[Four tweets from Twitter user FeralCherub, all posted November 6, 2018]
1) “Which party do I vote for to shut down the ~900 military bases & the unknown number of CIA torture facilities the US operates?”
2) “Which party supports reparations & an autonomous Black nation? Which party support land repatriation, autonomy & sovereignty for Indigenous peoples?”
3) “Which party do I vote for to sever ties with Israel? Which party will demand an end to the occupation, colonization & degradation of Palestine?”
4) “Who do I vote for to stop the deprivation of the working classes here & abroad? Which party represents the interests of the laboring masses against the capitalists who profit off their backs?”
"Oh well if you stop the queen leaving the bees are trapped" wrong, bees can and will swarm without a queen. They will also make new queens if they don't think theirs is good enough
"Bees don't consent to their honey being taken" wrong, bees are actually more than intelligent enough to know we take the honey. They LET us take the honey if they think what we provide in return (shelter, food, protection) is a fair deal.
"Taking honey starves the bees" WRONG AGAIN! Domestic bees overproduce honey. A beekeeper NEVER takes honey the bees would need because then you piss off the bees, and if you piss off the bees you don't have any bees. They stockpile honey for the winter, but because domestic colonies do way better than wild ones they stockpile too much. That's why beekeepers can take out whole frames and then have them filled in no time. Domestic bees actively overproduce because they know humans are going to skim some off the top.
And if they didn't want humans to take it, beekeeping WOULD NOT work.
To keep bees you have to let them fly free. If they can fly free they can leave. Meaning if they don't like what you're doing, they WILL leave.
The whole idea they're basically slaves to the queen is also not true, they can just make a new queen literally whenever, and if they don't like her, they kill her.
There is no way for a beekeeper to exploit their bees. The bees are EMPLOYEES.
With bees, it's less about exploitation and more about the harm they cause to local ecosystems.
They're an invasive species in almost the entire globe. What happens when humans bring invasive species in and feed them loads of local resources that native animals now can't access? The native animals die. And the local ecosystem is injured and destabilized.
congrats big corporation, that's the worst anyone's ever done it
are you being fr rn @staff @humans how is an anon ask saying "i am going to rape you with my cock" not a violation of your TOS or community guidelines?! and to then also go and apply a mature label (presumably affecting my accounts counter) to this unanswered ask just makes this all that much more insulting.
i checked out more of Graeme Wood's work and, unsurprisingly, he's a racist islamophobe.
"But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it."
like what the actual fuck was that?
just checking the description of the book he wrote is further proof that he is full of shit
if a vegan makes a post that somehow doesn’t apply to you because you have a unique medical condition or certain circumstances, then just scroll past it. if it truly doesn’t apply to you, then it wasn’t written for you.
stop with the “not all meat eaters!!! not all animal products!!!” stuff. the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people CAN go vegan. the fact of the matter is that there is no humane way to kill or exploit someone.
the reason we don’t say “most people” in front of literally everything is partially because it gives people an out. it lets people who really can go vegan excuse themselves when they shouldn’t be. so it’s really not a personal attack on your conscience every time we post about veganism. it’s really not about you at all.
Can I ask a question that maybe sounds a little insensitive but… why didn’t you just… leave?
I’m sorry, but if a group of people showed up at my door (WITH GUNS) my response wouldn’t be to say “no.” My response would be to save me and my family and do what they say. Even if it means my home gets trashed or destroyed, my life is more important than the possessions and home I am in.
I dunno, maybe it’s because I value life that I wouldn’t try intimidating soldiers with GUNS pointed at us? Or maybe it’s because I’m in America where just getting pulled over by the cops can result in your death if you say or do the wrong thing… I dunno. I just wouldn’t try to antagonize people who themselves are looking for antagonists to attack?
