Veganism

An article that appeared recently in The Guardian recently came as a shock to me. It contained the following news:

An estimated 4-6 billion male chicks are slaughtered globally every year because they serve no economic purpose. Some are suffocated, others are fed alive into grinding or shredding machines to be processed into reptile food. 

The culling is a messy solution to a thorny problem of modern poultry farming. Humans have bred chickens for one of two purposes: to produce eggs, or meat. Yet half of all the animals bred for this purpose are considered useless. Male chicks lay no eggs and don’t grow fast enough to justify the cost of feeding them up for meat. So, they are simply destroyed.

As a vegetarian who still eats eggs, I have always been careful to select free range eggs when shopping at the supermarket and I'd never thought about how the hens were separated from the roosters. Now I know. I'm embarrassed to admit my ignorance. However, the article did contain some good news:

The world’s first ever no-kill eggs are now on sale in Berlin after German scientists found an easy way to determine a chick’s sex before it hatches, in a breakthrough that could put an end to the annual live shredding of billions of male chicks worldwide. 

The patented “Seleggt” process can determine the sex of a chick just nine days after an egg has been fertilised. Male eggs are processed into animal feed, leaving only female chicks to hatch at the end of a 21-day incubation period. 

“If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks,” said Seleggt managing director Dr Ludger Breloh, who spearheaded the four-year programme by German supermarket Rewe Group to make its own-brand eggs more sustainable. 

This article appeared on Saturday 22nd December 2018 and at the time it appeared, there were plans to "roll out" the eggs to supermarkets throughout Germany during 2019, and then later to Europe. The eggs will be a respeggt label and supermarkets will be expected to pay a few cents cents more for them than for normal eggs. In the meantime, I'm ambivalent about continuing to consume eggs, knowing what I now know. Here is a video in which one of the developers talks about the process:

On a different note, there was a long story on the BBC's website titled The St Petersburg vegans cooking up a revolution and a restaurant called Horizontal is described as follows:

The restaurant adheres to the principles of anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, the abolition of borders, and animal liberation. In a country where people who are gender non-confirming or trans are shunned, and even sometimes attacked, Horizontal is a space where anyone's preferred pronouns will be respected ... Horizontal is one of about a dozen similar spaces across St Petersburg, promoting vegan anarchism - "veganarchism" - by cooking up delicious vegan food.

In a vegan grocery shop called Llamas, there is inside:

... rainbow-flag tote bags, feminist stickers and vegan condoms are sold alongside plant-based Napoleon cakes and reusable straws.

Furthermore, a week before the couple who run Llamas were interviewed for the story:

Anya and Igor from Llamas had taken part in an annual festival in the city called Znak Ravenstva - meaning Equal Sign. It promotes not only veganism, but also feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights and environmentalism, and tries to show how all of these movements are connected.

All this is disturbing for the cause of veganism. Associating veganism with anarchism, feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ and environmentalism is a very bad idea. Let's single out LGBTQ+ to start with. This is a well-funded and orchestrated movement that does not care about the people it purports to represent. It is cleverly using them to foment social unrest by taking a marginalised group of people and pitting them against mainstream society.

In the West, resistance to LGBTQ+ has largely collapsed and the indoctrination of the young into acceptance of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle is well underway via the education system. In more conservative countries, this push has resulted in a backlash against the LGBTQ+ community, so that this community is marginalised more. Even in the West, there is still resistance to the LGBTQ+ agenda but regrettably terms like "soy and sodomy" and "soy boy" (for an effeminate male) have entered the vocabulary of those who are pushing back. Veganism and LGBTQ+ have nothing in common.

The environmental movement has been hijacked by corporate interests who manufactured the myth of anthropogenic global warming and are making big profits from alternative energy sources and carbon offsets. Ultimately, these interests are not about stopping the destruction of the Amazonian rainforests or other laudable causes. They are about making money but such is the influence of the mass media that most people, especially young people, have been completely taken in. Vegans should avoid this trap.

Given the social disruption caused by militant vegans recently in Australia and elsewhere in the world, it might be time to retreat from even using the terms vegan and veganism. Both terms are inherently divisive. The former implies a dichotomy (vegan versus carnivore) while the latter involves adherence to yet another "ism". It might be better to say that I am a human who does not eat meat (vegetarian) or I am a human who only eats plant-based foods (vegan). That's enough. Don't proselytise, don't criticise. Be what are and be content in that.