Uncivilized Vegans v Hunters
Debate Slam

The debate between vegans and hunters, hosted by Uncivilized Podcast[1], was grounded in a false premise: that the two sides have comparable merit. They don’t. It’s like an animal liberationist v mink farmer debate.

Did slavery have merit in the days Culture’s ever-evolving beliefs were pro-slavery? Imagine being asked to debate against slavery today. Shocking! Shameful! Today’s vegans are yesterday’s anti-slavers, this time struggling for liberation of all.

Unciv vegans turn their back on civilization’s authoritarians, their narratives, their compliance-pressure norms of the day. Against the defense of the indefensible, we respond to this meritless debate, descend into the absurdity of human hunting, the ‘rational’ irrational spawned by hunters’ disconnect of heart.

In the midst of the absurdity, sound and fury ensued.

In these cacophonous end times... this revelation, the best hearts pour their outrage into a vegan chorus of primal compassion.

Dedication

To the trillions of fellow animal beings who have tragically suffered and died, and continue to, at the hands of a species that has lost its way. And to those few within who fight to end the bloodbath.

And to the plundered Earth and survivors still embedded within, despite humans’ aberrant predatory killingway bringing wildness to the brink of collapse.

Uncivilized Vegan v Hunting Debate Slam

a DEBUNK of MURDER

Cast of Characters

Danny Nichols — Animal caretaker, anarchist, marathon runner, and author of “Cops Don’t Kill K9 Cops, Do They?: The Deadly Bad Habit Cops Don’t Want You to Read About”

Flower Bomb — Individualist, nihilist, anarchist author, poet and founder of the zine project Warzone Distro

Jack — Untrapper, animal emancipator, forest steward, birder, spiritual wordsmith, Olympic wrestler, co-founder of a Vegan Society

KT — Degreed nutritionist and exercise trainer, thesis on vegan as the optimal diet, exotic dancer, humorist bitch, bonobo idealist

Ken — Wildlife defender, outdoorsman, birder, interviewed in the anti-hunting documentary On the Wild Side, author of “A Northwoodsman’s Everyday Guide to Compassion”

Rabbit Bell — Self-defense trainer, firearms trainer, animal rescuer and all around liberationist

Ria — Unlogger, wild habitat tender, swamp mucker, author of the anti-hunting book “Eco-Patriarchy: The Origins and Nature of Hunting”

Preface

Enrage: … I see what you mean, like it’s sooo bad, these dudes with their Invincible Ignorance incapable of making a sensible argument & instead relying on anecdote, baseless assertions, hidden assumptions, vague descriptions, weird fallacious appeals to emotion, nature, tradition, etc. Not just appeals but countless other fallacies that are so entangled & unexamined that it’s a god damn chore to try & parse out whatever-the-hell that they are saying, or, that they think they are saying.

I was nominated to participate in the podcast episode with Rabbit but I declined & glad I did because as much as I enjoy debating — those “hunters” are just fuckin dumb & obnoxious. They sucked all the airtime & Art facilitated it while they prattled on in gish galloping tangents. Rabbit called out both Art’s biased, arbitrary framing & that Art kept letting Jamie & Bjorn both to bogart the mic — making sprawling claims that Possum & Rabbit could not possibly cogently address. Possum called out their weird thing about asking for sources while also not volunteering any or providing any when asked. Also, the “hunters” arguments & claims were often such double-digit IQ hot takes that it makes one feel ridiculous to dumb it down to their level. They don’t possess the necessary vocabulary to discuss the topics.

These are supposed to be anti-civ anarchists, authors, anthropologists or whatever but I’ve heard their own arguments better said by even random idiot conservative hunters on Facebook. “NONE OF YOU VEGANS WOULD BE HERE IF NOBODY SPILLED OCEANS OF ANIMAL BLOOD RAWR” Like, wtf do you even do with that! Haha!

Ria: Glad I didn’t agree to debate too. Those debates always devolve into one-sided sound rationalities, meaningless at their core. The thing was fucked up from the start, like having an argument between an animal sanctuary steward & a meat packer on ‘Is it good to kill animals.’ Reveals the bias in the debate host that they would even think that’s a question to consider. Hunters aren’t worthy of being on the same platform as vegans. Or to make the analogy more understandable to today’s mainstream masses, it’s like having a pro-slavery v anti-slavery debate.

Love your take on the ‘debate’, it’d be a cool opening, even snippets of our serious criticism exchange above. Unless you feel inspiration to write an intro fresh for our debunk project?

Enrage: Ok if you think that there’s something worthwhile in what I’ve said then you may use it however you like. If credited then “Enrage” is fine.

1. On speciesism. “Humans are hard-wired to take care of their own first…”

“Heterotrophs are not hierarchal; we are more attached to our own species. We are hard-wired to preserve, nourish, nurture, protect our species first.”