I swear some people will act like taxidermists are skinning animals alive
A tiger recently died in a famous zoo in my country, and people are up in arms about the zoo's decision to taxidermy it for research and educational purposes
The alternative is chopping it up and burning it in a furnace but I guess that's "What the tiger would have wanted"
The tiger never talked to you or me or anyone, but I guess acting emotional about a corpse puts you on higher moral ground and that means you know the tiger better than anyone who actually took care of or researched it
"The tiger wouldn't have wanted-" No. You don't want this. You're projecting.
Edit: Apparently people are not only planning a rally against this tiger's taxidermy, but harrassing the taxidermist in charge. This is bullshit.
I mean, it is kind of a crass mockery of a living creature. Humans can choose to have their corpse put on display, before they die. Animals can't.
We generally find human corpses put on display for entertainment or educational purposes against the wishes of that person to be gruesome, disgusting, abhorrent, etc. Why's this any different?
I think I realized this when I had went to see my dad and stepmom one day and asked if I could place my hawk’s food. (A rabbit leg) in the freezer. My step mom was disgusted by the idea that a leg from an animal was in the freezer meanwhile an entire chicken was sitting in the fridge.
Your rotisserie chicken is an entire chicken.
Your pork chop is a hunk of pig.
Your rack of ribs are from a cow’s rib cage.
It’s like Americans view meat as colorful red and pink hued shapes that just exist and come into the world packaged.
You see so many people getting harassed or even having their content flagged for showing how to process or field dress meat when it’s at it’s freshest. Right after culling. For some reason this is considered “gore” by many folks when in reality it’s no more different from plucking a processed chicken after cull.
You also notice that Americans have an idea of what’s normal meat and what isn’t normal meat and there’s racist undertones that I’ve noticed in a lot of these comments left on foreign cooking videos
You have people that claim a video of a man in a different country preparing something like this is “eating a dog.” Meanwhile this is roasted goat.
You have people who’s only perception of an edible fish is in fillet or fish stick form and they call something like this nasty because “Eww there’s a head!” Yeah.. most animals have heads..
Some of ya’ll need to realize what your meat looks like prior to processing and that it’s prepared in different ways. We also need to erase the stigma behind non traditional meats.
Truly, genuinely, as an indigenous person I talk about this exact thing a LOT! Like, don't get me wrong I get a bit squicked when dressing a chicken or gutting and cleaning a fish, lord knows I had really mixed feelings the first time I saw a deers throat slit (I thought it was cruel, until my elder asked me if I would have preferred to let it suffer instead)
The truth of the matter is that animals and humans are intertwined. We are food to one another, that's the way of the world and I think people forget that when we champion for humane treatment of animals and when we rail against factory farming we need to remember that removing death is not the goal, removing undue suffering it.
Your diet is an inherently neutral act. It does not make you superior or inferior to anyone. However having a superiority complex over it does make you an asshole.
you're ignorant if you think what you eat has no impact whatsoever on the world's ecosystem or political climate, bc there's just no such thing as a "neutral" act under capitalism, that's a fantasy. you just don't care about who is affected.
whether or not I feel or act "superior" doesn't actually change much about *your* impact and lack of responsibility, does it? I won't let you offload that shit onto me just because you won't admit you don't give a fuck enough to change your lifestyle. thats between you and god. bitch
Veganism isn't a diet, it's a philosophy. It's how you approach life.
How one approaches life is, genuinely, the only thing that can make one person 'superior or inferior' to another, and it is abso-fucking-lutely not an inherently neutral factor in any sense.
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.
… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.
How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.
The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.
Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.
I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.
Harvesting honey does not murder bees.
The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.
There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.
Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.
When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.
So.
It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.
Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.
And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water.
Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!
Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)
You don’t care about the animal exploitation part? That’s fine. You don’t have to.
Consider the effects honeybees have on the environment and other species. Honeybees are invasive in a majority of the areas they’re kept and used in. They’re an invasive species. They take nutrition away from local species of pollinators. This has severe knock-on effects down the line. Fewer local pollinators leads to fewer local plants; fewer local larger animals; less biodiversity as a whole.
