" causes. Vegans feel they have the moral authority to co-opt all movements and to demand even historically oppressed groups carry the cross for veganism on top of their struggles or else they are illegitimate causes.
Vegans are so self-centered and entitled in their beliefs they will co-opt religious iconography as their own and are even so self-righteous they will visibly equate slaughterhouses to the Holocaust of Jews by openly using a Nazi symbol to evoke equivalence and use images of Holocaust victims next to animals This is so common, its gotten the ADL to make a statement.
In this way they truly believe that a superior sense of morality alone in of itself grants a person power and authority over others, much like a pacifist who declares themselves the boss of everyone while they sit and watch people fight for their lives against a genocide. This is the definition of elitism and is usually a sign of an actual activist group being covertly diluted by opressors from actual power into useless performativity of which members proceed to constantly attack each-other over. [citation needed.]
Yet, vegans who are spokespersons for the movement are unquestionably correct as they are presented to outsiders, no matter if they lack credentials, or there is direct evidence they contradict themselves, nor if they are proven to have lied or are wrong by independent sources. All research is presumed to either be correct and support veganism, or if it does not support veganism, it is a malicious/discreditable source...a lie. Members suggest new followers or non-members to "research" veganism by only using vegan sources...although they hide the fact that all their "best" sources are from vegans who already agree with their causes. (see: confirmation bias.)
As long as you are a vegan, you cannot be questioned. Veganism cannot be critiqued either, vegans who are outed as abusers or people who killed their child with the diet are instantly declared "not really vegan" and thus the movement as a whole can remain free from criticism.
Behavior like this is also supported by black/white thinking and elitism. (citation needed)
2. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
People who question the definition and tenets/commandments of veganism are treated with suspicion and often hate. Even if they question aspects of veganism which are difficult even for vegans to reconcile, such as pet ownership, bee pollination, pesticide use etc.; especially questions from fellow vegans. Vegans who are members of veganism are expected by the group to be loyal to the cause and not to question it ever or else they are betraying veganism. Often militant vegans will go after vegans who are not participating in activism enough or "correctly." Yet Vegans do as much as they can to present to the world that the vegan community is a monolith of agreement. Questions or critical inquiry that is perceived as negative to vegans from non-members are treated with at minimum condescension, at maximum, violent threats including death and rape threats. Fellow vegans who question how veganism is achieved whether it be actual commandments or recruitment methods are often psychologically split by the group, mobbed and labeled as fake vegans, non-compassionate, not caring enough, murderers, selfish and etc. . .
3. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
Veganism does not have one organization, however, spokespersons for the vegan cause such as Dr. Gregor, Mic The Vegan and Earthling Ed, present themselves as philanthropists who make no money from their cause and have no sponsors. Other youtube personalities who are popular within the movement also do the same. They either claim they are not sponsored by anyone, and/or do not show the amounts of their sponsors and how the money is spent. If they do list who contributes financially to them by name, often how the money is spent is hidden.
Much of their largest research papers were also produced by highly compromised sources.
4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies, and resulting isolation from everyone non-vegan. (with persecution complexes as well.)
Veganism as an ideological stance must necessarily perceive the majority of human society (everyone else who is not vegan) as hopelessly corrupt and amoral by comparison even soul-less. Everyday average people are "murderers", "rapists" and complicit in the mass "slavery" and "genocide" of animals.
This makes the existence for a vegan dissonant and difficult with the "normal" "other" people and "normal" "other" institutions. Anyone not vegan, to a vegan, is a callous, selfish and immoral being who is attacking vegans with their personal choices, leading the world towards whole-sale environmental (and human) extinction.
Vegans often depict their distortedly dark views with their art (ex2 ex3 ex4) and even result to self-harm to achieve catharsis and relief from guilt.
As a result, veganism is full of rampant misanthropy (ex2 ex3), anti-natalism (ex2 ex3) and anti-social behavior (preferring animals to humans) which poses the existence itself of human life as an unspeakable and unfathomably large cruelty to nature/environment/animals/all-life.