Danny: Speciesism is bullying. It was the first bullying. Prior to speciesism and the start of civilization (more bullying born of speciesism), we would have been existing within nature, naked in our natural tropical climate, and consuming our natural diet, just like all the other species of Earth. Making a conscious effort to hunt down other species not out of survival, but because we figured out how and wanted to, was the birth of civilization. This was our change in mindset/nature from survival to aggression. This is when we became Homo Bully. We became the psycho ape species of earth.

This new aggressive nature coupled with developing cognitive abilities would allow us to rationalize any and all aggression: Deforestation, leveling mountains, burning to flush out victims, making weapons, taking over wild habitat for agriculture, and eventually into more modern civilization with governments and industry. Sure, speciesists don’t like to think of themselves as psychos, but there are slaughterhouses running 24/7 worldwide, and the fucking pro hunting psychos can’t even bring themselves to even suggest boycotting all killing of animals. They know it’s not necessary. If it’s not necessary now, it certainly wasn’t necessary at a time when fruits were plentiful, our population was very low, and there were no fucking police to say you can’t live within your natural habitat in the woods or wherever the fuck you wanted.

I grew up hunting and fishing (murdering). When I would be holding a rabbit’s feet while my dad would be peeling her skin down her body, I wasn’t having the feeling of , “Oh yummy, blood & guts! This is so natural!” No, I had this feeling that this was gross, and I blocked it out. It’s what civilization taught me. I went vegan in a day at age 32. Seventeen years later it feels natural. I now know how fucked up this world is and why. It is because we are a species that went against our nature. I say in my book we are like a bunch of rabbits that decided to start attacking all the squirrels in the neighborhood just because they could and wanted to. We would think those rabbits had gone mad if we saw that, but somehow, we’re not insane?

Flower Bomb: I question the idea of “hard-wired” anything in any situation. For debate purposes it’s a useless assertion because clearly there is no universal truth to it. For example, despite their claim of “Humans are hard-wired to take care of their own first…” I often prioritize and care for all animals equally, including humans, and sometimes even more so non-human animals. The driving force behind this inclination is an instinctual empathy that creates a personal desire for non-hierarchal affinity with all animals. The mere fact that my empathy and personal desire are able to disobey any supposed hard-wiring brings into question its validity as a universal truth.

At best this supposed hard-wiring is subjective — just as their desires to kill. But most of the time speciesists only use these kinda claims to sound intelligent, and to rid themselves of any guilt, or deflect personal responsibility away from their actions. Because you know, if you – or even better the royal “We” – are “hard-wired”, we can’t possibly be responsible for so-called instincts that absolutely do support socially constructed hierarchies.

Jack: In the context of the debate, their statements on speciesism were disingenuous prevarications, designed to obfuscate and deflect. And they turned it into an either/or question, when it really is a both/and one. Why does putting one interest first preclude one from having additional interests of caring and protection?

Speciesism is a deep issue and not just another -ism within the limited spectrum of human isms to advocate against.

The concept of speciesism attempts to counter the hierarchal value system from which emanate all forms of devaluation, and consequent exploitation, of those “lower” than us. The hunters’ argument of caring for our own kind first is really an insistence on caring for our own kind first, and last. And therein lies the problem that has led to the selfishness that is destroying the Earth and all life that lies outside of the human realm. And by dint of the laws of flourishing life, by expanding our circle of caring and giving up the notion of levels of value pitting us against fellow animals, the Earth, and as an inevitable consequence, each other, the benefits will accrue to us tenfold- instead of the 10-fold crush of problems we now have within the human realm. Altruism and compassion are far more life-sustaining than selfishness. Speciesism kills.

The futility of putting humans first and “solving human problems before we shift our attention to non-humans and the Earth” is screamingly obvious. How long have we been trying to end wars, and famine, and human injustices, and every other form of human misery? Forever. Maybe it’s because we’ve been reinforcing and perfecting the whole counterproductive habit of humancentric selfishness, and putting humans “first”, which has clearly backfired on us and the Earth.

Maybe flipping the script, and practicing altruism first, beyond the self-centered singular human realm, will enable the Earth AND us to thrive again. What goes around comes around. And we reap what we sow. Perhaps if we sow far more seeds of altruism and compassion toward the non-human world than we sow the seeds of self-centered interest, perhaps then will we finally reap the “peace on earth” we say we want. Speciesism kills.

KT: You say we are hard-wired to protect our species? Hunting is not self-defense.

You got some berries? Feed them to your own, but you don’t have to kill other animals. That anthropologist who said that needs to get a refund from his college. I’m speciesist against humans because every day all day we hurt earth, animals and kill each other.

Speciesism is a man-made construct, such as racism, agism, or sexism, in order to gain power over another.

The definition of anarchy offered by a hunter in the debate was “to strive for way of life outside of domination and hierarchy.” Is a hunter using that definition self-hypocritical, or an oxymoron, or both?

And in the debate, when asked what animals are food to humans, did I get this right, the hunter said we eat certain animals depending on the culture we choose? How civilized.

