One of the things that gets me whenever I’m talking to another leftist about veganism is how quickly they become pro-capitalist.
The land is “unusable” for anything else? The most common take is to put a farm, and always a factory farm by their own descriptions of what the farm would be like, on it instead of figuring out why an area is so unusable, attempting to see if it could be rewilded, and then returning it to the native community that once lived there or turn it into a protected space if the area hasn’t been colonised.
You want to boycott the meat, dairy, egg, honey, wool, leather, etc industries? But what about the people who own farms and the people who work on them? That’s their livelihood, how will they make ends meet? Your boycott it will ruin lives!
And yet, boycotting Starbucks, Chick-fil-a, Burger King, Target, Walmart, Amazon, etc is completely fine, that’s encouraged.
Not to say no one in the history of boycotts has ever brought it up, but I have never seen people in the leftist spaces I’m in talk about how the owners and workers will be affected by boycotts.
So it’s really just an excuse to keep consuming because going vegan means you actually have to give up the things you like to align with your morals, meanwhile brand specific boycotts are just minor inconveniences.
You can just go get coffee at another coffee stop, you can’t get dairy milk ethically anywhere else, but it’s something people really like, so naturally they look for the harm in not consuming it and latch onto that, but the thing is that they take a pro-capitalist stance to do it.
The vast majority of farmed animals are from factory farms, they are megacorporations. The owners you’re defending are millionaires and the farmers you’re “supporting” are paid in scraps to do dangerous and traumatising labor while being regularly abused and exploited outside of that.
And even though buying from smaller farms is generally more ethical, it’s still unethical from both a non-human and human rights and welfare perspective, and it just isn’t feasible long-term.
If half the people who ate meat began seeking it from smaller farms, those farms would develop into larger, more factory farm-like, farms to meet demands sooner or later, because farming is always going to be business first.
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