This is a bad thing.
Vegans aren’t wrong for refusing to pay money for honey to be produced, and the world would be a better place if more people did the same.
….dude if it’s the bee’s presence you dislike, why do you buy any fruits or vegetables pollinated by them on large farms? You know the ship them in right? Or do you grow all of your own?
No worries, I have. Veganism is about doing what is possible and practicable; so as far as possible, I avoid that.
As far as possible, I avoid buying food pollinated by invasive honeybees. I speak against their use and push for alternatives. I aim for organic produce to avoid further harming local pollinators.
Starving myself isn’t going to help anyone.
On the other side of that, it’s very easy to completely avoid buying honey. Buying honey is objectively harmful to do, and trivial to avoid, so I just don’t do it.
Alright, well at least you’re consistent. More power to you then, but every beekeeper I’ve ever talked has assured me that bees in particular will just fucking leave if they’re not happy.
I can maybe see the argument against big farms that might clip the queen’s wings or something (tho even that is a little complex), but other than that? Not really seeing the harm.
Again, think past the bees themselves.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/
They harm biodiversity anywhere they’re introduced in large numbers as a non-native species. That’s not great.
I think it’s important to preserve biodiversity, and to protect local ecologies. Beekeeping goes against that in a big way.
Stop proactively breeding them, stop economically encouraging people to breed them.
Maybe on the ‘most effective’ end of the scale we could take them all back to their native range and keep them there. Allow their population to come to a balance naturally, given the food available to them in that range.
With the current status quo they’re already being shipped all over the place to pollinate farms in rapid succession. It wouldn’t be a big ask to get them back where they belong and then let those local ecosystems work themselves out.
It’s the same with bigger livestock like dairy cattle - you don’t have to kill them (though that’s already done on a massive fucking scale on a daily basis). Just stop breeding them. It’s easy. They’re already kept segregated by sex in most cases. Bees, you can’t really do that, but you certainly can limit their range! You can even remove wild colonies from their present location and move them back to their native range; beekeepers relocate swarms all the time. They take pride in it!
I wouldn't say it's ethical - it's still animal exploitation - but it would be measurably less harmful.
In their natural range, they should be left to their own devices! They do just fine there without any human intervention. Let 'em do so.
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.
… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.
How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.
The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.
Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.
I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.
Harvesting honey does not murder bees.
The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.
There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.
Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.
When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.
So.
It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.
Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.
And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water.
Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!
Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)
You don’t care about the animal exploitation part? That’s fine. You don’t have to.
Consider the effects honeybees have on the environment and other species. Honeybees are invasive in a majority of the areas they’re kept and used in. They’re an invasive species. They take nutrition away from local species of pollinators. This has severe knock-on effects down the line. Fewer local pollinators leads to fewer local plants; fewer local larger animals; less biodiversity as a whole.
This is a bad thing.
Vegans aren’t wrong for refusing to pay money for honey to be produced, and the world would be a better place if more people did the same.
….dude if it’s the bee’s presence you dislike, why do you buy any fruits or vegetables pollinated by them on large farms? You know the ship them in right? Or do you grow all of your own?
No worries, I have. Veganism is about doing what is possible and practicable; so as far as possible, I avoid that.
As far as possible, I avoid buying food pollinated by invasive honeybees. I speak against their use and push for alternatives. I aim for organic produce to avoid further harming local pollinators.
Starving myself isn’t going to help anyone.
On the other side of that, it’s very easy to completely avoid buying honey. Buying honey is objectively harmful to do, and trivial to avoid, so I just don’t do it.
Alright, well at least you’re consistent. More power to you then, but every beekeeper I’ve ever talked has assured me that bees in particular will just fucking leave if they’re not happy.
I can maybe see the argument against big farms that might clip the queen’s wings or something (tho even that is a little complex), but other than that? Not really seeing the harm.