The hunter said he went ex-vegan because he lived in the forest and freaked out when he couldn’t figure out how to sustain himself, so he started killing animals to be one with the forest and nature. How the hell is humans murdering natural? Sounds like he has no knowledge of all the plant foods all around him, because civilized humans lost that knowledge. And/or, he’s trying to live way outside the natural human habitat. Thinking you don’t have a natural human habitat, like all other species, is supremacist, domination, speciesist hierarchy.

The hunter said we wouldn’t exist if the people before us didn’t consume a high animal diet. Well, civilization has resulted in our overpopulation. I say, if his statement is true, that would be awesome. We are the parasite of Earth that’s destroying everything.

When you have to lie to yourself, and pretend, dressing up murder to make yourself feel better about yourself, you know you’re living the wrong way, against nature. I always say go with your gut.

Ever since they shot their first animal, and their dad or whoever told them it was good, they were told to go against their instinctive feeling, and they don’t know how to decipher, or just numb themselves to murdering.

Ken: Of course we take care of our own kind. Share your fruits, nuts, seeds, tubers, and mushrooms with those you care about.

Rabbit: Like so many topics in this debate, the issue of speciesism wasn’t taken very seriously or addressed honestly by the hunters. To not unflinchingly interrogate our relationship to non-human animals from a non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian and anti civ perspective is deeply irresponsible at best and is, Ironically, deeply authoritarian at worst. It’s 2025 and non (anti?) vegan “anarchists” sound like oppressive, totalitarian right wingers when the subject of animal equality/liberation comes up. And most anarchist seem fine with it because it allows them to live a life of unexamined authoritarianisms.

Ria: There is a merge point in the premises of human speciesism and civilization. They are conjoined twins, born together on the artifices of hierarchy and oppression, power and control, amounting to maddening successions of human atrocities along civilization’s catastrophic trek. They will be intrinsically unified until their death, whether through intentional dismantling, unintentional collapse, or a combination.

To give space to another indigenous voice, Obijwe/Cree artist Kerry Redwood Atjecoutay who describes himself as ‘antispeciesist, Earth First, Animal Liberation, Indigenous Peoples Liberation, anti-civilization, wilderness survival and bush craft, wild gardening, Green Anarchy’. He lists his reasons for abstaining from eating animals as:

“…not just for my health, but for the health of the planet, animals domesticated and free-living (wild), and the tribal peoples who are still struggling to hang on to their ancient ways… It is obvious by now that someone like me, who is a descendant of the buffalo hunters of the Great Plains… can survive and live a very comfortable life on a vegan diet.”

The top point on speciesism reveals a skewing process of Orwellian indoctrination in action. Speciesism questions why humans as a species treat other species of animals differently. Domesticated dog vs deer. Going back to earliest origins, humans have had an innate compassion for other animals that we still feel today, yet under civ we skew & suppress it. Under civilization, cultures enact rationalizations to suppress their self-disgust for harming animals.

I flesh this out in my book EcoPatriarchy: The Origins and Nature of Hunting. When some humans first began scavenging and then later hunting, regardless of what drove them to that behavior, thinking and social devices arose, such as rituals, mythologies, traditions, narratives such as our Killingway, are done with ‘reverence’, ‘respect’, ‘solemnity’, ‘celebration’, ‘honor’, ‘thanks giving’, that they ‘see animals as persons’, or animals offer themselves to be killed. This mind twisting was and continues to be used to overcome, to suppress to subdue, to squash, to stamp down, to deliberate via subjugating primal compassion and innate repulsion to harming animals.

Going against our nature, hurting and consuming animals is our initial separation out of wildness.

2. Vegans must supplement to be healthy because we need meat for our ‘species optimal diet’.

Danny: “Vegans must supplement to be healthy” is the new, “Mmmm, bacon!”. It’s pretty absurd to even have to respond to such bullshit, but I will for probably the thousandth time over the past 17 years.

I wasn’t vegan for the first 32 years of my life. I started running and playing sports at about age 14. I was raised eating the standard American diet. We had animal flesh and the breast milk of a cow at almost every meal. Eggs & pig flesh or sugary cereal with a cow’s breast milk were considered a normal breakfast. Sugary snacks and other processed junk were always readily available. My mom, dad, two brothers, and myself were obese. By age 16 I wasn’t obese any more thanks to running routinely and playing high school sports, but I would still typically get sick once or twice a year. I grew up never taking supplements. Why would I? I started running 26 mile marathons at age 19 and did one a year until about age 26 when my dog died. After that, I ran a lot less for quite a few years.

I was in the middle of training for my first 50 mile ultra marathon at age 32 when I went vegan. At that point I was still eating what was considered a normal balanced diet, but still getting sick about once a year, despite being a long time runner and at a healthy weight. After just half an afternoon of research at the local library I knew that eating animals or using them for anything at all was completely unnecessary, and I had to be sure because I was in the middle of some serious training. I saw there many long-term vegans and fruitarians. I also noticed there were champion and world record setting vegan athletes, such as ultra marathon legend Scott Jurek. I went vegan that day. A couple months later I completed my first ultra marathon about 30^th place out of about 70. It took me less time to recover from my first ultra at age 32 than it did to recover from my first 26 mile marathon at age 19. Now I’ve been vegan 17 years. At age 49 i can still run 10 miles under 70 minutes any day of the week. I haven’t been sick a single day in those 17 years. One winter I did get a cold that lasted 3 days. I don’t take supplements. I know B12 can be stored for a long time and we require very little. We can get enough by occasionally eating food that wasn’t washed to death.