It is also very difficult to have a vegan ideology without tending towards more and more cynical view of the world and isolation from non-vegans as non-vegans are considered terrible people. Vegans often lament these realizations to each other in their groups, further isolating themselves from family, friends and normal, critical discourse via increased emotional appeals and doomsday fatalism.
5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
Any time a prominent vegan becomes an ex-vegan, the community will collectively mob them, psychologically split and demonize them, and declare "they were never really vegan in the first place." In the vegan cult, there is no such thing as an ex-vegan. All "true" vegans are vegan for life (until death), and in this way they can demonize and disregard any voices from ex-members, and cauterize the truth from reaching the ears of other struggling members who may be doubting the cause from the closet.
6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
There are many many many documented interviews with ex-vegans about the problems of veganism. Ex vegans also admit to experiencing deprogramming from their beliefs (ex1 ex2). Ex-vegans are also an excellent resource documenting the confirmation bias and brainwashing aspects.
7. There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
See above. Most vegans drop out of veganism.
8. Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
Veganism is an ideology that does not allow failure and puts a terrible burden on every member for being responsible for millions and billions of lives with every bite of food. Perfectionism is required. Since there is no such thing as an "ex-vegan" and veganism is an identity, all vegans are under threat for their entire identity to be erased by the mob at any moment if they are caught failing veganism. Thus it is immensely superficial and manic-ly performative and the entire movement rests on the judgment from the group and it's leaders of what the physical attainment of veganism looks like. The vegan "lifestyle" requires materialism...there is no room for the ideology to allow differences in ability, health, or economic hardship, since anyone can be vegan (which is part of the lie.)
9. The group/leader is always right.
10. The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.
11. Alignment with Privileged Groups and A Tendency to Appeal to the Alt Right.
Veganism is predominately the occupation of rich white western women of whom do not work physical jobs, do not face systematic state-sponsored oppressions, nor a legacy of historical colonial genocide, nor entrenched poverty. When added with in-bred racial elitism, veganism and vegetarianism often ends up attracting the alt right. White Vegans will also use Poor, Historically Oppressed Groups as a Sheild for Veganism, by claiming they are either vegan when they aren't vegan (lie). Or claiming that being poor in itself makes you vegan by default.
12. Veganism Cures Everything.
(part of the black/white ideology and incessant need for recruitment of new members.)
Veganism is claimed to cure all physical ailments, save the world, prevent global catastrophe with hindsight bias bring harmony to all relationships and to be something that would stop all forms of abuse (ex2 ex3) in the world (if we were all vegan sexism, racism and capitalism would be ended.)
13. Vegans often share other dangerous fringe healing beliefs such as Anti-Vaccination, Hotep, Reptilian Conspiracy, Crystal Healing, Breathatarian, Detoxing Auras and Others.
14. Vegans Use Children for their Protests, Advertisement and Ideology, and Target the Young (ex2 ex3 ex4) for Recruits, because the ideology loses followers so often, they must constantly replenish them. Even Vegans admit that Vegan Parents put their ideology ahead of their own children's health, despite trying to deny the dangers of the diet.
15. Vegan Ideology Appeals to the pure (and non-logical) emotions of Children as enough justification for their ideology. [citation needed.]
16. Failures and Inconsistencies within Veganism is the Fault of the World, Not Veganism Itself.
17. Vegans Use DoubleSpeak.
It's common for insular organizations especially ones that isolate others from the rest of the world, to invent their own language, especially words to slur items or individuals who are taboo or "other." Words that are distorted for their cause are: "murder", "rape", "genocide", "slavery." (all these terms require the victim to be human, vegans invent that these terms apply to animals despite no language on earth supporting this, especially legal language.)
Another example of double speak is calling cow's milk "fermented cow pus."
18. Slurs against non-members, demonizing them.
Vegans invent slurs to call non-vegans such as "bloodmouth", "carnist", "pus drinker", "fleshmouth", "rape drinker", "cheesebreather", and they invent new definitions of common phrases to support the ideology of their faith.
