#Environmental Systems and Socities

[drella]

i had a dream last night that i drank antifreeze

[acti-veg]

Idk if someone has asked this question before but: What do you think is the best way to learn about animal rights and veganism without falling for misinformation and biased sources? A 'vegan critical' point I see very often is that humans have always hunted and that indigenous people hunting is resourceful and sustainable but that still goes against the main belief of vegans that animals are not meant to be used right? And really who decides when using animals is necessary and when it isn't?

There is really no ‘unbiased’ way to even discuss animal rights and veganism to be honest, they are both very partisan topics. You can get your facts and statistics from peer-reviewed studies, government reports, the USDA or UN FAO and such, but any discussion of animal rights theory will always contain a certain amount of bias, because they all have to be written by a human. There is a lot of discussion as to whether or not even presenting a statistic or fact can be done in an unbiased way. 

What I’d recommend is to check the sources, if it’s a vegan organisation or a farming organisation then that’s biased, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. If the person is arguing, for example, that eating animals is wrong because it causes so much more environmental harm than plants, the argument is biased, but the fact behind it, that animal products cause more harm than plant products, should be verifiable by an authoritative source or study. Sometimes bias can actually be really helpful, I use industry sources all the time and they are very biased, because if I can show that even animal agriculture industries openly discuss killing male chicks/calves, for example, there really can’t be any doubt that it is happening.

As for this point about hunting and who decides what is necessary and what isn’t, the thing often overlooked about veganism is that it’s really an umbrella term for a whole host of ideologies. What one vegan deems necessary and acceptable another may not. We are all united in opposition to animal exploitation and we all support boycotting animal agriculture, but there are a lot of points we still disagree on. Personally, I think that necessity is fairly easily defined as “not avoidable,” for that reason I’m not opposed to subsistence hunting in the cases of indigenous communities, I think our target has to be people in consumer socities who very obviously do have the option to go vegan, but not everyone will agree on that point.

My advice is just to read widely and always with a critical eye. Read what others conceive of as the tenets of veganism, but understand that it isn’t a dogmatic belief system; there is room for variation. Read essays, articles, watch videos, pick and choose what you agree with as part of a consistent understanding of veganism and discard the rest. Everyone writing about veganism, myself included, writes according to their own conception of what veganism is and isn’t, so just keep that in mind when you’re listening to their ideas. A truly unbiased approach to veganism really isn’t possible.

[ibbible]

The Soil System