People trying to proclaim they kill animals for “nutrition” or because it’s “natural” are so full of shit and disingenuous. They will use literally any excuse to keep up their bullying, speciesist ways. Want to know who is really anti civilization or anarchist? Ask them to voluntarily give up their position of power over other species and nature and watch their reaction. See how many absurd excuses they come up with for unnecessary exploitation and killing. Before civilization we would not have been pouncing on rabbits, ripping them apart with our unclawed hands, and eating them raw down to the bone. Would that have been for protein or B12?

Flower Bomb: The concept of ‘species optimal diet’ is laughable because there is nothing “species” or “optimal” about killing animals with specialized tools. Couldn’t the time and labor spent making these tools be better spent foraging food directly? It’s intriguing to hear primitivists/anti-civ hunters talk about anything optimal while failing to recognize the alienation they create between themselves and food. If consuming animals was an optimal diet, wouldn’t these hunters be able to obtain that food directly without having to have spent time creating a tool? How about when that tool doesn’t work? Perhaps it’s not as masculine or glorifying to simply use one’s fingers to pick berries.

I will believe that eating animals is a “species optimal diet” when these same individuals are able to catch animals with their fingernails, and bite through the skin with their blunted teeth. For extra credit how about eating these animals raw from the bone, down to the bone, with nothing left but the bones, day after day after day, without getting sick and vomiting all over each other. But it’s not gonna happen. If ever possible, it would have happened by now by some “return to the wild” libertarian trying to prove vegans wrong.

Jack: Um…Yawn…

He keeps talking about a “species optimal diet”. It’s his mantra for the whole debate. There is soooo much scientific evidence that puts that in doubt, both in the current and historically. Currently, even with the nutritionally deficient domesticated plant foods on civilization’s table, plenty of people are thriving very well on a vegan diet. Including some of the world’s best athletes. And historically, there is plenty of evidence that so many human cultures thrived on a primarily plant-based diet, if not some cultures on a 100% plant-based diet.

Now, this whole part of the debate, focusing on diet, and on the need for hunting to survive, stays stuck in the too-near distant past. The real question, preceding the “species optimal diet” question, is: “What is our species optimal habitat?” In this whole “hunter-gatherer” argument, we are allowing proponents of hunting to keep us within a narrow time-perspective, and not questioning whether we even belong where we mostly reside today, “necessitating” hunting. We simply don’t belong, for our optimal species habitat, in colder climates where we “need” to kill animals and steal their skins/fur for warmth and eat their bodies for lack of food otherwise. Long long ago, way before the time-focus of this debate, we lived in our natural habitat true to our biology, which even science has shown to be strictly herbivorous. We were foragers in a plant-rich environment with no “need”, or desire, to kill fellow animals.

Long ago, we DID live in a “Garden of Eden”. This is evident in the mythologies every human culture on Earth. Everywhere we look, we find some version of an archetypal memory of a time of living in the “garden”. It was the time before we left it and went on an errant path, into inhospitable habitats. And had to grovel for survival and kill animals for skin and flesh. This is the “norm” that hunters feel compelled to defend. And assuage their guilt for being murderers.

Additional to the hunting/killing habit, living in unnatural (for us) habitats caused us to be at war with nature to extract out of it what it doesn’t naturally provide an alien species. Shelter from cold, skins and flesh of others, energy to fulfil artificial needs to fill the void of an unnatural life, etc etc. Without admitting it, we are a miserable species living outside of our optimal species habitat, and dancing around it every mis-step of the way to rationalize it. And Earth and fellow animals are paying the price.

Why did we leave the garden and displace ourselves into killing fields? Was it climate change, as many theorize? I don’t know, but seems to me that no matter what, there were always pockets of our species-optimal habitat to remain in, and remain true to our “species optimal diet” and obligate herbaceous lifeway. My theory is that for whatever regrettable reason, some early humans chose (or were forced) to leave their natural habitat, while others stayed. Those that left, owing to the harshness of eking out an existence in inhospitable environs, to the point of having to become ruthless killers of animals, became the mean-spirited precursors of civ. I also theorize that these peoples, having learned the skills of killing, aggression, and domination, returned to the gardens of their origins and wiped out the those who remained passive peaceful foragers. And the archeological anthropological “history” that science is focused on is just a part of the Great Forgetting to ease the pain of it all.

This debate has been dominated by a couple of desperate souls who can’t or won’t think outside the box of civilization, in spite of how much they say they are anti-civ.

KT: Wow, It’s amazing how I’m standing here alive and well and unsupplemented. I must be a vampire.