19. They Invoke Their Taboos While Vilifying Them
Ironically while they abuse people who aren't vegan for glorifying and taking part in "animal suffering", ironically they use the words describing their taboo items to describe their cult approved replacements such as "soy milk" "vegan nuggets", "impossible meat", "tofu sausage", "tofurky bacon" etc. So, they invoke their taboos while at the same time they vilify them. For comparison, Imagine if you were in a Catholic Church and the Priest called the Communion "Alternative Homo Sex" or the Sermon "Church Porn" or Confession "Christian Fortune Telling." This is often a tell-tale sign that you are in a cult with a manic grasp on reality and an intent to cause mental paralysis (stuck being constantly reminded of temptations while being vilified for them at the same time.)
20. Vegan Symbology is Extensive and Prevalent
21. High Control Behaviors By Vegans to Other Vegans.
(BITE Model) [citation needed]
Vegans police each-other constantly about what veganism means, and even imply there are fake vegans within their own group, if they aren't doing veganism right. Vegans are quite cruel to even their own members, especially newly ex-members in fact seem to delight in taking others down, which shows the ideology promotes fascistic/narcissistic behavior, not actually building communities or bringing people together. This behavior is focused on thought-stopping members from any form of critical thinking which might wake them up out of their programming.
22. Propaganda Used Swings Between Being Extremely Violent/Gory to Excessively Childish/Idealist In Nature.
It is less about logic and more about emotional appeals. This is very common with extremists, abusive groups, and non-logical reactionary movements.
23.Veganism is Framed as a lifestyle both extremely family friendly, relatable, easy and positive, but requires militant activism against a doomed World.
Vegans mostly insist on spreading Excessively R Rated, Extremely Disturbing Videos as Their Bibles and Main Propaganda while also using family friendly "diet guides" and calling it a "lifesyle". This is very common for extremist cults and reactionary militant groups. See: How Isis potrayed itself in it's magazines (with high budgets to appeal as normal family people with video games, gardens, children etc) while also sharing live torture and beheading videos and demanding universal jihad.
All from wikipedia:
"Philosopher Carl Cohen stated in 1986: "Speciesism is not merely plausible; it is essential for right conduct, because those who will not make the morally relevant distinctions among species are almost certain, in consequence, to misapprehend their true obligations."[35] Cohen writes that racism and sexism are wrong because there are no relevant differences between the sexes or races. Between people and animals, he states, there are significant differences; his view is that animals do not qualify for Kantian personhood, and as such have no rights"
Also:
"Douglas Maclean questioned if different species can be fitted with human morality, observing that animals were generally held exempt from morality; Maclean notes that most people would try to stop a man kidnapping and killing a woman but would regard a hawk capturing and killing a marmot with awe and criticise anyone who tried to intervene. Maclean thus suggests that morality only makes sense under human relations, with the further one gets from it the less it can be applied"
And:
"Robert Nozick notes that if species membership is irrelevant, then this would mean that endangered animals have no special claim"
Many vegans have an odd obsession with pseudological proofs, the most iconic example being the Name The Trait (NTT) argument where they ask someone to justify meat consumption by naming a single trait that makes it okay to eat animals, but not humans. The irony is, NTT is not even logically valid because its premise implies that moral status must be granted by a single trait. This had led them to develop NTT2, which makes so many irrational assumptions that nobody ever uses it in an argument. So in essence, vegans that use NTT are typically just armchair philosophers that want to appear smart whilst relying on an illogical argument. What they really engage in is not logic, but sophistry.
On top of that, NTT has many other flaws. For example, it is actually an informal fallacy called argument from ignorance because its conclusion is build on the premise that, if no trait has been named, it must therefore not exist. This is a classic example of burden of proof shifting, which vegans tend to use quite a lot in general.
The irony of all this is that the conclusion of the NTT argument actually debunks veganism no matter the outcome. Let's just assume that the conclusion of NTT is true. After all, if NTT is false then vegans have no argument anyway. If NTT is true, then there is no moral justification to exploit animals, and we contradict ourselves with anything short of non-exploitation.
