Common sense goes a long way. Radicalism is always stupid.
Just eat meat once a week or month. Eat whatever in moderation.
Moderation is key.
Getting all meat eaters to cut intake by 50% is easier than getting 50% of meat eaters to turn vegan.
The bees consent! Veganism is about consent! If a cow could say “Yeah, please take my milk” it would be vegan!
Theoretically domestic sheep wool is also vegan because theyll overheat and die if we dont shave them, and thus are probably pretty happy when we do and dont care what happens with it afterwards, but i dont think vegans are ready for that convo
Sheep wouldn’t need shearing if we wouldn’t breed them to grow more wool, and if we allowed them to live where they are native, instead of “farming” them e.g. in Australia.
Also I am pretty sure that those sheep get slaughtered after a couple of years, instead of being allowed a happy life.
But I don’t think your cognitive dissonance is ready for that convo.
Here is an article about why honey is not vegan. I’ll quote some notable excerpts.
The latest research in the field suggests bees are indeed sentient, and experience a host of sophisticated emotions. In his 2023 book What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann states that bees are “self-aware,” highly intelligent, and possess a “primitive form of consciousness.”
The Guardian reported on the book earlier this year, saying bees’ apparent ability to recognize different human faces, process long-term memories while sleeping, and feel optimistic, playful, and scared raises “complex ethical questions” about our treatment of them.
…
…by using a piece of mesh that worker bees can pass through but [the queen bee] cannot, or clipping her wings. The structure contains horizontal sheets, where, because the queen bee is trapped nearby, the bees build their honeycomb.
To harvest the honey, beekeepers either smoke the bees to subdue them, or trap them with a clearing board over one or two days. Others kill the colony altogether.
Oftentimes, beekeepers replace the honey they remove with a sugar water substitute. This practice prompts honeybees to overwork themselves to replace the missing honey. Meanwhile, the sugar water lacks the nutrients, fats, and vitamins that bees need to be healthy.
Think of how labor rights, and even basic human rights are a constant struggle. Now imagine that you are a species that is regarded in such a way that everything you produce and everything you are is thoroughly classified a commodity. You do not have the capacity to speak against it. You are smart enough to suffer, but lack the degree of intelligence necessary to even begin to comprehend the enormity of what you are entrapped in. One species of animal has decided that all other species of animal are its products. None of the others can raise a voice against that. If human rights abuses abounds, how often do you think any kind of animal agricultural system is going to operate in a way that’s anything other than systematic abuse and suffering?
Is that really the kind of world you want to continue to create?
It’s easy to dismiss bugs, easy to think they don’t matter. But I think of them as a litmus test. We are the real equivalent to bugs, of what we think a God is like to us. Are we the kind of deitys that we would want to exist?
If you actually care about a mutualistic relationship between pollinators and humans, grow a garden.
Better to just eat cows. A cow is 1 suffering to feed many humans. A jar of honey is thousands of sufferings for one family to have sweeter tea.
Checkmate atheists
You are smart enough to suffer
Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don’t even think it’s possible to have a “primitive consciousness”, or a “sophisticated consciousness”. A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn’t exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or… you just don’t - not even blackness.
Let’s say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I’m assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.
You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you’d been resting on. “Woah what a weird dream” you’d think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.
ITT: Honey-eating vegans getting ethically roasted by non-vegans.
vegans will always argue with everyone, especially themselves, forever and ever, amen
If there’s any animal that profits from a partnership with humans, it’s bees.
And rats. Never forget the rats. They’re everywhere. One is watching you, right now. Waiting.
The province of Alberta was officially rat free for most of my life. They have decided to do what conservatives do and scrapped various programs for being “wasteful”
Basically they said why are we spending money on eradicating rats, we don’t have any. That’s stupid and we are going to save money on this.
