[Buddha-l] Victimized vegans?

[jkirk]

Hi Richard,

You didn't say if the Liberians you referred to eat eggs. My bet is that
they do, therefore they are not very de-facto vegans. They also wear leather
clothes. The kind of animal eating avoidance noted by your friend is
totemism in the classic sense: the clan is identical with its totem animal.
You don't eat the clan totem because it's felt to be like cannibalism. Thus,
this sort of meat avoidance is not based on a concept that eating the totem
is thieving from it or causing it suffering, as it is with vegans. 

However, most Africans do eat meat, as much as they can get, so the trade in
poached "bush-meat" from national parks is threatening every animal in
what's left of the jungles and savannahs, along with the ivory trade in
elephant tusks--killing the elephant just for its tusks--which end up being
exported to the lands of the Buddha: the Southeast and East Asian nations.
There the tusks are carved intricately and end up as objets d'art for
status-conscious consumers. 
Oh, the ironies of samsara.

As for what's denied to the bodhisattva--seems problematic in that one never
knows if one is a bodhisattva or not. Tibetan Buddhist monks often wear
leather shoes and woolen clothing when it's cold. They also eat meat. They
have taken the bodhisattva vow, but whether or not they are actually
bodhisattvas who by virtue of being such observe all the requirements you
listed, seems to be a murky question. 

Finally, it's a stretch to me to consider sheep shearing as stealing the
animal's wool, which is a resource that grows back. Shearing doesn't cause
the animal pain, either. Castration and slaughter do cause pain to animals.


Taking milk from cows while killing or neglecting their calves is a
commercial agriculture practice. I know people here in Idaho who keep one or
two cows for milking for family consumption, and they do not prevent the
calves from nursing. Thieving from the calf is not inevitable. I suspect
that the meager food supplies of cows in South Asia may have brought about
the practice of denying the calf milk. Has anyone ever seen a fat cow in
India? There maybe a few pampered ones, but most of them are lean if not
skinny and their milk production is quite limited compared to the
commodified cattle in the USA. 

I doubt that in the Buddha's time huge herds of cattle were kept in order to
run commercial milk enterprises, doubt also that milk was a commodity, as it
is today. Thus, the idea that taking milk for human consumption was stealing
from the calf could only have appeared because the cow's milk supply was
meager enough that her calf got short-changed in favor of the humans who
wanted to drink the milk.  

Joanna 
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On Thursday 10 May 2007 18:02, jkirk wrote:

> Mahatma Gandhi wrestled with these issues. He decided to not eat eggs
> because it was robbing the hen, in his view, nor would he accept milk
> because it was robbing the calf.

That is exactly the reasoning that one finds in the two Buddhist sutras I 
mentioned earlier. All dairy products, eggs and honey, as well as wool, are 
off limits to a bodhisattva, because acquiring them is a form of theft. Meat

and leather products can be obtained only through taking life. Anyone who
has 
vowed to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings has to think seriously

about causing animals suffering by stealing from them or taking their lives.
So what's a bodhisattva to eat or wear?

> He took all these
> quiddities seriously, to the point that he resembled a nut-case to many of
> his contemporaries.

Surely to anyone who has taken on any task as quixotic as relieving the 
suffering of all sentient beings is not going to be detained by 
considerations of what less altruistic people think of her.

> Vegans enforce their warped views on children, unlike the Mahatma.

This may be an over-generalization. In fact, it is for sure. When I was a 
vegan, I certainly did not require anyone else in my life to follow suit. 
Other vegans I have known have also seen it as a special calling, sort of 
like celibacy, not as a requirement for the entire human race. The problem 
for me was that being a vegan requires so much vigilance that it becomes all

but impossible to eat socially, and I felt I had better avoid acquiring yet 
one more anti-social tendency. 

Perhaps I should have moved to Africa. An African friend of mine said that
in 
his country (Liberia) all people belong to social units than have strict
meat 
taboos. They can eat animal flesh, but everyone has animals whose flesh is 
taboo. People are required to marry outside their social units. The result
is 
that most people end up observing both the man's and the woman's dietary 
taboos, thereby eliminating all meat from the household diet. And Africans 
(like many other peoples in the world) stop drinking milk when they are 
weaned from their mothers and quickly become lactose intolerant, so they eat

no dairy products. Although not philosophically committed to veganism, many 
Africans are de facto vegans.

> My sense 
> of the ones that I have met is that they are fanatics and not educated in
> the history of dietary ideologies and restrictions, or lack of them.

Again, you  over-generalize. You've met me, and I'm sure you'll agree that I

do not have a fanatical bone in my body. I'll bet you know a lot more vegans

than you are aware of. Most of the ones I know are pretty unobtrusive about 
it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am no longer a vegetarian, let alone a

vegan. But I consider it a moral weakness (akrasia) on my part and keep 
resolving to get back to my former dietary habits. Philosophically, I fully 
agree with veganism. Try as I might, I cannot find any flaws in the
arguments 
in favor of veganism as a moral position, so I can't manage to find it as 
ridiculous as you do, Joanna. I just find it very difficult to live up to 
this particular moral conviction in a society whose economy is based largely

on death and destruction. Although I am philosophically opposed to driving 
cars and eating animal products, I do both (and feel diminished thereby).

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
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