[Just Vegan Stuff]
Inhales rage about people thinking kindness is a limited commodity
Exhales animal welfare is a human rights issue too

I’m lucky to be in a workplace where I have other vegans to vent a little

The past day on the internet has been hard but I’m trying my best to be patient and understanding

But I am so frustrated that in 2020 people still seriously think that caring about animals negates caring about people

I’m so tired of it. Caring about multiple things is possible. It doesn’t mean you think those things are the SAME either

The one thing I wish I could help educate people more about

Is that even if you don’t care about animals in the least, a lot of the issues that we talk about in veganism are human rights issues too....like you could totally take animals out of the equation, and factory farming is a human rights DISASTER

There is no comparing meat packing plant workers to immigrant farm workers, I’m sorry.

Do we need better conditions for farm workers? Yes.

And I think those conditions are getting more and more public attention and need to keep getting it. Better pay, better conditions, help with immigration since a huge number of those workers are immigrants who get little help despite the important work they do

Meat packing workers conditions are NOT getting better because there is virtually not public scrutiny

People genuinely do not want to know what happens in meat packing plants because of the animal issues being so volatile, and because of it, horrid working conditions run rampant and human being suffer

In a grand sweep to justify factory farming as a necessary evil, we allow the worst human working conditions in the country to carry on, totally sanctioned, without batting an eye

It has the worst injury rate, a high mortality rate, unsanitary conditions, and, arguably worst of all

Has a well documented negative impact on the emotional wellbeing of the workers and unfortunately, their communities

These jobs are usually in poor, isolated towns

They drive up rates of crime and domestic violence because they take young, poor men and pay them to do miserable, dangerous, depressing work with no support

They get ignored and discarded by our whole society every time we pretend this model is fine, or even worse. A necessary evil to the modern world.

It’s extremely fucked up

And it’s extremely callous to pretend that it’s not an inevitable part of the equation. The people who work in this industry get chewed up and spit out. It’s not a bad job, it’s the worst job. By almost every metric, it fails to meet any standard of workplace safety and well being for the developed world.

It’s all well and good that we express outrage about amazon warehouse workers while Tyson chicken has been targeting and employing primarily poor Blach women in the south for decades, to do unsafe, repetitive proscessing work with insanely high injury rates, and all the same bathroom and break issues that amazon has been getting flayed for

It’s all well and good to talk the talk about how we know factory farming is bad, but unless we actually criticize these industries, and try to not support them, whether that’s through veganism or just reduction, or trying, when possible, to get meat from non-corporate sources

I could go on and on. I don’t know. I just get really frustrated when I see people dismissing these issues as niche, or somehow counter to human rights issues. They’re not. They are massive industries with claws, deep in the world’s class and racial inequality issues.

These things are deep roots in immigration, poverty, women’s issues, public and mental health

And they pay a lot of money to make sure people don’t want to talk about it.

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m not gonna pretend I’m not that bleeding heart vegan your mom warned you about

I became vegan first and foremost for animals, and because I genuinely believe that modern commodification of living beings is unethical to core. Because I really believe that animals feel pain the same way anyone does, and we all have shared ancestry and that if we can’t live gently without an expectation of something in return, then what’s even the point

But damn man, these factories could be processing rocks and the way they impact humans and our society would be just as bad

I don’t even think it’s ALWAYS unethical to consume animals per se. I think in a historical or traditional context, it’s a natural order that can be respected as a morally ambiguous reality of the natural world.

I DONT REALLY HAVE ANY ANSWERS HERE EITHER. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and all that

But I regularly see people getting huffy about animal agriculture while refusing to acknowledge it as a pillar of our society, and thus, a pillar of the capitalist hellscape we met contend with

It’s the lowest hanging damn fruit

fucking consigned

Consigned

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