Why do vegans choose to be vegans?

Question

im a vegetarian because i dont want animals to die so i can eat them since i wouldnt want to be eaten either. but nothing dies giving milk and eggs. the eggs were never fertilized so no one died there. and dairy cows are treated like friggin royalty or else their milk would taste disgusting.

seriously though no offence to vegans but really, why?

Answer 1

You do realize that a cow has to be pregnant to produce milk, don't you?  I mean, she's no different from other mammals.  Unfortunately, her baby is taken away shortly after birth so her milk can be sold for human consumption.  And, hey, what's up with THAT?  I'm an adult human, not a baby cow, so why would I drink cows' milk?

The cows are given hormones to increase milk production, and these hormones end up in your milk.  Their babies, as I mentioned, are taken away.  Once I learned that the sons of dairy cows become veal, well, that did it for me.  No more dairy.  The daughters of dairy cows, of course, follow in their mothers' hoofsteps and become dairy cows themselves.

With eggs, it is the treatment of the hens--90 percent of whom are kept in battery cages.  Go to www.eggindustry.com for more information.  Baby male layer chicks are killed at birth because they don't lay eggs and they don't produce enough flesh to be profitable as so-called "broiler" chickens.

And all animals, once their production declines, are killed.  Dairy cows become hamburgers, while the hens kept for their eggs usually become stock, nuggets, meat in low-grade pot-pies, or something else to hide the fact that their bodies are hideously battered from two years in a tiny cage with six or seven  other hens.

Answer 2

It is an ethical choice...the thought eating anything that could have potentially have been your pet (more strict vegan say anything that has a face or any products of an animal are included).

When I was a practicing vegan, dairy and by products were not prohibited in my book...I was just against killing the animal.  Even human moms give their babies milk and it is natural and a chicken egg that you cook has never been fertilized, therefore, no life has been lost, but almost like recycling because you use something that might have otherwise been thrown away.

(Know a lot of vegans will disagree, but this is my personal stance).

Answer 3

Hopefully you have been disavowed of the foolish notion that dairy cows are kept like "friggin royalty."  In no way is this ever true.  Even the most "humane" dairies still use those milking machines.  Heck, even the Amish use milking machines on their dairies!

There is nothing natural about drinking the milk of another species as an adult.  It's perverted and disgusting.  I don't care how good people think it "tastes."  That, to me, is like saying, "I know it's wrong to steal someone's car, but I just want it and it feels good to me, so I'm going to do it."

Hedonism and "nature" are not valid excuses for excess, cruelty, and gluttony.

Answer 4

The majority of animals raised for milk and eggs suffer more and for a longer period of time than those raised for flesh. I would rather eat a steak than eggs or dairy but I choose to exclude all of them from my diet.

I was not aware that being forced into pregnancy and then having your young taken away shortly after birth was similar to the treatment of royalty. Neither is being hooked up to a machine that sucks over 5x as much milk out of an animal than that animal should ever need to. Over stimulated mammary glands leads to overgrown tissue that can lead to teats dragging on the ground and becoming infected.

Egg laying hens rarely ever see the light of day and are forced to live their entire lives in their own urine and f***s.

http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan

http://www.farmsantuary.org/issues/facto...

Answer 5

Cage Chickens are treated in a cruel way, not being able to roam free, dust bathe etc.

So anything other than free range is unethical.

In regards to milk, vegans think cows are kept as slaves.

Vegans are pretty weird in my opinion. They don't even eat HONEY!

Answer 6

The money you pay to buy eggs and cheese goes towards torturing and killing animals. The animals that give you eggs and milk are tortured and then sent to the slaughterhouse to die. If anything, I would sooner eat meat than dairy and eggs for ethical reasons because at least killing them puts them out of their misery, because an animal raised for food is an animal that is doomed to be abused. The chickens are shoved in tiny cages and overfed, and once they stop producing eggs they are killed. Cows are forced to have calves and then seperated from them which causes them extreme anguish (because animals have feelings too). And they are not treated like royalty, many die of disease, but even if they were, they are eventually killed for their meat anyway.. I find it best to just avoid causing pain to any living creature.

Answer 7

first i was a vegan because what they do to the animals, with factory farms & such, & don't get me wrong, i still care. but i basically just do it for the health benefits.

Answer 8

I am only one vegan and so can only tell you why I personally became vegan.

I initially became vegetarian because I didn't think it was right to kill other animals when you could survive perfectly well without meat.

Concerns over how battery hens are treated made me switch to free-range eggs, and the environmental impact of the dairy industry in my home country (New Zealand) made me cut down on consumption of dairy products. I admired vegans because I thought they were "hard-core" but didn't really understand why they thought veganism was necessary.