Actually, this point is my forte, so step aside alleged civ-studied anthropologist. I have a civ master’s degree in nutrition and exercise science (notice the switch to my civ tone?). According to civ’s prestigious Harvard Health, a vegan diet has “all the necessary protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals for optimal health, and are often higher in fiber and phytonutrients. However, some vegans may need to add a supplement (specifically vitamin B12) to ensure they receive all the nutrients required.” Thing is, before we started removing nutrients from wild plants for agriculture, and when we ate roots and drank water straight from the ground, B12 was readily available. Now we supplement tortured farm animals with B12. Oh how far we’ve come!

Let’s turn the table and look at civ humans who think they can get all their nutrients from hunting today and be healthy. Let’s pose the question to you, Does eating meat provide all essential nutrients for humans like plants do?

Hell no. Meat, including organ meat, has a large amount of proteins and fats (that’s why people who eat tons of meat lead the way to death’s door), plus has some vitamins (mostly the fat-soluble). It lacks carbs, fibers, most water-soluble vitamins, and a bunch of minerals.

Murdered animals’ tissues (both farmed & wild) contain cholesterol and saturated fat, but do not contain nutrients like:

• Fiber — Fun fact: 95% of meat-eating humans don’t consume the daily recommended minimum. No wonder animal murderers have higher rates of being bloated, having low energy, heart disease, cancers, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome, and being packed with constipation!

• Vitamin C – If you’re eating tons of raw meat including raw liver and fish roe you can get tiny amounts, amounts not useful enough. It’s also hard to get enough boron, vitamin E and other antioxidants in animal tissue, unless you’re truly a carnivore eating all parts of animals, in raw form.

  Ya know hunters are lying when they say they know indigenous people who only eat meat, unless those people have scurvy, internal bleeding, bleeding eyes and gums and loose teeth, hair loss, unhealthy connective tissue, anemia, poor wound healing, increased risk of infections, and death.

• Folate — Flirting with no folate gets you anemia symptoms of fatigue and shortness of breath, and neurological problems like numbness in hands and feed, confusion, memory loss and depression. Sexy!

  And yes, despite the craze of the day, our ancestors ate plenty of carbohydrates (which come only from plants) because they instinctively knew how to thrive.

• Neanderthals — A 2021 study found that some Neanderthals ate a diet rich in starchy foods, including roots and nuts. And no meat.

• Ancient humans — Researchers have found evidence that some ancient humans ate starchy foods at least as far back as 600,000 years ago. This was long before agriculture and domesticated grains.

• Early humans — Researchers have found evidence that some early humans cooked and ate carbohydrates at least as long as 170,000 years ago.

Also, when humans started cooking with fire, the increased carbohydrates were critical to the expansion of the human brain (not that that’s necessarily a good thing, look where it’s led). Carbohydrates are a rich source of energy, and the brain requires glucose.

Carnivorous animals get their nutrition from eating other animals, but they don’t just eat the muscles, they eat the full carcass (often including while the animal is alive, and eating bones and the contents of the stomach). Their metabolism is attuned to their diet, so they need less of certain nutrients that are essential to us, and their bodies produce some of those. For those who eat fish, a recent study found that the nutrition we get from eating them is mainly in the seaweed and kelp (which are nutrient dense, and contains B12) that they consume, but in lesser amounts. Best to cut out the middle and eat the source of nutrients directly.

As a nutrition and health civ professional, I’d be neglectful to not inform that for us, everything we need is provided by nature through fruits and vegetables nuts and grains. Our physical body requires nothing more. As a civ layperson, earth is screaming for us to end our hunting madness to allow others to simply exist. So… what are the real reasons hunters choose to paint a flashy narrative hyping up killing and consuming animals, and ignore and diminish all the plant foraging that sustained humans? Take your alleged concern for health allegedly derived from your cruelty toward animals and shove it up your ass.

On a final note, you proud macho hetero dudes murdering animals wanna know why so many of ya can’t get a mate? Cuz most importantly, real women crave a legit tender heart. And… animal protein causes impotency, diabetes, early death and so much more.

So… how do you decide who you are going to eat today?

Ken: Hunters, you’re wrong. You are not nutritionists. You obviously haven’t done your research or had enough life experience yet.

I was once an avid hunter and fisherman. I thought, like you, that ancient peoples knew best. When in my 20s, I brought home dead animals, cleaned them, stuck em on a sharp stick and cooked them over a campfire in my rural yard. I wanted to live and eat like ancient peoples. A few weeks into this quest i became very lethargic, just didn’t feel well. I could hardly run anymore even though I was an avid runner. My body felt sluggish. It was before the Internet, but a friend had lent me a book on nutrition. I read that meat, especially cooked or burned meat, causes cancer (amongst other ailments). I abandoned that way of eating and thinking and eventually went raw vegan, though it took me almost 15 years to fully wake up to this. I’ll never go back to my meat-eating ways, I feel too good now, physically and emotionally.

Traditionally the healthiest cultures were nearly 100% plant based such as in Okinawa Japan.