Well guess what. Now there rats everywhere in that province. Maple god damned maga
Had a roommate who was vegan and I tried it out as well (they don’t shut up sometimes). At that point I learned that maybe I should just think things through myself when he told me wifi is bad and you can only use Ethernet cables. My friend, who has a doctorates in electrical engineering, and I had a lot of laughs; surprise the cables emit the same harmless radiation. It was fun when I got ratted out by my ex then for just running wifi without broadcasting for her dumbass to use the internet when I was at work. Haha punny right.
And the honey thing is such a hilarious argument. Like do you want plants to grow? Also watch the third Ghost in the Shell movie, where yeah crops get destroyed. But hey, we already are getting to experience that now, as in what’s the next recall?
Here in Australia, native bees are solitary. All the bee farms use foreigner bees.
Well Australia has their shit together, well except for the ID bullshit every county is trying to push. I’m honestly not sure if foreign bees are bad, I figure the more the better.
https://www.unisq.edu.au/news/2025/05/honey-bees
A University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) researcher has found that honey bees – a species introduced by European colonisers for honey and crop pollination – may be driving down the population sizes of native bee species, potentially leading to extinction.
Interesting, I had no idea that was a thing. Not really sure what should be done about that; I don’t specialize in this subject matter. I’m a bit on the dumber side; it’s bees or is … wasps.
Not a vegan.
Honey is a direct animal product. It is meant to feed them, much like milk feeds other cows.
I don’t get how that’s even arguable. I don’t care what you do and don’t eat, vegans, but honey is definitely an animal product. It’s not a product of flowers, it’s a product of bees. Veganism/vegetarianism are both already series of arbitrary lines drawn, though, so, whatever.
Also fish is meat, for those people out there. It’s an animal, you’re eating the animal: it’s meat. You can be a vegetarian that eats fish, that’s fine. You are all illogical to me. Morally right, rationally arbitrary and inconsistent and often hypocrites.
Veganism/vegetarianism are both already series of arbitrary lines drawn, though, so, whatever.
They are not fixed lines. I can’t speak about veganism but not eating red meat is vegetarism, leaving meat out except for holidays is vegetarism, eating fish but not meat is vegetarism. There is many way to be vegetarian. Even if there is one way that is much more popular and much more discutes these days. So I can also image non-fixed lines in veganism.
Same. I’m not vegan, but honey is obviously an animal product, and we don’t get their consent to take it (much like eggs or milk).
Further arguments like bees leaving behind some hives are just self-serving - feel free to eat honey, or even milk and eggs, but then don’t call yourself vegan, because you are not.
I’m not vegan either, but it feels very strange for non-vegans to dictate to vegans what is and is not vegan and who is and is not a vegan.
I think this kind of obscures the reason people are vegan in the first place. It’s more than just a dogmatic creed against eating anything animal-derived.
For people who do it for moral reasons, the core issue is consent. Animals cannot consent to be eaten and cannot understand why they are born in captivity and made to suffer. Honey can be farmed with almost total freedom for the bees (can be, not necessarily always is), and bees also produce significantly more honey than they need so do not suffer from it being taken.
Others object to the fact that choosing to eat meat when you can reasonably choose not to, is semi-directly deriving pleasure from the death of an animal. Which is the same reason most people are disgusted by blood sports. Again, that clearly doesn’t apply to bees and honey, because honey is not the flesh of a dead animal.
For people who do it for environmental reasons, beekeeping has no significant negative environmental effect, as long as invasive species aren’t being used. If anything it can have a positive impact on local ecosystems if done responsibly (again, can).
Extracting honey fundamentally differs from other animal derived products. Take milk; cows are forcefully separated from their children and hooked up to automatic milking machines. They must be kept confined, and keeping them in this way is generally only economical if they are slaughtered for meat as well. There is fundamentally suffering involved, which is not the case for beekeeping.
All this is to say, if someone wants to strictly abstain from animal products as a matter of principle, that’s their choice! But the vast majority of reasons to be vegan aren’t reasons not to eat honey.
Thanks. I think the single biggest barrier to the population as a whole eating more ethically is the way that veganism as a movement has taken on this absolutist dogmatic stance that makes it a dealbreaker for most people. If you make people feel as though cutting their meat intake by 50% is pointless because you’re still going to call them murderers, why would they make the effort?