This is where the flaw every logic argument for veganism stands out once again - because the NTT argument pretends that vegans don't exploit animals when they factually do. In fact, even their own definition states that it is okay for humans to exploit animals, and that merely the degree of exploitation should be reduced. Thus, because NTT states that there is no justification to exploit animals, but veganism justifies some exploitation of animals, they defeat their own argument. Their logic fails.
So is there a single trait that grants a special moral status to humans? There are many individual things unique to humans that separate them from other animals, but NTT is a really disingenous argument because it asks for just a single one. This means that vegans can nearly always find an odd example to counter with:
By now it should seem apparent that the "logical" case for veganism rests entirely on the irrational Argument from Marginal Cases. That is, relying on hypothetical scenarios that do not occur in reality. NTT is the same, it really just boils down to asking a single question, dressed up in misdirection and switchbacks:
When is a human not a human?
This goes back to vegans having no respect for their fellow members of society. What defines humans (or any species) is never given by a single "trait". Humans have the ability to reason, be cultured, cook, be religious, etc. This is a result of a shared ancestry that goes back hundreds of thousands of years. No human has all of these characteristics, but together they define humanity as a whole. Thus, trivial questions can be answered with equally trivial responses. The trait which separates humans from other animals is the trait of being a human.
According to a survey, documentaries (21.9%), internet videos (14.7%) and social media posts (13.2%) are the most effective ways of converting people into veganism. This means that the most convincing ethical arguments for veganism are not actually based on logic or reason, but rather on an appeal to emotion presented by propaganda videos which are accompanied by sad background music (e.g. Earthlings, Dominion, Dairy is Scary). Vegans thus have a strong interest in anthropomorphizing animals beyond their actual psychology and in portraying animal husbandry as malicious, as displayed in the following paragraphs.
There are a number of videos in the internet showing recordings of farmers and slaughterhouses mistreating animals in order to promote veganism. It can reasonably be assumed that they are not documentaries, but propaganda that is at best distorted and at worst staged. Consequently, the US Fur Commission has been able to compile a list of many easily verifiable cases, starting from the 1960s, of activists paying workers to abuse animals.
Many farms legally require their employees to sign a contract which obligates them to report animal abuse cases (after all, even 1 out of 100 animals dying would heavily damage their profit margin after having invested a considerable amount of money into feed). But in order to obtain their recordings, animal rights advocates are required to stand by and watch all of it play out. One such example is Earthling Ed's film Land of Hope and Glory, which featured a scene of dairy cows being abused on an RSPCA Assured farm. However, the RSPCA responded that they have not been contacted about this at all, meaning that the so-called animal lover Ed Winters stood by and watched all of it play out.
A common observation among these videos is that they are without context and only a few minutes long. In many cases, such as in a PETA dairy farm video, animals are located in areas where they are not even supposed to be. The fact alone that only 6 out of 82 undercover videos resulted in convictions should make it quite obvious that vegans actively try to get their hands on misrepresentative footage. In fact, it is not even necessary for them to trespass on farms because all of them have welfare regulations that require them to be surprise-inspected by government bodies.
Dominion claims that pigs at the slaughterhouse are forced into small pens with no access to water. But in a video tour of a pork plant, Temple Grandin explains that all holdings legally have to have access to water. She then goes on to show an example of how activists can take misleading shots to lie about holding pens being too crowded, when they actually have more than enough room.
In a Reddit AMA, an undercover investigator for an animal rights group outright admits that they were not looking to find and stop animal abuse, but to lobby for legislations against farms. He believes that they do this because they want to enforce a vegan lifestyle for all humans by making farming too expensive or complex to practice. He also notes that the Humane Society took in 134 million USD in 2015, of which they spent 58 million on shady offshore Caribbean investments. It is therefore not surprising that undercover activists can get paid up to 800 USD per week just to aquire footage.
Due to these occurrences, farms have now become much more cautious about who they hire - and so actvists are now using this to imply that farmers "have something to hide".
