Hello. There was a question that was bothering me just a tiny bit for a while.
In some places in the world oysters are used to ensure water safety in water treatment plants. One such place is Warsaw in Poland. Oysters are fished out of natural habitat, "employed" for few weeks and returned after their service. In the meantime, their natural instincts to close or open shells based on water quality allow for their responses to be measured to make sure that water taken from Vistula River and prepared for the population of Warsaw to drink is safe. This is one of many steps of water analysis and afaik is used due to its sensitivity and broad scope, which makes it cheaper.
Question is: is that water vegan?
Since oysters are commodified in this context, I would guess that this water is not vegan. It is possible to test water parameters without utilizing oysters by chemical analysis, but I suppose it is cheaper to just chuck in some oysters into the freshwater supply designated for households.
But what are vegans in Poland supposed to do, only drink diet coke and do their laundry by filling up their washing machine with bottled water? This is where the "when practical" phrase comes in.
practicable*
I completely agree, that's just a common mistake I try to correct when I see it because those words mean very different things.
In this case, though, it's a distinction without a difference.
Practical means something that can be done or is feasible.
Practicable means something that can be put into practice.
Practical is about applying theory, practicable is about integrating a behavior into one's continual habits.
That's not quite accurate. Practicable means feasible to do, whether it's a practice or a one-time thing, and whether or not it's easily done. Practical means that it also has to be "sensible and effective."
The latter is kind of subjective I think, a matter of consensus; but I believe the way I choose to live is sensible. I can only hope it's effective.
Its not just cheaper. It's environmentally better. The chemicals and supplies needed for testing have an impact when produced. While yes, you can have glass instead of plastic which can be reused, you still have to synthesize the chemicals themselves. You also have to clean the equipment after every test which uses further resources.
Clams just vibe and have a temporary magnet stuck to them that triggers a nearby sensor when they close. These magnets and sensors are reused over and over and over. (Of course they are properly cleaned between clams to prevent spread of pathogens.) One clam with a magnet for a week or two is far less resources used than repeated chemical testing that must be performed multiple times a day.
I bet the Coke is made from the same water.
Probably, yeah.
There are parts of the US that do it too including Minneapolis St Paul if I am not mistaken. It’s very high tech: they get faster results from the oysters than other testing and use both at the same time.
Oysters are about as sentient as plants are, most likely
Phoenix uses carp to clean the algae from our water canals.
Nothing that comes from a large industrial process is truly vegan. Even “certified vegan” foods are still fertilized with animal feces.
Could drink the bottled water and wash your clothes in diet cola. Would be more interesting, if nothing else
no, but neither is watching a movie where any of the cast or crew isn't a vegan, because they had catering and were eating meat and dairy on the set to make that movie. but it's very rare for a vegan not to watch any movie at all because they involved the use of animal products in their creation. same thing with your example, drinking water that was tested with oysters is like watching a movie knowing that the actors were eating meat on the set while making it. the key thing is that there is basically nothing that's completely vegan. even eating fruit and vegetables, those were made using pesticides, which killed insects. the goal of veganism is to reduce harm, not eliminate harm to zero.
It’s more than reduce harm otherwise you would say plant based or people eating vegan Monday through Friday are vegan. What about when they used to harm animals on the set? I can see vegans boycotting that but not non vegan actors.
it is just reduce harm. that is the very definition of veganism from the vegan society, to reduce animal exploitation as far as is practical. the reason we don't call people who eat mostly plants and a little meat vegan is because there's already a term for that, flexitarian. my point was that even eating a 100% plant-based diet still involves animals being killed, and vegans know this.
and even non-vegans boycott movies that harm animals on the set. most of the boycotting of those movies comes from non-vegans actually.
It’s unclear whether or not oysters are actually sentient.
If they aren’t - then the use of oysters isn’t ethically different to the use of plants.
However - vegans have different opinions on this issue.
Why do y'all get to ignore the pain of living beings that aren't sentient?
Any living being which feels pain is - by definition - sentient.
Sentence is the ability to perceive things including pain. So non sentient beings don't perceive pain
You really need to let go of this argument you keep clinging to about plants feeling pain or whatever. It's incredibly dumb and tiresome.
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This subreddit is for honest questions and learning. It is not the right place for debating.
Please take your debates to r/DebateAVegan
Nobody is ignoring, just rationalizing
By that standard dont eat plants either. Plants also have pain responses even though its not sentient
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Disclaimer: This thread is unhelpful to the discussion, so I've removed it.
