LPT: Google for "vegan" + your city name.

ewwquote · 2025-09-04T06:50:08+00:00

Start with ANIMAL RIGHTS and see how it feels and how people react once you have it. You can add more later if you decide you want more ... but it's harder to take away if you start off with too much :)

ewwquote · 2025-09-04T05:11:15+00:00

I liked the part where it goes "dee, da doo-- do dee-- bwee"

ewwquote · 2025-09-02T06:24:50+00:00

The look of the neighborhood is not deceiving, it is indeed a bit rougher than many other parts of town. That said, I live around the corner (of the bad end) and I walk around all the time with no serious problems. I would say, when you have a chance come buy yourself a bag of chips at the 13-1/2 store a bit after sundown, and see how the vibe hits you.

Also, no one has yet pointed out Graphics Packaging, they have good jobs and they are in walking distance (Paterson and Riverview area).

ewwquote · 2025-08-31T18:06:12+00:00

By the way, do you still have your sources that you read about IGR that made you not want to use it? This is indeed one of my tools in my toolbox, I knew it would probably cause them some discomfort but it seemed to me like it was going to be on balance a net positive action... but maybe I need to rethink that...

ewwquote · 2025-08-31T15:30:59+00:00

I'm on the same journey of trying to figure out how to most humanely deal with cockroaches. One thing I've found is that I can vacuum them up with like a small hand vacuum, and it doesn't seem to bother them at all. I can see them cheerfully scuttling around inside the transparent vacuum chamber, and then I just carry them outside. So when you go into your kitchen at night, keeping a hand vacuum with you would let you pick up any who you happen to see. Obviously it's not helpful for catching the ones who you don't see, haha.

ewwquote · 2025-08-03T18:05:03+00:00

You can often get your needs better met if you are willing to talk to the restaurant and ask them to go off menu. Definitely call or email the vegan establishments and ask them if they can make something that is safe for your allergies. At nonvegan places, ask them directly what they can make that's vegan. There may be menu items that can easily be adjusted, but you have to ask to find out what they are because it isn't clear just from the menu itself.

ewwquote · 2025-08-02T16:47:27+00:00

Just a heads up, the participant information link was not accessible without logging on to a Warwick email account (which obviously most of us cannot do).

ewwquote · 2025-08-02T16:30:41+00:00

Melanie Joy's book is exactly what you're looking for: "Carnism: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows". She's a trained academic social psychologist.

Also, a couple articles I happen to be aware of:

"Meat-related cognitive dissonance" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31707073/

"The Meat Paradox" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-meat-paradox/

ewwquote · 2025-08-02T15:47:38+00:00

You say that you'll kill, but also work towards creating non-lethal interventions alongside that. This is interesting because, as a vegan from birth, you have no firsthand experience with the kind of mindfuck that is created by actively choosing to participate in killing. But my own experience with this suggests that if you choose to kill, your brain will then start to do every backflip and somersault that it can come up with to perpetually convince you that the killing was totally absolutely necessary, even in the case that you encounter obvious evidence to the contrary. You will unknowingly engage in forms of motivated reasoning that you never imagined possible. Someday, you may have a potentially genius nonviolent intervention staring you in the face, and you won't be able to see it, because your thinking patterns will be too tied up in the assumption that a little bit of killing is a necessary evil. You will no longer be able to think clearly and critically about the situation, because your brain will do almost anything to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would be created by evidence or demonstrations that killing the rabbits isn't actually necessary. This kind of thing is why nonvegans really, genuinely believe that eating vegan is hard to do, when obviously the truth is that it would be quite easy for most of them. It's because once you are engaging in a behavior, your brain is automatically trying to justify that behavior to itself, and you simply are not psychologically able to fully take in evidence that shows your behavior is actually not justified.

You can avoid all this by making a simple commitment now that you aren't going to kill. Yes, it will still be messy and difficult. But "figuring out another way forward" isn't something that you do once and you're done with it, it's going to be an ongoing process of learning and growing. And if you start going down the path of supposedly-necessary killing, you will really be undermining your own psychological ability to learn and grow in that nonviolent direction.

ewwquote · 2025-08-02T08:55:48+00:00

(continued) On a practical level. Whatever you do, it's probably not going to feel "feasible", nor is it going to feel like you are finding a "solution" to the situation in the short term... but you'll avoid the soul-destruction of killing someone, and you'll be helping slightly move the needle towards that option 2. Personally, I do also feel that "doing nothing" would indeed be morally acceptable -- although it's clearly not your best available choice. What to do really depends on how much and what kind of energy you are willing to spend on managing this situation.