I became vegan when I realised that the egg and dairy industries (including free-range) were just that: industries.

They view animals purely as production units: any animal that is not "productive" is killed.

This includes males chicks and calves, as well as animals that are too old/exhausted to continue "producing".

These discoveries lead me to decide that, for me to live in a way that was consistent with my own personal ethics, I had no choice but to become vegan. I thought it would be hard, but once I had made the decision there was no looking back... and it is so much easier than I thought it would be.

Simply put, becoming vegan was the best thing I have ever done in my life.

Answer 9

I was born vegan to vegan parents. What you choose to eat is your presonal choice.

Answer 10

Nothing dies for milk and eggs? Let me ask you this: who did nature intend to drink mother cow's milk, and where are they?? Do you have any idea of how dairy cows are treated? Veal calves? Hens? starvation and light deprivation induced shock? You really should google some stuff.

NOt only due to moral concerns, but because the vegan lifestyle is far healthier and more natural.

Answer 11

If you mean by "royalty" that the dairy cows:

-are artificially inseminated every 11 months in order to make them give birth and continue to produce milk (whereas if they were allowed to do that naturally, they would only have a calf every 2-3 years)

-often have sores on their udders from being over milked by painful machines

-are separated from their calves within the first few hours of birth...males are off to be crated for veal and females are groomed to be like their mothers....

-are branded on the face with a hot iron with no anestesia

If that's what you mean by "royalty", then cool. But if not, then  I'm not sure that you are truly informed about where milk comes from.

The dairy industry is closely tied to the meat industry - after the dairy cows are used up and cannot give more milk, they become hamburgers at McDonald's. I already touched on the incredibly inhumane treatment of the male calves for veal.

THAT's why I don't consume dairy. It's all just as cruel and dirty as the meat industry - if not more so.

Chickens have their beaks seared off while conscious so they don't peck one another. They are housed in cages that are so small they cannot turn around or spread their wings. They sit in their own and others' f***s. The male chicks who are born on the farm are tossed into dumpsters when they are hours old and are killed b/c they are "useless" (they cannot lay eggs). There are no laws protecting chickens when it comes to the slaughtering process. They can be fully conscious when they are dipped into the bath that scalds their feathers off - oh, by the way....that's what happens to chickens when they're too old to lay eggs. They are killed and used for food too.

May I suggest you watch the "Meet Your Meat" video on www.peta.org. I think that explains why vegans do what we do.

Cheers!

Answer 12

It is much about ones own health advantages.Check scientific/not sites for info.If a vegeterian goes vegan(but in a correct way,of course)he/she is to become even healthier with time

Answer 13

No, you're wrong about the milk part, the factories that pump cow's milk by machine overwork their milk supply that they develop puss and they still wont give their nipples enough time to heal so they pump their puss into the milk supply and it gets pasturized and we drink some of it. BTW, there is no such thing as a true vegan, that is almost impossible. Only 1 percent of this world is a true vegan.

Answer 14

because they treat the animals like sh*t and don't feed them properly and they have bad living conditions and stuff

or in a lot of places they do anyway

so they are against the bad living conditions and thats why they don't eat the eggs and stuff

or maybe they are against the fact that the animals have to live in captivity when they should be living in the wild

i don't really know...im not vegan

Answer 15

If you think dairy cows are treated like royalty, it's probably not even worth answering your question, but other people will read this so...

Dairy cows are not treated like royalty, they are treated like a commodity.  Cows, like all mammals including humans, have to reproduce in order to lactate.  Left to their own devices, cows would calf every two to three years and would (get this) use the milk they produce to nourish their young.  In an intensive dairy operation, they are artificially inseminated with a device even the industry itself calls a "rape rack" every 11 months.  Cows gestate for the same 9 months that humans do, so this means they are nearly constantly pregnant.  Calves would cut into the profit if they were allowed to drink the milk nature created for them, so they are removed from their mothers, who mourn for them, within 24 hours of birth.  The females are formula fed until they are old enough for the rape rack and the males are sold to the veal crates, where they are nearly starved for months (like friggin royalty!) until they are slaughtered for their pale, tender baby flesh.  Cows have been bred to have oversized udders; coupled with the hormones and steroids they are pumped full of, they produce many times the milk nature designed them to.  When you combine drastically increased milk production with mechanical milking, a painful infection of the udders called mastitis is the result and antibiotics are added to the chemical mix in an effort to keep it at bay.  Because mastitis is so widespread, though, control of it is next to impossible and the government has determined acceptable levels of blood and pus that are allowed to creep into the milk supply.  A cow should live for 15-20 years, but the endless cycle of pregnancy, birth and mechanical milking renders a cow useless after 4 or 5, at which point she is slaughtered for cheap burgers and the cycles continues with her daughters.

