Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
I think there’s nothing wrong with explaining your ideas and why you believe them to those willing to listen, but I can see why pushy activism for any cause can get annoying quickly. There are often Jehovah’s witnesses outside my local supermarket, for example, but they only give you a pamphlet if you specifically approach them
It’s not just pushy, it’s judgemental and vitriolic
Oh, you eat meat, murderer? Your shoes are made from the skins of defenseless creatures. The sugar you’re so callously adding to your coffee was processed with ground-up bones, you unredeemable monster.
Even the arguments for veganism that aren’t built on animal cruelty still take on an air of moral superiority. Don’t you care about the planet and future generations? How dare you trade carbon emissions for the temporary comfort of a bacon cheeseburger!
The vegan movement has always been associated with anger and contempt, even if it is justified.
There’s also the ‘guilt by association’. Look at organisations like PETA: they even complained about things like the treatment of entirely fictional animals in video games, like Palworld. Basically, you can’t even argue that ‘they look like real animals so it encourages real-world mistreatment’ like they usually do.
That does not make you look particularly sane. I’m sure they do good work as well, but that sort of thing isn’t helping their cause.
PETA might do something good by accident. They kill 60-70% of the pets they receive for donation, so I guess the lucky 1/3 that don’t get the ax are a good thing.
And it’s history stems from religious ideology.
Edit: oh you downvoters. Go look it up. A woman had a vision from God that said “don’t eat things with faces”. Dead serious - that’s where it started.
All the sciencey justifications today are post-hoc rationalization.
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The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.
PETA has a lot more fucked up behavior under its belt than the one time they “accidentally” euthanized a dog they stole from someone, and much of their bad behavior has been very much maliciously intentional. Here just a small sample.
ETA: A few more, because why the hell not? Fuck PETA.
It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_Animals
As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.
If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.
I’m no fan of Fox News in general myself, but just because we don’t like them doesn’t make everything they publish false. And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.” There’s sensationalism on that site, but there are also numbers, many of which come from PETA themselves.
I linked the Snopes article knowing that it supported points from both sides. The point in linking that article is that it’s despicable that any of those reports of PETA’s disgusting behavior are true at all.
You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.
I’m quite sure there are quite a few things PETA has been accused but not convicted of. When you’re a group of assholes as big as that, you get pretty good at skirting the fine lines of what’s legal and what’s not. They’re hardly the first example of groups like that.
Their agenda’s to make PETA look bad so people don’t become vegan or demand higher welfare standards from meat producers, and they can continue selling meat to Americans of such low standards that it would be illegal in the rest of the civilised world.
As I said, they can’t do that once the foster programs and other shelters are full, too, and then overflow into PETA-run shelters because they’re the ones that still have a capability to receive more animals after they’re full. There aren’t enough shelters to keep every animal in good conditions until it’s either adopted or dies of natural causes, and no amount of coordination can magically create extra capacity.
I’m sure PETA shelters would have more capacity if they didn’t prefer to see an animal dead than a pet. They have significantly higher kill rates than any other shelters, and have made their stance pretty clear that they’re against animals being pets. No wonder they just keep killing them.
That’s actually not the problem. The problem are those who repeat themselves ever louder, even to people who have expressed disinterest.
Have you heard about our lord and saviour of our sins?