The problem with the carveouts that utilitarian vegans make for honey is that they’re largely falsifiable feel-good apologia. The claim that harvesting honey doesn’t harm bees is complete bollocks, really it’s in the same realm of the claim that milking a cow doesn’t harm the cow because she can always make more and just saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so. The hive does need to downsize and drones do have to die to accommodate the loss of surplus, workers do forage further and compete more with other insects for nectar, while honey harvesting rarely harvests at the low extraction levels claimed to be harmless and domesticated bee colonies crowd out native pollinators. If it were harmless the bees would never bother to make it, it takes a shitload of energy for them to produce it. It’s turn-brain-off dissonance territory in the same league as dairy farm propaganda but because vegan utilitarian thought leader Peter Singer said it’s OK they’re all willing to make the huge leap in logic to eat something that could just as easily have been maple syrup or agave nectar.
I’d respect the utilitarians a lot more if they just said they don’t care about bees and shellfish because they’re not fuzzy mammals, instead of performing these unimpressive acts of logical acrobatics.
Also to add another reason for veganism to your list, the more important one for me personally: The reflection on oneself. We are symbolic thinkers, we transpose ideas from one context to the next. eg Slaughterhouse workers exhibit the same elevated levels of domestic violence as cops. When we harm someone else, in another manner we also harm ourselves. If we can understand another entity on some level and we then hurt it, we do ourselves a psychic injury that isn’t just philosophical but has real profound effects on our thought processes, our outlook on the world, our behaviors toward other things. Maybe utilitarian vegans just don’t see any commonality between their bodies and the beehive, but I think the core failure of utilitarianism is it’s inability to respect this very simple but unfortunately intangible concept, in all contexts.
Utilitarian hedonist here. I stopped eating prawns because I heard about them pulling the eyes out to increase breeding rates. I decided to research it by watching a video of a prawn having its eyes removed.
It looked like it was in pain.
That’s enough for Me. I don’t believe in p-zombies, so if something looks like it’s in pain, I believe it. I don’t want the prawns to have their eyes pulled out because it looks like it hurts.
And the meme is actually a lie. I don’t have strong feelings about honey, I’m undecided. I actually posted this bait in part to start an argument so I could read what people have to say. And also because it’s funny and this is lemmyshitpost. Right now in this present moment, I don’t think I want honey in My life.
Honey can be farmed with almost total freedom for the bees (can be, not necessarily often is)
This is why I don’t eat honey. The profit motive incentivizes unethical practices, so the logical choice is to deprive that industry of its profits.
Also, we will never meet the current demand for honey sustainably, so its necessary for some of us to voluntarily go without. I’m more than capable of being one of those people.
Can honey be produced ethically? Theoretically - but you could say the same for any animal product if you get theoretical enough. The truth is that it frequently isn’t produced ethically, and that’s enough for me to opt out. And I think anyone with the ability to stop consuming animal products ought to do likewise.
I think the argument is that bees will do it regardless of consumption so may as well have some nectar/bee barf for sweetener?
I’ve heard bees are more productive at making honey than they actually need. They’ll make so much that they abandon a hive full of honey and start a new one just to make more.
Dunno if that’s true or not, but the claim gives big “those slaves just love being natural slaves” energy.
Well put.
Vegans fight amongst themselves all the time, and plenty of them have different rules.
For example, veganism doesn’t extend just towards diet but animal products overall. A lot of people will only focus on the diet or certain animal products such as leather though.
Really wish people would just agree to do whatever they can, anything helps.
Yeah veganism isn’t a single set of beliefs, it’s a range of practices and the people who do those practices do so for a rather wide variety of sometimes-overlapping reasons. I’ve never had a more heated debate about veganism than one with a fellow vegan.
So, basically like religion? Just follow the parts you want to and everything is good?