Again, think past the bees themselves.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/
They harm biodiversity anywhere they’re introduced in large numbers as a non-native species. That’s not great.
I think it’s important to preserve biodiversity, and to protect local ecologies. Beekeeping goes against that in a big way.
Stop proactively breeding them, stop economically encouraging people to breed them.
Maybe on the 'most effective' end of the scale we could take them all back to their native range and keep them there. Allow their population to come to a balance naturally, given the food available to them in that range.
With the current status quo they're already being shipped all over the place to pollinate farms in rapid succession. It wouldn't be a big ask to get them back where they belong and then let those local ecosystems work themselves out.
It's the same with bigger livestock like dairy cattle - you don't have to kill them (though that's already done on a massive fucking scale on a daily basis). Just stop breeding them. It's easy. They're already kept segregated by sex in most cases. Bees, you can't really do that, but you certainly can limit their range! You can even remove wild colonies from their present location and move them back to their native range; beekeepers relocate swarms all the time. They take pride in it!
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.
… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.
How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.
The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.
Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.
I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.
Harvesting honey does not murder bees.
The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.
There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.
Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.
When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.
So.
It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.
Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.
And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water.
Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!
Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)
You don’t care about the animal exploitation part? That’s fine. You don’t have to.
Consider the effects honeybees have on the environment and other species. Honeybees are invasive in a majority of the areas they’re kept and used in. They’re an invasive species. They take nutrition away from local species of pollinators. This has severe knock-on effects down the line. Fewer local pollinators leads to fewer local plants; fewer local larger animals; less biodiversity as a whole.
This is a bad thing.
Vegans aren’t wrong for refusing to pay money for honey to be produced, and the world would be a better place if more people did the same.
….dude if it’s the bee’s presence you dislike, why do you buy any fruits or vegetables pollinated by them on large farms? You know the ship them in right? Or do you grow all of your own?
No worries, I have. Veganism is about doing what is possible and practicable; so as far as possible, I avoid that.
As far as possible, I avoid buying food pollinated by invasive honeybees. I speak against their use and push for alternatives. I aim for organic produce to avoid further harming local pollinators.
Starving myself isn’t going to help anyone.
On the other side of that, it’s very easy to completely avoid buying honey. Buying honey is objectively harmful to do, and trivial to avoid, so I just don’t do it.
Alright, well at least you’re consistent. More power to you then, but every beekeeper I’ve ever talked has assured me that bees in particular will just fucking leave if they’re not happy.
I can maybe see the argument against big farms that might clip the queen’s wings or something (tho even that is a little complex), but other than that? Not really seeing the harm.
Again, think past the bees themselves.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/
They harm biodiversity anywhere they're introduced in large numbers as a non-native species. That's not great.
I think it's important to preserve biodiversity, and to protect local ecologies. Beekeeping goes against that in a big way.
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.
… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.
How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.
The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.
Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.
I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.
Harvesting honey does not murder bees.
The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.
There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.
Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.
When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.
So.
It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.
Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.
And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water.
Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!
Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)
You don’t care about the animal exploitation part? That’s fine. You don’t have to.
Consider the effects honeybees have on the environment and other species. Honeybees are invasive in a majority of the areas they’re kept and used in. They’re an invasive species. They take nutrition away from local species of pollinators. This has severe knock-on effects down the line. Fewer local pollinators leads to fewer local plants; fewer local larger animals; less biodiversity as a whole.
This is a bad thing.
Vegans aren’t wrong for refusing to pay money for honey to be produced, and the world would be a better place if more people did the same.
….dude if it’s the bee’s presence you dislike, why do you buy any fruits or vegetables pollinated by them on large farms? You know the ship them in right? Or do you grow all of your own?
No worries, I have. Veganism is about doing what is possible and practicable; so as far as possible, I avoid that.
As far as possible, I avoid buying food pollinated by invasive honeybees. I speak against their use and push for alternatives. I aim for organic produce to avoid further harming local pollinators.
