[Discussion] Packaging, Tyres, and the Vegan Blindspot
[Discussion] Packaging, Tyres, and the Vegan Blindspot
If you've read my previous post detailing my process of discovering that plastics, paper, cardboard, inks, dyes, glues and ceramics all can contain animal products - not just their excretions, in each of these cases flesh and bones may be used - then you may be remembering an argument vegans sometimes get which is that no one can be 100% vegan. While this is a nirvana fallacy it has got me thinking these last couple months as to what the limit of individual responsibility is.
In the past I have said vegans shouldn't wear leather even if they already bought it because it is commodification and objectification and a strong psychological indicator that leather as a concept is OK on some level.
But if we extend this logic to the keyboard I'm using to type this, what if the plastic contains traces of tallow used in plastic manufacturing, is that disrespectful to the animals that died? OK maybe you could argue it doesn't make much of a different now, "maybe", you say, "the animal flesh content is so low and not even confirmed so the psychological/signalling impact is minimal right" ignoring the fact that turns the victim's deaths into a numbers game, who die to have their tortured bodies desecrated into the very materials that literally surround our entire lives in this death cult society (most of us at least), so yeah ignoring that this argument says "its OK because its only a little bit of dead animal" what about new purchases?
The other week my mouse broke, I use it with my laptop because I find it much more convenient than the track-pad, and playing Mineclonia is basically impossible without it. But, for most use cases I can get by with a keyboard, I use a tiling window manager so most of my computer navigation is done by keyboard anyway. Anyway my point is, how could I justify paying for what is probably dead animal parts in the plastic, inks, and then the cardboard and inks the mouse comes in. So I tried contacting Razer and Steelseries, Razer was more promising but eventually both admitted they could not answer my question and promised to look into it in the future and provide information on their website (I'll believe it when I see it) I've yet to contact Asus, Logitech and probably a bunch of other manufacturers but at the moment its just more effort than its worth I spent weeks going back and forth with Razer to no avail, and what if Asus and Logitech don't know either? I know this is a pessimistic way to think and I should just try contacting them because this is the only way things will get better if we just start by asking.
But thats not all, I recently lost my better hairbrush and haven't even begun looking for a vegan one yet due to lack of motivation, I'm on my last hair bobble and I don't know any vegan options for that either.
I'm sorry this sounds like complaining and it mostly is but my point is basically the anti vegan point but from the other side: it is hard if not impossible to be 100% vegan, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try right? like individually none of these things justify killing an animal if I stood in front of a pig I couldn't say I'm sorry I've got to crush your bones into black ink to print a brochure manual for my new mouse because its slightly more comfortable than my laptop track-pad, while that is true taken in aggregate this is a very difficult moral principle to uphold,
I'm not asking for permission to buy these things and I'm not going to suddenly become an ex vegan, but I'm angry at this society that they put dead animal parts in so much, that they make people unwitting participants in their death cult, what about for example if I go to a restaurant and restaurants have chairs right? and those chairs are either plastic or they may have leather or non vegan wood veneer or wood glue. Eventually these will need replacing. But wait I hear you say, "that's not part of what you're paying for so there is no supply demand relationship there! That's a choice the restaurant makes independently of a vegan customers choices" is it independent though? lets imagine two restaurants one selling vegan options and one owned by a vegan cooperative, the owners have down their best to source as many vegan materials as they can for their vegan decor, they only use vegan cleaning products even their menu leaflets are printed with soy ink on vegan paper, this is all great but now lets say vegans go to the non vegan restaurant thinking they are only responsible for the things they directly pay for: of course the non vegan restaurant is more popular because it caters to a wider group of people, and within a few years the vegan restaurant closes down: now there's one less restaurant in the world actually committed to vegan ideals. So through this story I think we can come to understand that although non vegan components of businesses are not practiced for us they are practiced on out behalf, which makes us culpable, essentially washing the blood from our hands for a practice we know is happening on our behalf but we choose to ignore as not out responsibility.
So where am I going with this tangent about restaurants: well given the prevalence of potentially non vegan materials: items like computer equipment, tyres and shipping/packing materials may also technically be non-vegan, and if we can reasonably assume there's a good chance non vegan computer equipment or tyres were put through use and wore down, then we can surmise that a fraction of any purchase we make goes towards buying new tyres of hard-drives, now if we were making those purchases we would get Michelin tyres https://veganfoundry.com/are-tyres-vegan/ or Seagate hard-drives (contact my simplex for the correspondence screenshots) but since we don't know what decisions these companies are making and 99% of people aren't vegan the odds are good that a fraction of your money went to buying new tyres or hard-drives or whatever else that contains animal flesh.
What about this very site even? Despite the owners themselves presumably being vegan are they even aware that the hard-drives may contain animal products? Does me posting this contribute to the ongoing objectification and commodification of animal victims flesh in the plastic manufacturing industry?
I don't have these answers and I'm feeling totally lost. My only hope is that more vegans will take at least some steps to ameliorate these issues perhaps by contacting companies, I myself will be recontacting the companies that confirmed the vegan status of their products and packaging and asking them if they would include this information on their FAQ pages as soon as I can get the motivation to do that
NB The attached image is the first published book to be certified vegan, so at least I can buy that item with a clear conscience probably haha
While this is a nirvana fallacy it has got me thinking these last couple months as to what the limit of individual responsibility is.
Personal responsibility is tied to agency, so it's going to look different for every person. Do what's practicably in your power; what that looks like is ultimately up to you. If you can do more, you should, however its not always apparent if and when doing more is sustainable for ourselves.
Personally, I worry less about derivative animal products that couldn't exist without mass animal agriculture propping them up. I'll obviously do what I can when it's readily apparent, and I'll try to generally stay informed, but there's also a limit to how much time and mental effort I can spend on every tiny detail of my life.
Also, if you come across something surprising that might commonly be overlooked (like tires), share it! You'll be doing more good than just abstaining yourself by raising awareness.
6Yeah some part of me knows that or I wouldnt be using websites at all for fear of the hard drives that sustain it carrying animal flesh in their inks glues and plastics, but I just feel this incredible pressure and the worst part is for 4 years I thought I was divorced from this psycho shit, I thought, yeah I can do more to help others go vegan but as for me: I don't pay for animal body parts in anything that I buy directly at least, then I think the first one I found out about was ink so I was like ok there seems to be vegan pens and printer ink and vegan hair dye and what not this doesnt seem too hard, but its when I found out that the vegan society doesnt even look at product packaging that it started getting hard. As for like mental strain what would you think of someone who said I needed cheering up so I got a dairy ice cream, like you could just not right. Buying that ice cream is murder
3I think that I'd be a bit dubious that they're really doing all they can, but it is what it is.
In my first year of transitioning to veganism, I went vegetarian. I definitely knew going vegan was the right thing to do, but I was also worried about it being too hard and me just quitting, saying fuck it, and going back to pretending that there wasn't anything wrong with eating flesh.
Was I really doing all I could in that year, even though I knew the right thing to do and still didn't do it? I honestly don't know.
Then again, it's people like you who were much more committed than I was that helped push me to actually become vegan. So while I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, I also don't want to be someone that doesn't hold them accountable at all.
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These are the questions we must ask ourselves, I'm due for some new tires so I will opt for Michelin ones at Costco. I wonder if the Costco cards contain animal products in the ink and plastic. I'm really interested now in that book you included in the post.
3Thank you, I'm not sure if its every Micheliln tyre but they certainly released at least one vegan tyre product youll have to double check!
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