According to the Sentience Institute (an activist organization), 99% of US animals live on factory farms.
First, it should be noted how this data was twisted in order to inflate the number: most (90%+) of these animals are birds, but poultry only makes up around half of the meat consumed in the US. More importantly, the definition that was used for "factory farm" is the EPA definition for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOS) which classifies all operations with a certain number of animals as such, regardless of how much space they have or even if they are in a building. According to this classification, farms like this one that have cattle graze as usual are "factory farms" just because they have a lot of animals.
Vegans are particularly good in misrepresenting the beef industry. For example, the statement that only 5% of US cattle are grass-fed might lead someone to believe that the most of them are in feedlots. But this is far from the truth - according to the official USDA numbers, only about 15 million out of 94 million total cattle are currently on a feedlot. The overwhelming majority of them (around 75 million) are grazing on pasture. This is because "grain-fed" cattle are actually raised on grasslands together with their mother for the majority of their life and only sent to feedlots towards the last few months to be fattened and grain finished.
Notably, even intensive farms are far from what they are made out to be in propaganda videos. Cattle feedlots generally plan to provide around 300 square feet per head, meaning the animals have plenty of space. Because bovines are herd animals, they just often choose to bunch together and so activists like to use conveniently angled pictures like these, implying that the animals are locked up in some sort of cage when in fact there is a large area for them to walk around in the background.
Being the agenda-driven lunatics that they are, vegans have not only infiltrated nutritional position papers, but also animal science institutions in order to anthropomorphize animals and promote a bambi effect to the general population. One great example of this is the common claim that it is supposedly well-studied and documented that pigs are smarter than dogs, chimpanzees or even 3 year old humans.
Anyone with even remotely sensible knowledge about biology or evolution would instinctively know that this isn't true. Since the majority of vegan websites do not even provide a citation for this claim, let's have a look at what the first genuine non-vegan source says about this overwhelming science which actually originates from a single study:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-pigs-intelligent_n_7585582
The paper was funded by Someone, Not Something, a project of Farm Sanctuary, an animal rescue organization. Someone, Not Something is an exploration of the science behind the emotions, intellect and social behavior of farm animals, with the aim of extending greater compassion and legal protection to these creatures.
and:
Authors Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and founder of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, and Christina M. Colvin, a professor at Emory University, note in their paper that pigs have been found to be mentally and socially similar to dogs and chimpanzees.
So how did they come to this conclusion? By using weasel words to create a false analogy:
“What is known suggests that pigs are cognitively complex and share many traits with animals whom we consider intelligent,” they write in the paper, titled “Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus domesticus.”
Sharing traits does not make animals "as smart as". Parakeets have traits that probably can be measured as "shared" with chimpanzees and dogs, such as voice recognition, pattern recognition, empathy, complex social bonds, and probably more vocal/language abilities than a pig or a dog. This is like saying because both EMT workers and surgeons know the basics of anesthesia, EMT workers are "as skilled as" surgeons.
Looking more into this, there's another article here:
https://www.seeker.com/iq-tests-suggest-pigs-are-smart-as-dogs-chimps-1769934406.html
"We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans," neuroscientist Lori Marino of Emory University and The Nonhuman Rights Project said in a press release. "There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them."
Note again they state they "share a number of cognitive capacities" as a way of saying they are equivalent. So here are the traits they share:
Despite the questionable backing of this research, lets assume they are all true and none of this was evidence that was compelled or compiled in a manipulative or dishonest way. The only two traits that really stick out as approaching most monkeys are:
But even these don't make them "as smart as" chimpanzees, although definitely as smart as rats. However, considering the methods and conflicts of interest it is highly questionable as to how this data was compiled.
Besides, it's really problematic to compare pigs to 3 year olds. Even a 3 year old is smarter than a chimpanzee, as their language capacity already outstrips them. No pig is going to be able to make jokes about their father's pronounciation of certain words like here - and that video is of a 2 year old. No pig, chimp or any other really smart animal comes anywhere close to even the youngest human beings.