Rabbit: I tried in the debate to bring up the same argument as Jack does above concerning habitat. And time lines. How far back do we want to go to find the golden age of human pre civilization? But, I was quickly silenced as anti-indigenous, a quick, lazy and often used rebuttal by the hunters in the debate.

Ria: Even civilization’s sciences of nutrition and anatomy are noiselessly on the side of veganism, by uni-culture’s most dominate, most biased, most normative customs.

In this case here, science serves as an indoctrination palliative, a story soma, a senseless pacifying rationalization disguising humans’ primal reaction to their hunting and harming animals. Most naked apes wear this mask snug tight, too anxious and vain to recognize the horrifying ethos of their unnatural predatory power. The ethos of various forms of power-mongering is the driving force for snake oil liberation, snake oil diet, etc. justifying most sapiens’ harrowing killingways. Here’s another example of hunting power-mongering by Deep Ecology forefather Paul Shepard:

“The human hunter in the field is not merely a predator, because of hundreds of centuries of experience in treating the woman-prey with love, which he turns back into the hunt proper. The ecstatic consummation of this love is the killing itself. Formal consummation is eating… The prey must be eaten for ethical not nutritional value, in a kind of celebration.”

Seems like ‘species optimal diet’ is the least of the idol-god Shepard’s, concern. In the introduction of “Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth” Andrée Collard and Joyce Contrucci also connect hunting animals to man’s relationship with women, but in opposition:

“In patriarchy, nature, animals and women are objectified, hunted, invaded, colonized, owned, consumed and forced to yield and to produce. This violation of the integrity of wild, spontaneous Being is rape. It is motivated by a fear and rejection of Life and it allows the oppressor the illusion of control, of power, of being alive.”

To respond to the surface level pseudo-point above in this section, in a surface level manner, there are very healthy vegans who don’t supplement. Further, since you’re assuming all vegans’ ideal dietway is domesticated plants, is it safe to assume that meat eaters’ ideal is animal tissue from domesticated animal ag (which is highly supplemented)? Comparing indigenous hunting to civ veganism is an apples to oranges comparison.

Civ has razed the wild, transforming much of the vast wild into domesticated foodspace. Wild plants have been bred into a distorted crop form, stripping them of dense nutrition. While knowledge of wild plant foods waned with the Leviathan of civ, killing animals devolved into the patriarchal mainstay. For those who want a return to earlier ways, including our habitat guild of origin, a top priority would be restoring earth’s pre-civ primal wildness to the plant bounty that nourishes and sustains humans’ primal thriving.

Sciences are anti-wildness. They are distorted to protect today’s man’s most ruthless quagmires he analytically launches upon his conquered.

“…one must first be able to imagine the other’s experience and hear her, which cannot happen through abstraction and representation. The more we are taught to know the world through perverted words and formulae, the dumber we grow, for intelligence only devolves… where the civilized are taught to listen to the voices representing their needs and woes. In this way, the civilized are taught how to not hear the other, but overwrite her voice with civilized generalizations.”

— Anthropologist Layla AbdelRahim

3. Anthropology has settled that early humans hunted, were connected to nature and were socially cohesive.

Danny: Fuck your civilized anthropology, civilized “medicine”, civilized fruits & vegetables, civilized sciences, civilized human-washed history, and your civilized “hunting”.

I’ll just add this from my book:

“I propose the term hunter is a speciesist term created by our bullying mentality as additional propaganda that it’s ok for our herbivorous species to suddenly act as a predator and kill at will, rather than out of necessity. When I think of wolves or lions going after prey, I don’t think of them as “hunting”. They are just trying to eat. They are just doing what they naturally do, not conforming to some ideology. Imagine if lions started a propaganda campaign that they were herbivores and tried to bully all lions into eating a diet of primarily berries, calling themselves gatherer-hunters. Pretty absurd, right? Somewhere in our history some modern humans started doing just that. They created the idea of humans as hunters and it became the “hunter-gatherer” religion. The first enforcers (police) may have been the bullies threatening violence against those not willing to go along with unnaturally attacking other species.”

Flower Bomb: Anthropology has settled? So... history is a fixed concept to be settled on? People just stop exploring and questioning? Some anthropologists have settled with the idea that early humans hunted. But does that mean moving forward we have to hunt as well? Since when do self-declared anarchists adhere to repeating (oppressive) activities of the past? Should we all start reading the bible and pass that down too?

This fixation on the past often turns into a god-complex where people determine their futures based on attempting to replicate history. It is a problem with the human conception of history itself which often serves as a mechanistic way of turning lived experiences of the past into a monolith. Wildness doesn’t stop for history. It doesn’t wait for humans to conceptualize the psychological tools of time and space in order to quantify and categorize it. Our conceptualization of ‘history’ is limited at best. And while we continue to grapple with this conceptualization, wildness as a lifeforce continues on in constant flux, existing with fluidity rather than with the lock-step mechanized way we imagine.

