Inuits in the Arctic can survive perfectly on a plant based diet 😤
indigenous hunting is like, the ONE kind of hunting that shouldnt offend anyone and yet
listen, i fucking love whales. i do. i have advocated against cetacean captivity and whale hunting since i was like 13. i HATE whale hunting. but have you ever seen the prices for food in a grocery store in indigenous areas, if they even have one?
i can guarantee no vegan has ever paid $22 usd for a bag of grapes, and you cannot farm that far north. they can forage for some foods, but its not enough to sustain themselves and get a nutritionally complete diet. this isnt just cultural or religious practices (although cultural and religious practices are significant and shouldnt be stripped from them), its literal survival. indigenous people hunt in a very sustainable way (a single bowhead whale can feed an entire community for a year), they arent out here killing a bear just to hang it on their wall. they are trying to survive. subsistence hunting by native tribes is 100% morally correct, even if (like me) the thought of animals dying makes you sad. fight against the japanese whaling fleets who kill hundreds of whales under the guise of research and then sell the meat. fight against wealthy americans who kill animals just to stuff them and put them on their wall. fight against seaworld and their disgusting cetacean captivity practices. but dont come at native people who depend on subsistence hunting to survive. fucking colonizers.
I’m always suspicious of people, especially vegans/vegetarians, who see the eating of meat as a purely black and white issue because it indicates to me that they haven’t really thought about the greater implications and context of their choices. Is it really fair to equate the death of this beluga whale, who was caught and killed in the wild, who will essentially be consumed where he was (i.e. no massive expenditure of energy to process, freeze, and transport the meat across the country), by a group of people who understand the ecology of its habitat, and will likely use every possible ounce of that animal, with the slaughter of say a chicken who has lived it’s entire life in absolutely claustrophobic squalor, slaughtered on an assembly line, whose “unusable” parts have been discarded, and the processing of which required comparatively massive amounts of energy and expense (and in conditions that were probably pretty horrific for the human workers involved)? No, I can’t say that those two events are even remotely comparable, and I think that the person who can so quickly argue that they are hasn’t really examined their own beliefs, out of either ignorance or willfulness.
This is exactly my issue with accusatory vegans. I'd include vegetarians but tbh I've really never heard or seen a vegetarian do this, probably because there's such extreme moralizing involved that anyone who supports this 'anyone who harms an animal ever is a demon' attitude has to give up eggs and dairy and go full on vegan to match the ideals.
