A question for those against animal products for food/clothes/tools etc.

Hi all

I have a question for those who are against using animal products for making items like tools, clothes, food etc.

Does your view on this change when the people who do this are from tribes, or areas of great poverty that have done this as a way to live? Do you think bad of them for killing animals to eat, for wearing the animals skin to clothe their families?

What if it was a way of helping their families gain an income? Would that be so bad?

I ask because i have recently bought a strap for my banjo made from Bison leather. It was made by residents of an Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. It is apparently the poorest or one of the poorest counties and these people use this way of living to provide an income for their family.

The strap itself is lovely, but i did ask a lot of questions before buying it. Long story short, the Bison are used across the country for meat, so the leathers are used in whatever way they can be. The people of this reservation handcraft various leather products from their kitchen tables at home. Their whole families get involved.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not after any particular answer to make me feel better about my purchase, it's fantastic and i'm very happy with it. I'm just curious how people feel about certain groups of people using animal products to help their families live?

I see so many friends that seem to live by the vegetarian rules, but they also do much for third world countries and low income people. They don't realize that sometimes the two cross over and using animals and other natural products are very much needed sometimes.

Thanks,

CX.

Here in Canada we have people who depend on the annual seal hunt to make money to support their families.

Groups like PeTA and Green Peace could not give a rats ass about a person needing to support their family or another human life. Animal rights groups care about the money they make pretending to care about animals.

My aversion to animal products has much more to do with how the animals are treated when they are alive and how humanely they are killed. Therefore my main issue is with the overtly evil nature of factory farming and "modern" slaughterhouse methods in certain industrialized nations, in my case, America.

Most leather products sold in America come from Indian cows which have been forced on a merciless death march across mountainous terrain into Pakistan where they are then slaughtered for their skins. As many as 25% of the cows don't even survive the trek, but their drivers don't care. The losses are calculated into the profitability equation. So I try to avoid leather.

I eat eggs, but I only buy them from a guy I know who has forty barnyard chickens on his old-fashioned farm, rather than 20,000 birds crammed into a filthy warehouse full of diseased, dying, and dead birds.

In parts of the world where people still raise animals in sane circumstances (where the animals are cared for or at least treated with a modicum of decency), or who hunt wild animals out of legitimate need, I have no objection. Though I wouldn't eat meat myself unless I was starving. I feel an affinity for animals which I didn't have before I became almost-vegan.

Some vegans who consider all animals sentient would not eat one under any circumstances and would say that the tribespeople shouldn't either. To someone who believes that way, eating flesh is akin to cannibalism.