Humans will never fully understand the past because the past is a myriad of experiences — not an oversimplified yes or no to ‘did people hunt’. Personally I don’t care if all people hunted in the past, or if all people were 100% vegan in the past. I am vegan here and now, and for reasons I have explored from the past, without attempting to replicate a model of the past for my present or future. The future is meaningless without life in action here here and now.

As for the connection to nature and social cohesion, the only thing these hunters seem connected to is the projection of a human supremacist worldview born from the same domesticating logic they claim to stand against. Said in another way, human supremacy consuming the animal within the human supremacist.

Jack: To the statement “Early humans hunted”:

“….Waaaaaa, Johnny did it tooooo…!”

It’s also settled that early humans warred upon each other. Could there be a connection between hunting and an aggression mentality? And what’s with this glorification of how they were “connected with nature”, and “socially cohesive” (whatever that means). We really don’t know how connected to nature or socially cohesive they really were. But if observations/investigations into more recent indigenous “hunter”-gatherer ppls are any indication, they also had some pretty not-so-admirable lifeways- capturing other tribal people into slavery, buying and selling women, clearing and domesticating large areas of land, plenty of evidence of not-so-egalitarian gender roles, trapping animals for trade/commerce, etc…then we can assume “early humans” were also doing at least some of the same.

I submit that the less early peoples hunted and the more they were plant-based/gatherer, the more connected to nature and “socially cohesive” they were. And the more peaceful and kind and happy and content, and comfortable in their own skins and habitat.

I also submit (with as much and even more credibility as any “knowledge” based on cherry-picked anthropology/science ), (and without succumbing to arguing on the terms of skewed logic dictated by those 2 hunters in the debate)..I submit that; the act of hunting, and developing a culture of killing, gradually led to exactly what we now have in civ; that it led to the development of civ; that “hunting” (cold-blooded murder) established the shift to a mindset/actionset of heartlessness and an indifference toward, and domination of, the Earth and fellow beings (including our own kind). Of course it was very gradual. And evolved in fits and starts. And some ppls (“indigenous”) are not as far along that path, but on that path nonetheless.

We see it in gradations there. Different by degree but not by kind.

Thus, Incas and Aztecs, and the Pharaohs, and ancient Chinese dynasties…and many of the native Americans with their pockets of more formal civilizations, and all the precursors of those who were somewhere on the way to it- all were/are on that road called Civ Avenue. No strict demarcation. (Tho industrialization is a pinnacle of it). Not one or the other, fixed in time past and future. ALL who “hunted” (murdered) were/are on the way. And all were and are an aberration of our true nature. Regardless of our rationalizations and conceits to the contrary.

What essentially characterizes civilization (and I assume here both sides of the debate agree that civ is the ultimate enemy of life and what we are advocating for), ….what characterizes civ is a care-less-ness toward life and an indifferent use/consumption of it at any cost, and that character had its genesis in Early-Human hunting, and then the rationalizing of such killing and the hardening of the heart toward other life. Of course, this hunting ethos did allow for some “social cohesion”, in spite of hunting and not via it as the hunters here assert. We’d have a lot more social cohesion if we lived peacefully on this Earth and not at war with fellow animals, and the Earth.

My point is that this debate doesn’t go back far enough in time. The hunters, in all their archeology/anthropology references, stop at a point where we as a species were already far along the path toward civ. So, I contend that hunting cultures are early civ cultures, and that it was inevitable that some of those peoples advanced the character of hunting, and thus civ, to what we now have, almost world-wide. It was a contagion bound to spread, and it overtook those who resisted going down that path, as by the very nature of the aggressiveness that is its driving force it overwhelmed the peoples who never hunted.

And I contend that of those peoples who hunted, even if they remained otherwise connected to nature, their hunting/killing vibes spread like a virus, and that the anthropologists (and the hunters in this debate) are right, and that nearly all pre-historic peoples hunted and that they thus, together, created the primordial soup of civilization. They themselves were afflicted with the self-inoculated virus of killing and the subsequent mind/heart-games around the deadly deadening reality of it. They did not know how advanced the virus would become elsewhere, thus the shock when they finally met the colonizers of full-on civ. But they should have known that killing comes full circle. And that colonizing fellow animals would lead to their own colonization down the long course of time. But, once on the path of killing, such wisdom had already been forsaken. If not, they would have been able to foresee, and warn against, what hunting would eventually lead to, and they would have quit their corrupting serial killing early on. And civ never would have evolved, and all the babble in this debate, and in my words here, never would have been needed.

“…when the very animals of the forest began fleeing his approach…” …then it was for the Earth that civilization began- “ …the end of living and the beginning of survival” -Luther Standing Bear (with editorial license by jm)

KT: What does Anthropology say to native people here telling Western people to fuck off when they use native culture as a stupid rationalization for murdering animals? If Anthropology describes how humans were in the past, does that mean we always have to redo every aspect from the past? Who decides? It’s so obvious that hunters are cherry picking from the past whatever they themselves want to do. Anthropology has it’s civ biases, but hunters are locked & loaded with tons more bias.

