[Buddha-l] Victimized vegans?

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

jkirk schreef:
> "And the excuse that drinking milk is stealing from a calf is just turning
> nature into private property, which is stupid."
>
> Hmmmm--theoretically a good point. However, cows were kept as property from
> time immemorial, either by householders or in herds by herding cultures.
> Same goes for crops, trees, land, on and on. Unfortunately the concept of
> private property is ancient, and if there was a commons shared among a
> group, woe to anyone not of the sharing group who availed of their commons.
> Joanna
>
>   
Of course you're right about that, I meant to say that stelaing implies 
ownership, and in my mind an owner is a person. Of course a cow can be a 
property of a person, but I don't think that milk of the cow is a 
propery of the calf in the same way.  Gandhi committed the Disney 
fallacy, in Disneys stories animals and things become persons. Of course 
there's nothing wrong with sparing some milk for a calf, but nature is 
messy and produces in abundance, making room for parasites in all 
possible ways. Human beings have always been parasites, they had to be 
in order to survive. I don't think that it's immoral, it's amoral.


-- 

Erik


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