Laying hens have it even worse and are widely considered the most tortured of all livestock.  Some eggs have to be fertilized in order to keep a stock of layers; males chicks cannot produce so they are slaughtered by the tens of millions every year, as soon as they are sexed, often by being thrown alive into grinders or plastic garbage bags.  Poultry is exempt from the Humane Slaughter Practices Act, so when a hen's production slows and she's killed for dog food and nuggets, she has no legal protection to ensure that she's killed in anything resembling a humane way.

If you truly believe "nothing dies giving milk and eggs" you're kidding yourself.  If you're interested, read "Diet for a New America" and/or "The Food Revolution" by John Robbins.

Answer 16

Sorry, but you are wrong about "nothing dies giving milk and eggs"

The "process" of producing commercial eggs and dairy requires the death of many animals.

I really would encourage you to visit a commercial dairy farm. Not an "open day" where you get a sanitised view, go find a real dairy farm and see for yourself.

Here are my notes on issues with dairy, you can judge for yourself if you think its being "treated like friggin royalty "

Artificial incemination every year

Cows would naturally calve every 2-3 years. Dairy farms artificially inceminate them every 11 months. This causes excessive stress on the cows body, increses the chance of prolapse and generally "wears them out" in a few years, rather than a natural 20 years.

Protein enriched feed

The feed they are given is enriched with artificial growth foods. these are generally made with cattle meat protiens.

In the USA and some parts of Australiasia they use a hormone growth agent called recombinant bovine somatotropin. Its brand name is POSILAC® and its made by Monsanto. This increases milk yield and beef growth. This is a synthetic hormone. Its banned in the EU since 1988

The main mechanism these hormones work is by re-directing dietry nutrients from peripheral body tissue to mammary glands. effectively, they are slowly killing the cow.

70% of US cattle are injected with this growth hormone ( 2007 stats ) that the majority of the world will not entertain because they believe its too dangerous.

Bribe/feed caged carousels

These suck. They are large rotating carousels where the cows are caged in a space where they cannot move. They have "black boxes" on thier legs which communicate with the main operating computer. They are fed just the right amount of food depending on how much milk they gave yesterday. They have added growth food if thier production drops

One person can milk about 400 cattle on a carousel so there is no time for checking the animals health - they just milk them dry and kick them out.

killing bulls, excess calves and free martins at 1 week old

All bulls are killed at 1 week old, although some farms iin the UK started ( in 2006 ) shipping them to Continental Europe for veal again. They do not keep any back for breeding as they bring in new blood lines. In the UK we don't use dairy bull calves for veal anymore in country. They are either killed, or shipped out. Bull calves go to make low quality leather products such as cheap sofas.

They kill all free martins as there is a good chance they will be barren.

Strangly, they feed these animals with colostrum at birth to keep them alive, but then kill them a week later.

excess feeding to produce 60 lites of milk per day

The growth food is all designed to produce excess milk. Cows are naturally designed to produce about 15 litres. The european targets for 2009 are set at 90 litres, i don't think it need me to tell you if this is heading the right or wrong direction.

intensive rearing means low husbandry checks

As mentioned above, most automatic dairies have one milkmaid per session, thats it. I know a dairy farm with 1200 cattle and 3 employees. Tell me how they can ever check the cattle....

removing calves from mothers after colostrum feed

This is stressful, cows bawl for weeks for thier young, calling them to be fed. Obviously the calf cannot "run to mom" because its in dog food by now.

killing the cow at 7 years old

Cows can naturally live to 20 years old. Production dairy cows are killed after 4-6 births so are never kept after 7 years old.

Hope that helps.

Eggs has its whole range of issues. To get eggs at the required commercial price means killing all cockerals, and killing the layers at about 10-14 months old - left naturally a hen can live to 10 years old.

There is little to say about caged birds that isn't widely known. Seeing them first hand puts all those words into context. I highly recommend you get to see inside a layers shed - it has a profound effect on many people, including my regular meat-eating friends -they were more shocked than me.

A typical shed houses half a million laying hens, 4 to a cage, cages stacked 2.5 metres high, each being about 450 mm  square and 300mm high. They are about 50 rows wide and the shed is about 250 metres long. The gaps in the Isles between columns of cages is about 450mm - just enough for a human to do a sideways shuffle down them.

The food and water are fed through on a converyor and eggs carried away on a conveyor.

When viewing the scale of the operation, its easy to see how little attention is paid to welfare checks.

labels like freerange / organic etc mean very little in terms of how long the animal lives. The only way to eat eggs in a cruetly free way is via a hobby farm where they retain any cockerals and allow the hens to live a natural life