Starving myself isn't going to help anyone.
On the other side of that, it's very easy to completely avoid buying honey. Buying honey is objectively harmful to do, and trivial to avoid, so I just don't do it.
vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects
I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.
Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.
Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey
they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom.
Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.
… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.
How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.
The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.
Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.
I feel compelled to explain the misconception part for anyone who doesn’t know anything about beekeeping and finds any of this confusing. This might be a little redundant, but I’m scratching an itch.
Harvesting honey does not murder bees.
The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.
There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.
Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.
When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.
So.
It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.
Like, there’s no need to have a conversation about this, anyone who claims that harvesting honey requires that you kill bees is lying. Either they don’t know anything about beekeeping and are just repeating a lie someone else told them, or they know that they’re lying and they’re just straight up trying to deceive people. Neither is a good look.
And just one more point of clarification – “cells of the hive” doesn’t mean the anatomical cells of the bees’ bodies, it means the little holes in the honeycomb of the physical structure of the hives, which they build using beeswax. Think of it like a bee pantry. They put their honey in the pantry, but since they’re working hard every day, they often make wayyyyyy too much of it. So the beekeepers come along and take the extra honeycomb that the bees don’t need and aren’t going to use, but they leave plenty behind for the bees to eat. Additionally, if anything happens to the hive’s honey supplies in the winter, the beekeepers can supplement their food by either giving some honey back or giving them sugar water.
Also, fun fact! When beekeepers extract the honey from the comb, they often leave all their equipment out afterwards so the bees can come along and clean up, re-collecting any traces of honey or wax left behind, which get put back into the hive and recycled. Any leftover waste (dirt and grime from old comb, for example, or bees that died natural deaths of old age) makes great fertilizer for the plants that produce the pollen the bees make next year. No waste!
Vegans, the bees are not going to stop making honey if they’re left to their own devices in the wild. The bees are just doing a thing that bees do. Eating honey is not exploitation, it’s sustainability. That said, if you’re still worried about the ethics, I’d recommend looking up some local beekeepers/honey farms in your area and reaching out to them for more education! I’ve known a lot of beekeepers that are really excited about doing education and outreach to teach people about the importance of pollinators, the partnership between bees and beekeepers, and the process of how honey is collected. Some honey farms will even give you a tour of their process so you can see in person how it’s made and that it’s not a harmful or exploitative process for the bees at all! (and of course eating local honey gives you an amazing connection to your local environment, both spiritually and physically?? like apparently eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies??? it’s really cool)
You don't care about the animal exploitation part? That's fine. You don't have to.
Consider the effects honeybees have on the environment and other species. Honeybees are invasive in a majority of the areas they're kept and used in. They're an invasive species. They take nutrition away from local species of pollinators. This has severe knock-on effects down the line. Fewer local pollinators leads to fewer local plants; fewer local larger animals; less biodiversity as a whole.
This is a bad thing.
Vegans aren't wrong for refusing to pay money for honey to be produced, and the world would be a better place if more people did the same.
On this day, 1 March 1968, Chicane students at the Wilson high School in East Los Angeles walked out on strike in protest at the cancellation of a student play. A few days later, March 6, coordinated student strikes began involving approximately 15,000 students from seven or more different high schools. Their goals were to get more Latine teachers in their schools and to change textbooks so they included Mexican-American history.
Chicane students were not allowed to speak Spanish in class and were often discouraged from applying to college by guidance counsellors and teachers. The dropout rate for Mexican-American students in 1967 was as high as 57.5% in one high school.
Police and school administrators tried to stop the walkout by blocking school doors and arresting many students who tried to peacefully protest, but they were undeterred. Following the walkouts, on March 11, students had a special meeting with the Los Angeles Board of Education, where they listed dozens of demands. The board responded, claiming that though it agreed with the vast majority of the demands, due to lack of funds it was unable to follow through on them.