IMO, leather really isn’t a big deal. It’s a by-product of the meat industry. Nobody is raising and butchering cows specifically for the leather. If nobody used the leather, then the skins would just be thrown away … or maybe ground up and used in dog food or something.
I agree, as well with things like sauces from shellfish shells that would otherwise be tossed.
However, I recently heard the reasoning (of a buddhist who tries to avoid animal products, i.e. would not actively seek out a non vegan option, while accepting non vegan food if offered) - would the product in question still exist if the animal was seized to be killed? Even if it was for a different purpose and leather, seafish shells, gelatin etc were just byproducts, they would not exist if the animal it is derived from wasn’t killed for whatever reason.
I totally agree that it would be a shame to only use a part of an animal and let the other go to waste. Likewise, I get that “I’ll do X as long as everyone else does Y” is a way of reasoning that ends up counterproductive and keeps us locked in a status quo. So, if someone wants to stop using not just the primary products of the meat industry but also the secondary, I can understand.
it subsidises the meat industry.
Valid, lowers the price of the resulting meat and thus increases consumption
Fur on the other hand…
I mean, to be fair there aren’t many if any first world countries that eat fox, bear, or really anything with fur. I understand some people shoot bears and such, but in talking about actual farms.
Vegans are unwilling to come to terms with the fact that they aren’t special. Taking honey is fine. Bees aren’t going anywhere any time soon. You know what? Taking honey had no downside for society. There is sooo much other stuff to worry about. Have you heard about our Lord’s, and Savior: Corpse Bees! An obscene amount in cemeteries, and grave yards. Can’t wait for some for you to get offended. Yes, the journey of most animals/insects is tragic. I like having the ability to travel cost to coast in hours on a full stomach. Until my belly aches.
They work for each other, Morty!
That sounds like slavery with… extra… steps
I told them it means peace among world’s.
I thought Vegans cpuld consume animal things if its done willingly.
Like if a cow walked up and said “Please gopd vegan, butxher me, it is my purpose,” they could totally make.and eat burgers from said cow.
That said, bee vomit feels like it sort of fall into that category.
Dang dude, turn on autocorrect
I would but then the phone is all “I replaced entire words 3 sentnces ago and didn’t tell you! Ha ha ha.”
So fuck it, I will just take my typos.
If there is a way to turn on autocorrect from like, 2019, before it was assy, I would take that.
autpxprrext
The bees don’t want you to take their honey. They don’t make excess, they make what they need and we steal it and replace it with stuff that’s “just as good” according to us. Bees die in the process of harvesting honey.
These are reasons that honey isn’t vegan.
I know some people who keep bees and absolutely none of that is true if you take care of them properly. Bees will try to fill the space they are in with honeycomb even if it is well in excess of what they need because they are anticipating that the colony will grow, but if you harvest regularly and consistently the colony will not grow larger than can be supported by the honeycomb that is left behind.
Have you ever kept bees? They make a ton of honey in excess of what they need.
A quick web search tells me that bees don’t die when harvesting honey, unless you take more than they need to survive, too often and are careless when harvesting?
Yeah all of those things sound pretty likely in most honey farming settings.
I’m don’t know much about beekeeping, but I could easily see large scale industry doing exactly that. I would have a hard time trusting them to be careful of the bees’ livelihood. It seems like if the farmers are actually careful the bees should be ok though
“google ai overview told me exactly what I wanted to hear so I’ve decided to look no further”
“i’ve invented a reason to dismiss what you posted and decided that’s a good enough reason not to think about it any further”
I’m open to counter arguments
I chose a whole food plant based diet for health reasons, and honey just isn’t good for my body.
I chose to plant pollinator friendly plants in my yard because I think bees are cool and I love watching them do their thing.
It feels like there’s a whole debate about honey I’m unaware of, but isn’t the point of veganism avoiding anything made by animals? If yes, why is honey an exception?
