Me personally? I don't know if I'd applaud it, because if someone's still eating animal products (a) they still see animals as resources to exploit, not individuals, and (b) the chicken you kill on Tuesday doesn't really care about the chicken you didn't kill on Monday.
But for sure it's a great first step. Some people need time to adjust and I support anything that moves us in the direction of kindness towards animals.
I'm a big fan of the show. But we need to realize that we actually do have a responsibility to minimize the harm we cause when we're able to. I wouldn't accept "but you have a phone tho" or "no ethical consumption under capitalism" as justifications for buying a child-killing SUV, for example. It's just kinda defeatist.
And even if my choices make literally zero difference, and the world is exactly the same with or without my actions (which is just not the case), I still sleep better knowing I'm not contributing to the extreme and obvious harms of animal agriculture.
Right, this is a very common mindset to have. There are two things to think about that come to mind for me:
First is that (almost) everyone thinks factory farming is bad, but around 75% of all land animals in animal agriculture are factory farmed. In the US, it's around 99.7%. In particular it's a very safe bet that if you eat a random chicken, while they were alive they were in abject misery.
Second is I think animals have an inherent right to life that we shouldn't infringe upon. I wouldn't suddenly think it's ok if someone shot and instantly killed a dog, even if they were loved their entire life and only had "one bad day." It also wouldn't make it ok if someone ate the dog afterwards, because that doesn't really matter to the dog. All animals want to live, and killing them unnecessarily is wrong.
It's just sad seeing the dissonance between people who don't make the connection (or lack thereof) between simultaneously thinking "I have a dead, tortured animal on my plate" and "I'm a good person," especially when it's so easy to just not hurt animals.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. These behaviors are so normal because that contradiction is so commonplace.
Plastic is bad for the environment. Leather is worse. The most sustainable thing to do is to use neither.
This isn't true for the vast majority of commercial honey unfortunately. If you're buying it from the supermarket, or any producer that operates at even medium scale, they'll clip the wings of the queen so that the hive is unable to leave even if they want to.
"No it isn't"
"Yes it is"
Argument won, great job 👍
There are plenty of other spaces where vegans can respond to "plants feel pain" and "but what about lions" a million times a day, but that gets old pretty quick. The goal is to have a space where vegans can just interact amongst themselves, which necessarily requires some degree of gatekeeping
No of course not. I was mostly just trying to make the case that killing whales isn't good for the environment, or is at least strictly worse than not killing them. The sustainability of whaling mostly refers to killing just few enough that we can continue killing them indefinitely, rather than any sort of positive effect on the environment. Clearly if we were actually interested in environmental sustainability we just wouldn't be killing whales at all.
Did you have any thoughts about the other two points I made? I'm also curious why you're so passionate about defending people who kill whales, since this seems like a pretty uncommon opinion.
Sure we can do that, I just didn't want to hijack a conversation about what makes killing whales ok with a bunch of other separate considerations.
Separately, there's the environmental impact. No matter how sustainable the whaling is, it's not like they're overpopulating and need to be culled or something. Whales are important in the ocean ecosystem, and they're good at sequestering carbon on the sea floor for a very very long time when they die. It seems pretty obvious to me that killing whales is done out of self interest (we like eating them, it's our tradition, etc.) rather than out of some altruistic sense of duty to preserve the ecosystem, and not killing them at all would be the most sustainable solution.
And finally, I don't know a ton about it but evidently there are some pretty serious health concerns with eating whales, that makes it seem like you could argue for not eating them (and therefore not killing them) purely out of self-interest to maintain your own personal health.
So from what you're saying, it seems like not only is killing whales unnecessary for the Faroer anymore, but the document you linked seems to imply that it's actively detrimental to their health.
Also this response doesn't really engage with what I said before about the lines of reasoning being flawed. You're painting a picture of how whaling has been an integral part of their cultural history, and that's interesting information, but it doesn't really relate to whether it's the right thing to do.
So again, it's an argument of the form "X is ok because it's cultural and we've been doing X for a long time," which I don't think is very persuasive.
And one more thing: you're now saying that they don't kill whales commercially? So "Y is ok because we would be economically ruined if we didn't do Y" doesn't even apply, right? Or am I reading what you said incorrectly?
I recommend looking at my response to the reply about "the good place" and continuing the thread there, it's the same ideas.