Even if not entirely successful, the walkouts contributed to bringing together and radicalising working class Chicane youth.
More information, sources and map on our Stories web app: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8113/l.a.-chicane-student-walkouts
To access this hyperlink, click our link in bio then click this photo https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2221198768065261/?type=3
i notice ppl who are left wing say this type of thing a lot and honestly i dont really understand it. i cant seem to put my finger on what ppl who say this are actually meaning. i feel like im missing smth
ofc ppl who say this type of thing arent a monolith. ppl who say similar things dont always intend for those things to have the same meaning as each other. but tributary, if youre willing, could you explain what this sentiment means to you?
heres where im hung up, if it helps you explain what you mean better: arent ‘punishment’ and ‘fair negative consequences for your actions’ pretty much the same thing? a domestic abuser no longer being allowed to see the kids he beats is being punished but hes also facing fair consequences for his actions. someone white getting fired for calling his black coworker the n-word is, by the dictionary definition of punishment, being punished. so is a child rapist getting sent to prison. should we not give ppl negative consequences if they hurt someone?
im sorry if i sound really stupid. english isnt my first language. i just want to understand this belief since i see and hear it all the time and it really confuses me
when i say this, at least, i am making a distinction between (1) "we should take steps to stop people who are hurting others from being able to hurt others" and (2) "people who do bad things should have bad things done to them".
examples of (1): i hit my children, and am no longer allowed to see them. i use a racial slur at work to a coworker, and am fired. <- these things might feel like punishments to me, because i want to see my children / i want to work so i have money, but the focus in doing them is not to punish me, but to keep the other people safe - i can no longer abuse my children or my coworker.
examples of (2): i hit my children, and so i get publicly beaten in return. i use a racial slur at work to a coworker, and am put in solitary confinement for five days. <- these are punishments. they do not materially make anyone i have hurt safer (i can still see my children; i can still go to work with my coworker), because the assumption that people won't do something if they know they'll get hurt for it is simply not true (we have a lot of good evidence that hurting people doesn't make them change their behaviour, other than trying harder not to get caught).
of course, there's the option to do (1) and (2). i could be banned from seeing my kids, and also publicly beaten, but... why? why do we need (2), if we are already doing (1)? what does (2) do to materially make my children (or other children, for that matter, or anyone) safer?
and that's what "don't trust people who want to punish" is getting at, because the urge to punish is often really strong - especially in christian, especially evangelical christian, spaces, where there's this internalised "if you sin you go to hell" logic. people get hurt, and then they often turn around and say "well the person who hurt me should be hurt too", rather than "i don't want this person to be able to hurt me or others any more".
the problem with that is that like... well then we just end up in a cycle of hurting people for hurting others, which has negative consequences for everyone involved. as opposed to consequences happening that make everyone safer, and then rehabilitation efforts to stop people being hurt/doing hurting again. and it's also the same problem as the eternal "well it's okay to do X to Y group" (e.g. it's okay to remove voting rights from felons) - you are then motivated to turn anyone you want to do X to into a member of Y group (e.g. mass criminalisation (felonisation?) of black people via racially-selective policing and lawmaking). you start being led by "i want to do X to Y" as a knee-jerk response, rather than "what do we need to do to keep people safe?". violence becomes acceptable as long as it's for the Right Reasons.
tl;dr "punishment" and "your actions having consequences that you do not enjoy" do not mean the same thing here; there's a difference in the motivation of the person doing the punishing/consequences, and this quote-thing is arguing that that's important.
footnotes to this below the cut (bc they got longer than the actual post):
(a) i think this all demands a prison-critical but not necessarily prison-abolitionist stance. i think "no punishment" is entriely compatible with "this person keeps raping people, and we have no reliable ways to rehabilitate rapists to the point where they stop wanting to rape people, so we need to stop this person from having unsupervised contact with other people", and then with the further claim that the the best way to do that is to restrict their movement/access to society (i.e. imprison them). i think it is incompatible with "and also the food should be horrible and they shouldn't have access to books or tv or-", which i guess makes it critical of the prison system as it is now. it requires you to consider prison as "a holding place for people who are too acutely dangerous to others' wellbeing to be allowed around others", rather than "a nasty place we have that hopefully deters people from doing crimes because it's horrible too be in and therefore people won't want to be in it".