I would say that the act of using the oysters is not vegan, which makes the system not vegan. The water itself is, because it does not contain any commodified oysters. Similarly, spinach is vegan, but the manure it may have been fertilized with is not. In most cases we are just trying to reduce harm as much as we can. If you look too deep you can say that nothing produced by a person powered by an animal-based diet is vegan and therefore we can only trade with other vegans, or grow our own food under UV lamps in our kitchens and boil water we fetch ourselves from the nearest stream. We don’t control everything around us. We are aiming to simply not directly and intentionally pay for the killing or exploitation of animals by consuming their flesh and secretions or by wearing their body parts. If most everyone did that, there would STILL be some harm to animals, but ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS if we all just kind of did our best. So anyway, the water process is not vegan, but the water still is. If I lived in Warsaw I might write a letter to the city suggesting more animal friendly ways to test water, but I would not feel bad or like I was compromising my ethics by using city tap water.
I see. Thank you for your perspective. This and other responses have helped clear this thing up for me. There are many aspects that were unknown to me and I'm glad I got the chance to learn from broader slice of population than my immediate colleagues. Separating the method from the product was not something I would think about for example.
I love a good steak
Yes. Oysters aren't sentient.
Is veganism against the exploitation of animals, or only sentient animals?
Depends on which definition you subscribe to.
Hope no one builds a home or drives on a highway at dusk. Many bugs killed
This is an example of a tu qouque fallacy that carnists often levy at vegans and it fails on multiple levels. I'll try to be brief. First and foremost, even if you were correct and vegans were massive hypocrites because they fail to live up to their asserted values, that still doesn't actually debunk veganism or the values themselves, it would only highlight that the vegan in question is currently failing to live up to their values.
Second, "many bugs" would still be killed in the counterfactual scenerio as well, meaning if the home or highway was not constructed, that same land would be wilderness, and wilderness contains untold amounts of animal suffering and death via natural predation cycles, so possibly even more animals would be killed overall if the home or highway were not built, or maybe fewer would be, or maybe the same amount would be. There isn't robust comparitive analysis data on the total animals killed in each scnerio as far as i know and so i remain agnostic. Until and unless the burden of proof is met, i.e until data is provided to establish that overall deaths in the current scenerio exceed that of the counterfactual scenerio, i can simply dismiss the hypocrisy accusation.
And finally, that's not even factoring in whether or not insects are sentient to any meaningful degree, or to any degree at all, which is also something I'm agnostic about. Based on what I've seen I would suspect that some types of insects are insentient and some types might be sentient, but even for the ones that might be, they likely possess a trivial level of sentience at best. And that's a problem since non trivial sentience is what I axiomatically value.
Does your second paragraph then potentially excuse the use of the oysters in the OP question regardless of sentience? (I did not research this, im just a curious observer going off what OP said in their post) Since the oysters are taken from natural habitat its not like they are farmed or population is increased specifically for water testing, and the chance for natural predators goes from some% to zero% in the testing facility, it seems okay to assume the oysters are in a safer environment when testing than when in the wild. Is there a possibility using these oysters for testing is an overall positive to the well being of the oyster species? Therefore indeed making the process vegan even if the oysters are sentient?
This argument doesn't make sense. By this logic habitat destruction is ok or even good because it leads to fewer animals being born which will eventually suffer and die due to predation or just their life cycles. At that point we should just kill any wild animal we see along with not supporting animal agriculture.
If only you could be in charge of all life and stop anything from ever dying! It's so sad how life came into existence erroneously by allowing anything to suffer ever. One day we humans will achieve peace with nature by bending it to our will to stop all suffering.
I know you're saying this sarcastically but unironically yes, i hope we do. I reject the appeal to nature fallacy wholeheartedly as any reasonable person does and think human intervention in nature if done with benevolence is a good thing actually. Since no benevolent God actually exists, it’s left to us, the sapient species, to make the world a better place. Nature is unfathomably horrific and brutal, to such a degree that it's difficult to truly grasp, like trying to picture a billion stars. I do think humans have the potential to one day, if not eliminate, at least significantly reduce the suffering and harm that sentient beings in nature endure via heavily re-engineering nature with advanced technology. And if not, i would still consider it to be a preferable world in theory.
Minimisation of suffering. Most animals are capable of suffering and plants aren’t, so it’s way easier to explain as you say. But a vegan if we found something that under biological rules could be classified as a plant but we proved it could suffer, a vegan wouldn’t eat it just because it was a plant
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