There are at least a dozen inter-related reasons to be vegan and no hard line of what diets are and aren’t vegan. All vegans check at least one of those boxes, many of us check multiple. Some vegans only care about avoiding the suffering of animals who experience life through a nervous system, therefore will eat shellfish which have no nervous system. When honey is exempted it’s usually utilitarian vegans doing logical gymnastics to claim that the way in which it’s farmed does no harm to the bees, or that while it harms the bees it doesn’t hurt their nervous systems and cause them direct pain. Veganism is no monolith.
Most of are agreed that the point of veganism is to reduce nonhuman suffering. Following absolute rules for no reason is silly. The point is the ethics.
But the other vegans have the wrong opinion about whether eating honey causes suffering.
Ahh thanks. But wouldn’t that make you a vegetarian?
(Not trying to be confrontational or disagreeing with your point, asking out of genuine curiosity)
No. If someone ate no animal products besides honey that doesn’t make them not vegan, it means they don’t share the opinion that honey causes animal exploitation. I do not wish to register an opinion there, I’m just saying what the rationale is.
I’m actually not a vegetarian. I’m a kangatarian.
Kangaroos have evolved over the past 60,000 years to breed in such numbers that their population can sustain hunting by humans. They have no other natural predators, unless you count parasites. Dingos in some places, but not many. The result is that if humans don’t hunt kangaroos, they over-breed. Destroy the local habitat, threatening endangered species, then starve. Some kangaroos must die at human hands for the good of everything else, including the other kangaroos.
So the government uses drone surveys to analyse the population, and then tells people how many kangaroos need to die. Each kangaroo in the quota can either be hunted, or culled. Culled kangaroos will be shot, and their bodies will rot in a ditch. Their meat will benefit nobody. If they’re hunted, then at least some good comes of it. If a kangaroo survives the initial shot, hunters will stun and then kill it. I’m unsure whether the same regulations apply to cullers.
So, I eat kangaroo meat. All kangaroo meat is hunted, there’s not a single kangaroo farm in the world. At least, not the western idea of a farm. Every kangaroo I eat lived a free life in nature, and then died for the good of the ecosystem. No animal slavery.
And I propose a bigger question than honey: is kangaroo meat vegan?
They have no other natural predators
Counterpoint: this is because we killed off most of their natural predators.
No. An animal died for it, it isn’t vegan. Simple as.
Veganism is about consequences or at least should be. If an animal was (and apparently in this case is) killing the ecosystem if you don’t kill it, I’m curious what the rationale for it not being vegan is. Veganism seeks to end cruelty and suffering. Whereas in this case not killing the kangaroo would be a choice that leads to more suffering and that’s not just for humans. If veganism isn’t about applying these “rules” for a purpose and instead it’s just about applying them without taking context into consideration, what’s the point of it?
Notice how your entire argument for ethical behavior applies to controlling the population rather than eating the animals after? The step of eating the animal is the not vegan act.
Control the population, leave the remains in the ecosystem it belongs to.
Notice how you’re not responding to my question?
I’m not a vegan, but the current state of beekeeping is pretty shit. Taking the honey and replacing it with sugar water on top of the stresses of monoculture and killing varied flora with herbicides creating food deserts and using market conditions to race to the bottom on pollination contracts just results in a whole bunch of dead hives. Like you can both support sustainably practiced beekeeping and find the production of industrial honey to be a horror show.
Isn’t a lot of the industry produced “honey” actually honey flavoured corn syrup anyways?
Regardless of whether you are vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, or other, if you aren’t horrified by industrial food production, you should be. This goes for industrial fish trawling & fish farming, industrial chicken cow and pig processing, honey I guess, even factory plant growing e.g. alfalfa almonds and corn (ruins the land and wastes water)
It’s so pervasive it’s hard to avoid everything.
With that and the amount of recalled food in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
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Like anywhere else is much different. You think only the US has industrial farming?
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And there is an ethical way to eat: dumpster diving. Everything in that dumpster is already waste, and taking it does not increase demand – no store is going to order more stock because the dumpster is running low. None of your money is going to support factory farming of any kind. Any food you find in the dumpster is 100% ethical to consume.