(b) "but what about the people who would do [crime] but don't because they're afraid of being punished by jail" <- my response to this would be. idk if you've seen that comedian that's like "christians ask me why i don't rape and murder if i'm not worried about going to hell, and i say i have done exactly the number of rapes and murders that i want to do, which is 0", but... if the only thing stopping someone from doing something is "someone will hurt me if i do this", then they are already kind of a proto-criminal. if the only thing stopping a rapist is their fear of getting locked in a little box for several years, then they are essentially just waiting for a chance to rape someone where they're very sure they won't get caught. the punishment is not doing much here.
(c) i don't think having the reflex to go "i want this person to hurt like they've hurt me" upon having been victimised in some way is bad or concerning (i think that's a very human reflex), but i think people who rationalise that into "and because i feel that way, i think it's okay if X type of people have horrifically bad things happen to them" is concerning because that's a rationalisation about violence being acceptable, and the minute you start thinking violence is acceptable in certain circumstances, it opens up the door to broader and broader interpretations of when those circumstances occur. (see also: "it's okay to do physical violence and online abuse against nazis" as an accepted maxim leading to a proliferation of "and now i will justify why [X non-nazi group that i don't like] are literally fascists and therefore literally nazis and therefore it's okay to do violence/online abuse against them" essays in leftist/liberal spaces)
(d) "okay but what about punching actual literal nazis" <- great question! i do not have a satisfactory answer for this one, mainly because it is extremely hard to unpick what is "knee-jerk punishment urge disguised as/post-rationalisation by [insert argument of why we should punch nazis]" from good arguments why nazis are specifically exempt from the "don't punish" thing.
(e) i also think there's an interesting distinction maybe between "people who want to punish others are a red flag" and "we should remove punishment entirely from society". idk. maybe you can hold that punishment is bad, but also that maybe there's some shit as a society we have to punish for reasons around social cohesion/herd behaviour/whatever. have not worked that one through particularly.
sparxflame gives an incredible overview of it from a mechanical perspective, thank you. I want to dig more into the mindset behind it.
As sparx said, the immediate impulse to punish upon hearing about a transgression is normal. It becomes concerning when that is the default reaction. It is part of what is called carceral logic or carceral mindset:
Carceral logic can be understood as a punishment mindset that views retribution and control, including by physical constraint (e.g. imprisonment), surveillance (e.g. electronic monitoring via ankle bracelet), or violence, as central components of a public safety system. (Lopez, 2022)
Certainly not all things get escalated to the level of imprisonment, but the urge to punish, shame, or censure is also related to this. Like when somebody online expresses an opinion deemed unsavory or supports a ship that is perceived to be wrong in some way. People get harassed, abused, and doxxed for relatively minor things.
Not only is the response disproportionate, it is what many people immediately jump to as opposed to:
blocking/muting so they don't have to see a take they disagree with
ignoring it because it's an opinion
engaging in dialogue to understand the other person's POV
Examining why that is is the first step towards interrogating carceral logic.
(There's also stuff about separating out "good" and "bad" people and bad people not just being worthy of punishment but need to be, which leads to things like places passing laws against sex offenders living in their limits and making them homeless and harder to track instead. But that's another topic)
"the immediate impulse to punish upon hearing about a transgression is normal. It becomes concerning when that is the default reaction. It is part of what is called carceral logic or carceral mindset:"
No, it is thoroughly distinct from a carceral mindset; they can go together, but they are different and distinct.