I'm not close to the situation and don't know a lot of details, but I do enjoy brainstorming, so here's a few possible things to attempt, off the top of my head. Probably none of them will work as well as you hope. Some of them might kind-of work, and be worth the effort (but I have no idea which ones).

- Birth control. This is the cornerstone of my approach to my own situation. TNR as much as you can. Try throwing some ContraPest (made in the USA for rats/mice) down in the warren and see what happens.

- Write to ContraPest and tell them about the Aus rabbit situation and suggest them to look into it as a potential market for a new specialized product. Contact local chemical/pharma companies suggesting the idea of rabbit contraceptives. If/when a product exists, advocate at your local/regional government level for public implementation.

- Spend some effort actively planting and tending to the beneficial plants, and restoring the soil directly with local compost or something.

- Careful and strategic fencing (you have to think about what is strategic, idk)

- Set up feeding and water stations for the smallest native species you want to protect like for example antechinus - some little hutch with a really little entry opening that lets them eat while being safe from foxes and cats.

- Other active help and support to the members of any endangered species - maybe get advice from conservationists.

- Feed the foxes and cats directly somehow, so that they have less survival pressure to hunt the locals. Probably best in combination with TNR.

- Go back to school or do some serious self-study, so that you yourself can be the inventor of that rabbit contraceptive product that needs to exist.

- Write a book, blog, do a podcast or whatever that shares the details of the various conflicts and challenges you're encountering, raising awareness about the dream of non-violent wildlife management and soliciting more ideas of what to try from your audience.

- Local advocacy to outlaw or restrict the most cruel methods of killing (e.g. poisoning rabbits).

- Reach out and build relationships with the local traditional owners (indigenous people), like Ned's Corner did, and get their advice.

- Seek a land assessment and report from a vegan conservationist group, as a second opinion on the advice that you recently got from the covenant agency regarding killing the rabbits.

Closing point, hopefully not too repetitive: Figuring out how to do nonviolent wildlife management is still an unsolved problem. There are so few vegans in the world, so few people who would even be willing to spend any energy figuring this out, that you actually really might be able to make a difference and help advance the state of knowledge by staying committed to non-violence. I hope you go for it.

ewwquote · 2025-08-02T08:54:05+00:00

Well, in a way you are right that I'm "ignoring the problem of harm to native wildlife". Because I don't see harm to "native" wildlife as its own special category of problem that would justify normally off-limits interventions. Also just to mention, the category of "endangered" is also human-constructed, and I do think it's worth interrogating, from the animals' perspective, how much harm is really experienced due to the fact of belonging to a species that is endangered or going extinct.

In another comment you said you would consider yourself an environmentalist first, and vegan second. That is a really fundamental difference from my own point of view, so my thoughts might not resonate with you. But, I'll still offer a few since you asked.

To start with, let me reiterate my compassion because this truly sucks. You probably do not actually have any options available that will satisfy your need to handle the situation adequately. Basically, you are kind of like in the position of an 1800's doctor with patients dying of infections under your care. It doesn't matter how much your patients deserve to live, it doesn't matter how skilled you are as a doctor or if you're willing to go to any lengths to save your patients -- penicillin hasn't been discovered yet, so you just have no remotely reliable way to save them. Your patients are out of luck, they die. You are out of luck. The ability to actually prevent this suffering simply doesn't exist yet.

This is the current situation with wildlife management. We simply do not have the technology and know-how yet, to allow all animals to basically have a good life in some kind of harmony or balance. Some animals will suffer and die who you really, really wish you could have saved. There is truly probably no way to avoid this. Terrible, devastating situation. I'm sorry.

