The fun part is that this doesn't even tell me which side of the honey debate you're on.

i got banned from a vegan comm for saying that bees tend to leave hives if they're not satisfied with the conditions, a fact that's just verifiably true.

Common sense goes a long way. Radicalism is always stupid.

Just eat meat once a week or month. Eat whatever in moderation.

Moderation is key.

No matter how hard you try, in this industrialized world, some animal has been harmed by your activities. So, is true veganism even possible, in a practical rather than philosophical sense?

I'm not a vegan, but the current state of beekeeping is pretty shit. Taking the honey and replacing it with sugar water on top of the stresses of monoculture and killing varied flora with herbicides creating food deserts and using market conditions to race to the bottom on pollination contracts just results in a whole bunch of dead hives. Like you can both support sustainably practiced beekeeping and find the production of industrial honey to be a horror show.

The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the bees directly.

Here is an article about why honey is not vegan. I'll quote some notable excerpts.

The latest research in the field suggests bees are indeed sentient, and experience a host of sophisticated emotions. In his 2023 book What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann states that bees are “self-aware,” highly intelligent, and possess a “primitive form of consciousness.”

The Guardian reported on the book earlier this year, saying bees’ apparent ability to recognize different human faces, process long-term memories while sleeping, and feel optimistic, playful, and scared raises “complex ethical questions” about our treatment of them.

...

...by using a piece of mesh that worker bees can pass through but [the queen bee] cannot, or clipping her wings. The structure contains horizontal sheets, where, because the queen bee is trapped nearby, the bees build their honeycomb.

To harvest the honey, beekeepers either smoke the bees to subdue them, or trap them with a clearing board over one or two days. Others kill the colony altogether.

Oftentimes, beekeepers replace the honey they remove with a sugar water substitute. This practice prompts honeybees to overwork themselves to replace the missing honey. Meanwhile, the sugar water lacks the nutrients, fats, and vitamins that bees need to be healthy.

Think of how labor rights, and even basic human rights are a constant struggle. Now imagine that you are a species that is regarded in such a way that everything you produce and everything you are is thoroughly classified a commodity. You do not have the capacity to speak against it. You are smart enough to suffer, but lack the degree of intelligence necessary to even begin to comprehend the enormity of what you are entrapped in. One species of animal has decided that all other species of animal are its products. None of the others can raise a voice against that. If human rights abuses abounds, how often do you think any kind of animal agricultural system is going to operate in a way that's anything other than systematic abuse and suffering?

Is that really the kind of world you want to continue to create?

It's easy to dismiss bugs, easy to think they don't matter. But I think of them as a litmus test. We are the real equivalent to bugs, of what we think a God is like to us. Are we the kind of deitys that we would want to exist?

If you actually care about a mutualistic relationship between pollinators and humans, grow a garden.

Not a vegan.

Honey is a direct animal product. It is meant to feed them, much like milk feeds other cows.

I don't get how that's even arguable. I don't care what you do and don't eat, vegans, but honey is definitely an animal product. It's not a product of flowers, it's a product of bees. Veganism/vegetarianism are both already series of arbitrary lines drawn, though, so, whatever.

Also fish is meat, for those people out there. It's an animal, you're eating the animal: it's meat. You can be a vegetarian that eats fish, that's fine. You are all illogical to me. Morally right, rationally arbitrary and inconsistent and often hypocrites.

The real debate is with figs.