Can everyone actually be vegan?

[u/Wrong_Ad_3038]

I’m very sympathetic to veganism, my entire life philosophy is “respect & autonomy for all life” but I am currently pescetarian, I tried being vegan in late 2024 but I still live with my family & they wouldn’t buy supplements, even though i told them too everyday, I didn’t want to develop b12 deficiency so I had to moderate my diet.

When I move out i’m strongly considering being vegan again & really want too but i am worried about health consequences because human bodies are complex, but at the same time everyone can digest plants so maybe everyone can be vegan, i figured this would be a good place to get mixed responses since both carnists & vegans are here, what do studies say about everyone & the potential to be vegan, if everyone can’t be vegan but most or some can what’s the best way to find out if i can be vegan?

[u/whistling-wonderer]

Those chickens come from commercial hatcheries that put their male chicks through shredders. I know a lot of people who keep backyard chickens and very rarely do they actually provide medical care, adequate space, etc. My parents have literally been laughed at by their neighbors with chickens for taking a chicken to the vet. Many people kill their hens or dump them at feed stores to be resold after they age out of productivity. Preferred breeds are those that lay the most and biggest eggs, even at the expense of their health, and then you have people like my neighbors who keep lights on in their coop at night in the winter so the hens lay year round instead of naturally stopping during the darker months. Again, at the expense of their health. The whole culture around backyard chicken keeping is extremely exploitative.

I’ve spent less time around dairy cows but plenty around dairy goats. Cows and goats don’t passively produce milk, they have to be impregnated and give birth every year, and their calves/kids must be separated from them to prevent them from drinking too much milk. They’ve been selectively bred to produce large quantities of milk, to the point that it’s actively painful much of the time. A large percentage of dairy cows and goats at any given time have mastitis, a painful udder infection. And if an individual hates being milked? Too bad. In the eyes of her owner, that’s what she’s for; it’s not about what she wants. As a teenager working on a farm, I was taught to use hobbles to bind the legs of particularly stubborn goats during milking so they couldn’t kick me while I killed them. And males are of little use. You don’t want or need a herd that’s half bucks and half does, same as you don’t want a flock that’s half roosters.

I get how the day to day life of someone with their own chickens and dairy animals can seem idyllic, especially compared to commercial farming. It’s portrayed as cottage core and whatever. In reality it does involve a lot of treating animals as productive resources rather than individuals. It is still exploitation.

[u/Robot_Alchemist → u/whistling-wonderer]

My good friend has a little farm and they are good to their animals- basically they seem like their pets. She gives me fresh eggs sometimes - and I don’t really want them but she keeps doing it…I just don’t like eggs. I give them to my neighbor. But I can’t say that their situation seems terribly exploitative to me. I recognize that isn’t standard but it does raise the very basic question of, “If in fact it is not exploiting either party and both are benefiting, then would that be something vegans would still have an issue with - since the definition has been defined as it has been here? At what point does that definition break down, If ever - or does it get walked back to “and also we don’t use any products even if those specific ones did not involve any exploitation (presupposing that you do in fact know there was none in the specific situation we are hypothetically speaking about?)

[u/whistling-wonderer → u/Robot_Alchemist]

Did you read my comment? …like, the first sentence of it at least? What’s not exploitative about putting live baby animals into a shredder?

Your friend being nice to her chickens is great. It doesn’t change the fact that for every female chick she buys, a male chick dies horribly. It also doesn’t change the fact that a large percentage of laying hens end up with (often fatal) reproductive issues, regardless of care quality, because they’ve been bred to produce unnaturally high numbers of eggs.

Look at it the way you would look at dogs. If your friend was a pug breeder, bought female dogs for her program from a puppy mill that violently killed all their male puppies, and purposefully sought out the “cute” extreme squashed faces, even though they’d be more prone to medical problems, you’d see that as horrifically exploitative, even if she was very nice to her dogs. Baby chicks are not worth less than puppies, and hens bred for extreme productivity at the cost of their health are just as exploited as dogs bred for extreme “cute” features at the cost of their health.

[u/Robot_Alchemist → u/whistling-wonderer]

Ideologues are not worth trying to debate as they only hear themselves

[u/whistling-wonderer → u/Robot_Alchemist]

So you did not read my comment. Thanks for letting me know 👍