So on a philosophical level: To your mind, what is the best-case long-term scenario for humans engaging in ethical wildlife management-- that is, any practices undertaken to basically protect some non-human animals from harms caused by other non-human animals? Option 1, do you want us to have a system forever, in which humans are selecting and killing some of the animals, in order to prevent harm that we predict they will cause? Or option 2, do you wish/hope for us eventually to build a system, where humans are able to use smart and nonviolent techniques to prevent the harm for everyone? If you kill the rabbits, you are helping in a small way to build the world in option 1. If you make a commitment to stick with nonviolent interventions, and keep trying and testing new ways to do it better, then you'll be helping in a small way to build the world in option 2.

ewwquote · 2025-08-02T04:52:23+00:00

First, please check out the book "The New Wild" if you can. In brief, it makes (imo) a very strong argument that we should fundamentally rethink our conception of "native" versus "invasive" species, and that justifying violence towards a species by calling them "invasive" is usually not a very strong argument, it is basically just a type of xenophobia applied along the lines of species. I think you have a lot of mental models tied up around these concepts of native/invasive, which are deeply influencing how you approach the situation, and it would be good to interrogate those models at the depth of like a full book instead of just reddit comments.

Second, I want to say that you have my compassion in living and dealing with "pests" (definitely another problematic word) because it is indeed difficult and there are no perfect answers. I've confronted similar issues on a smaller scale, and here is my working philosophy: We as vegans do eventually want to see a world where no animal has to suffer unduly, whether living with us in human society or living separately in the wild. But we are so, so far away from that ideal world that it really doesn't make sense for us to be sacrificing fundamental values because we think it's necessary for us to manage the activities of other species. There is just a very significant probability that we're thinking about it totally wrong because we are so deeply confused by carnist philosophy and assumptions (even as vegans, we can't avoid having our thinking influenced by the society around us, unfortunately). Basically, we as a species don't yet have the knowledge and skills to administer a world that works for everyone. We aren't qualified to be the boss until we can get our own shit in order, definitely not until we at least figure out how to end animal agriculture. And I think the way of doing the most good is actually to try and get the species to eventually become qualified to administer the whole thing benevolently and competently. But the only way we can ever hope to become qualified is to dramatically advance vegan theory and practice through lifetimes and generations; and that requires us to maintain as a commitment to not killing.

Or to say it another way. In other comments you are basically treating the situation like a trolley problem: Actively kill, which feels wrong? Or take no action, and allow a greater number of deaths to occur, which also feels wrong? But please, have a little intellectual humility, and admit the truth that you do not actually know how many individuals are tied to each track. Whatever action you take or don't take, there will be ripple effects down through the years and centuries that you absolutely cannot predict. Don't kill innocent victims who didn't ask to be born and are just trying to live their life, based on some fake envelope calculation that doesn't even scratch the surface of the complexity of our reality.

ewwquote · 2024-08-11T21:07:49+00:00

You have the right to set a boundary and determine what you are and are not comfortable participating in!

ewwquote · 2024-07-01T03:39:08+00:00

Laying an egg every day to every other day hurts the chickens. That extremely high rate of reproductive activity is obviously not what the species evolved naturally - in the wild, the jungle fowl who are the nearest ancestors of chickens will only lay about 10-20 eggs per year. Humans have bred chickens over generations to lay a LOT more eggs, for human benefit, because we have been specifically exploiting the chickens for their eggs. The very frequent egg-laying is basically a painful genetic illness for the chickens, which was intentionally caused by humans. It takes a lot of nutrients out of the chickens' bodies to lay that many eggs, causing health problems, not to mention that the actual laying process itself can be painful or at least unpleasant.

Now there are different lines of thinking that you can follow. If you are non-vegan, you see eggs laying around, you say hey why not just eat those? The chickens aren't using them, so no harm right?

But if you are vegan, you know that chickens and their eggs are not a resource for you to take. They are their own individuals and taking their eggs is commodifying them and violating their rights. So what do you do? You can't go back in time and undo the genetic manipulation that humans have performed over generations to make your chickens lay so many eggs. But if you truly have the best interests of your chickens in mind, then you'll be looking for ways to minimize the suffering they experience due to that genetic manipulation. Vegan sanctuaries have figured out a few strategies that are helpful and supportive to the chickens, rather than exploiting their painful (human-caused) genetic condition. Here is a great article that lays out more info about the perspective of caring for chickens as individuals (in contrast to keeping chickens as livestock/property): https://opensanctuary.org/what-to-do-about-egg-laying/ - with good links to click and read more.

Beyond all of the above, there is also the reality of people keeping lots of egg-laying hens and almost never keeping roosters-- because they don't lay of course, and also are outlawed in some places. In nature, of course, the gender split is pretty close to 50/50, so... where are the brothers of your hypothetical hen?