Dumpster diving still relies on industrial agriculture happening and doesn’t scale to more than a small portion of the population, some of whom have no other choice but to do so.
True, but at a personal level, you can get perfectly ethical food that way, even meat.
This doesn’t hold up. For you, personally, sure. But EVERYONE couldn’t convert to dumpster diving. That’s just shitty supermarkets.
I had this revelation about buying local. If EVERYONE “bought local”, local farms begin looking like factory farms in order to produce enough for the local population. I’m certain there would be additional inefficiencies (moral atrocities) as a result. It’s more ethical for me, personally, to get my produce locally, but I can’t in good faith criticize anyone else that buys groceries on Amazon.
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.
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This is the correct response. Small-scale hobbyist beekeeping is awesome for humans, bees, and nature, and we absolutely positively need it. Industrial beekeeping, in which bees are carted across the continent to pollinate the fields of the highest paying industrial farmer may still be tolerable to the bee but far less so for nature. Many people don’t appreciate the nuance. Apis mellifera almost certainly won’t go extinct as long as beekeepers are around. But that’s not what we talk about when we say the bees are dying…
Apis mellifera isn’t native to the Americas and neither are a lot of the plants they pollinate. They crowd out the native bees and destroy their habitat. Small-scale beekeepers working in populated spaces aren’t the problem though. And they rescue swarms that would otherwise be exterminated. Plus they’re more likely than the average person to know about their local natives and support them, by making carpenter bee homes or whatever.
I wouldn’t say “need”. European honey bees are a foreign invasive species. They displace the native pollinators. IMO hobbyists are worse because they are damaging the native bees without reason unlike industrial farmers that need the bees to produce the food we all eat.
And the reality is the vast majority of hobbiest bee keepers do it as a tax dodge. In most states, if you put a hive on your yard, you get to classify your house as a farm and pay virtually no property taxes.
European honey bees are a foreign invasive species
But… I am European?
Europeans used to be pretty invasive, too!
Sadly they still are in some areas of the world.
Particularly the middle east.
Industrial honey is just another facet of my distain and complaint of industrial agriculture as a whole. Almost every vegan argument I’ve ever encountered has been in reaction to the horrors of the industrial process
Which is why when someone asks me “Well what about indigenous tribes? Almost all of them hunt, are you doing to tell them they’re morally wrong?”. No, no I am not, because they are not morally wrong. They’re hunting for survival, in relative harmony and reciprocity with the ecology that completely enveloped every aspect of their social development.
This is what will lead me to the full change in diet. I’m at the mitigation and small changes phase. I really don’t have ethics issues with animals as food (farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order), but we exist in a capitalist hellscape that has zero shame or remorse for exploiting making perverse anything once natural for profit.
farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order
But it isn’t necessary (at least in most cases), and we have the intelligence to make better decisions simply because they are better.
Unless I misunderstood your comment, “when suffering is inherent to existence” could be used for things like burglaries as well.
Hard agree. I’m no vegan as a fully understand that a) humans are omnivorous mammals who thrive on a mixed diet and b) eons of selective breeding has created creatures that are designed for food and goods and wouldn’t survive in the wild in their current state without either much suffering or outright death of the species. The monocultures created for large industrialized farms are a blight for the environment as well.
I champion local small scale farms with permaculture and local plants as much as possible while reducing meat consumption in general (at least here, meat is usually at every meal so reducing it to one a day if not every few days would be a huge shift). I also recognize not everyone wants nor cares about going vegetarian or vegan but would accept the reductions in meat use and focusing on buying local if it was made more readily available
I avoid honey because european honey bees are an invasive species, devastating populations of native bees and threatening their existence, endangering plants who have specific pollinator relationships, where that pollinator is now threatened. They are helping facilitate ecological collapse. We are not the same.
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the bees directly.
You could probably get out of just about any argument this way.
Pssshhhh!!! Maybe you set your sights that low. You can eat your bee’s, I’ll only be eating A’s!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) …just tell me where the line starts…
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the
beesflowers directly.
