jmcquown wrote:

>
> To my understanding, Vegans don't eat any animal products at all. Strictly
> vegetables and grains. No butter, no nothing that has anything to do with
> animals including butter or milk from cows or goats. Strict Vegans also
> won't eat honey although I have no idea what this has to do with "animal"
> products since bees aren't animals. Vegetarians are more moderate, using
> dairy products including cheese, butter but won't eat meat, fish or poultry.

From what I can gather, veganism is a way of living that excludes all forms of
exploitation of animals.

BTW.... Bees are animals. Their view is that bees are enslaved and exploited in
order to produce honey. In reality, and that may be a difficult concept for
vegans to wrap their heads around, only one bee in a hive is enslaved. That is
the queen. The rest of the bees are free to come and go as they please. If
something happens to the queen the whole hive will get up and move.

It is fascinating that something like honey can not be vegan because it involves
the exploitation of an animal that has a natural tendency to live wherever there
is a queen and spends its entire live flying back and forth to gather pollen
without any training at all. Yet Vegans generally espouse the virtues of organic
farming. That means that they use shit for fertilizer. Most of that shit comes
from cows and other animals on farms that are raising them for meat, or milk.

I wonder how they would ever have survived in the 19th century, before the days
of mechanized tractors. Farmers generally used horses or oxen to work their
fields. They used them to pull plows, the haul wagons, to operate various types
of farm equipment. The entire agricultural system replied almost entirely on the
exploitation of animals.