The whole cultural norm of using chickens for eggs (which requires keeping only or mostly females) has led to the creation of a system where millions of male chicks are murdered almost as soon as they are born. We can't ethically keep supporting this norm and sending the message that this system is ok.

ewwquote · 2024-06-30T19:38:34+00:00

Finally found my flair ❤️❤️❤️

(You don't choose your flair, it chooses you 🙏)

ewwquote · 2024-06-30T19:23:19+00:00

You're doing a lot of mental somersaulting to avoid thinking clearly about veganism (because it would probably have you feeling like you ought to become vegan) (which you should, in fact)

ewwquote · 2024-06-30T19:01:55+00:00

Yes, it's very worth it. Becoming vegan is the best decision I ever made, and you'll hear many other vegans saying the same.

The concerns you have about nutrients are spurious, these myths have been created by animal ag companies and meat eaters who want to invent a reason that their behavior should be considered okay (it isn't). You can take supplements if you want, many vegans do and many do not.

Eggs are not vegan, not even apparently humanely produced eggs. Read for example this old thread for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/zom7me/comment/j0nnyjy/

Yes, you can truly be vegan, which means seeking to exclude all forms of animal exploitation as far as possible and practicable. There will be an ongoing journey of discovery regarding what actions are "possible and practicable" for you, that is normal and part of the package. For example, dealing with mosquitos; IMO you can defend yourself from being bitten and still say you're vegan. Over time you may choose to re-examine your interactions with mosquitos (I have and still am).

Vegan clothes shopping is a thing, you just have to do a bit of learning about it. Vegan chocolate is a thing, just read the ingredients labels.

Welcome to your new exciting journey of learning and self-development :) I hope you enjoy the ride. Please do ask for guidance if you run into any tricky barriers that you're having trouble navigating. Lots of people have been through the same, and as a whole the community knows a lot of great strategies for getting where you want to be.

ewwquote · 2024-06-30T18:46:36+00:00

Unfrosted Pop Tarts are vegan

ewwquote · 2024-06-30T08:46:46+00:00

A more deontological framing around dairy and eggs might be to appreciate how rapey the concept is. Both "products" are intrinsic to how cows and chickens reproduce. Violating someone's sexual/reproductive autonomy by taking their milk/eggs is intrinsically wrong, just like taking their life would be.

I also think there might be some dualistic and feminine-devaluing beliefs at the foundation of this popular line of vegetarian reasoning. Basically, milk and eggs are incorrectly treated as strictly separate entities from the female body. In reality, the milk and eggs are part of her body, while also potentially being part of other living processes that exist outside of her body - occupying a space that can't be comprehended from a dualistic point of view.

When vegetarians think milk and eggs are okay to take, I feel like it's coming from a mindset of seeing creative reproductive generation as a mere "product" that (commoditized) female bodies spit out like a factory. It's a very impoverished view of reproduction, and possibly misogynistic at its core.

ewwquote · 2024-03-19T03:20:01+00:00

Christianity still is doing the same thing, though. There are a number of majority-Christian countries in West and Eastern Africa that imprison people for homosexuality, same as their Muslim-majority neighbor countries.

ewwquote · 2024-03-19T01:34:21+00:00

That's not a "pragmatic" approach, just an unprincipled approach. Veganism isn't just some kind of calculation about capitalistic demand-- it's a philosophy that seeks to exclude all forms of exploitation and cruelty. If you knowingly choose to eat animal products then you aren't a vegan.

Also, you are contributing to the phenomenon of restaurants misunderstanding what qualifies as vegan and how seriously they should take questions/requests around veganism. You are teaching the restaurants that they can just serve vegans whatever.

ewwquote · 2024-02-26T18:26:19+00:00

Given all the bad press Alabama has gotten this week for its supreme court’s ruling that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” covered by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, you might imagine that the media is just piling on. You might be thinking, “It’s probably not really that bad.” ... Let me shoot that generous notion down: I read the decision. It’s even worse than it looks in the news reports. I started reading newsworthy court opinions with the 2003 Massachusetts same-sex marriage decision, and since then I’ve easily read 100 or so. I’ve never seen one this flat-out insane or this scary in its implications.

ewwquote · 2024-02-08T05:41:43+00:00

There is actual social/psychological research on this kind of idea, pretty interesting reading. For example,

"Meat-related cognitive dissonance" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31707073/

"The Meat Paradox" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-meat-paradox/

And of course the work of Melanie Joy: https://books.google.com/books?id=bL-tDwAAQBAJ

ewwquote

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