Anyway, the only way we would truthfully know the full story of the past is if we were there living it, experiencing it. We really only know the aspect of the authors. Why not just go by here and now?

Ken: Some did, some didn’t. Native Americans gathered berries with their friends and family. That’s an observational fact from the early white settlers.

Rabbit: I found it deeply funny that Jamie insisted he was a “rogue” anthropologist weilding hot new and unwelcomed takes in academic circles but kept spouting old and tired talking points from a deeply colonizing anthropology. The cutting edge or anthropology is very quickly moving away from these obviously biased ideas. Jamie gets a D for lack of innovation.

Ria: The sect of uncivilized focused on ‘hunter-gatherism’ seems plagued with patriarchy. Here’s an exercise to visually demonstrate the point: In your mind google ‘caveman’. Compare those images to a google search for ‘cavewoman’. Evolutionary narratives are value-laden, and play out in scientific studies and interpretations. Alternative narratives countering mainstream values, such as vegan primitivism, are silenced, scorned and sternly denied even before due consideration. Origin narratives are created, not objectively described realities. Hunter-gatherism naturalizes patriarchy by projecting it into our species’ origins. This is countered by seeking a broader ancestral life narrative, by undermining the values behind patriarchy and rejecting the rigidity of the evolutionary normative. Liberationists detached from their primal sensing and primal knowing use civilization’s science or esteemed cultural narratives to construct an oversimplified, overgeneralized artificial ethos.

“…deep ecologists are most notably involved in this kind of overgeneralization, borrowing here and there from Native American and Eastern cultures the pieces that fit into their theory, while ignoring other aspects of those cultures. This type of conceptualization is cultural cannibalism.” -Gretta Gaard

Firstly, indigenous peoples are not monolithic. They are very distinct between tribes and nomadic bands, and as individuals within them. Broad sweeping glorifying statements describing indigenous peoples are dubious at best. Cultural bias, romanticizing earlier humans into unrealistic forms is glaring.

When an 18-year-old indigenous vegan began traveling, meeting other vegans was eye opening. They grew to affiliate as straight edge vegan. In social media, leftist anarchists put forth that veganism is racist because it is white-centric. When they reveal their native-born identity, they are accused of being colonized. Indigenous people too accuse them of adopting western ideology. They feel stuck in the accusations and don’t know how to respond. They get support simply meeting and sharing food with other vegans, particularly indigenous vegans, and opting for individualism over conforming to restrictions of traditions. The science of Anthropology oppresses the stories and lives of individuals from past to present.

When Native American Calling discussed veganism, native callers reported a variety of motives for going vegan, like this:

“The only one that convinced me to become vegan was my soul and the animals. After 29 years I got to a point I knew I had to put my foot down. An unforgettable day where I was enjoying an elk burger… something about the experience didn’t feel right. What I experienced physically and mentally afterwards for days was a clear indication that I didn’t need meat..”

Another caller reported “When we teach our children… to adopt a plant diet, we’re teaching them compassion and love early on.”

It feels universal both across cultures and through time that some humans ate plants for care and liberation of animals and earth, holding individual motives that override cultural pressures.

An exemplar outcome of overgeneralization and bias in reporting past quasi-realities: Paleoanthropologist Raymond Dart’s 1924 finding of an Australopithecus africanus Taung child gave Dart the audience to invent a narrative that humans evolved as violent Killer Apes, a narrative soon after discarded and denounced by fellow anthropologists, but still mediated into the minds of human masses in news outlets, movies and books. Then desperate to fulfill their vision for man as a powerful Hunter Killer from their origins, individual humans spread the false narrative as fact, overriding our innate compassion for other animals.

Far from hunting lifeway being a part of social cohesiveness, especially after humans spread outside their habitat, evidence of the impact of hunting ethos on humans’ social dynamics are rampant. The Inuit are one example of a peoples living far outside their habitat making them reliant on killing animals as a mainstay and hunting’s accompanying gender disparities. While both men and women experience violence, Inuit women suffer from significant high rates of domestic violence, yet anarcho-primitivists hold Inuits high for meat eating’s social cohesion?

Regarding Anthropology: How can anyone anti-civ not understand the bias in civilization’s pillar of science, making science their virtual god? That worshipping at the altar of science is propelling and expanding a civ agenda?

4. “Indigenous people love meat.”

Danny: That’s hilarious. The only truly indigenous people were those existing prior to “hunting” (systematically attacking other species). Those indigenous people likely didn’t “love” any foods. They just ate their natural frugivorous diet like other species do. I don’t think lions “love” eating gazelle. They are just eating naturally. Common sense tells me those indigenous people consuming fruits & vegetation didn’t suddenly stumble upon a deer carcass, started eating the remaining flesh and think, “omg, I love this shit! let’s start killing deer so we can consume their raw flesh!” No, civilization did that. That was post-indigenous.

Flower Bomb: Identity-politics worship at its worst. The way that humans attempt to use history to flatten a myriad of experiences into a singularity is exactly how speciesists cherry-pick and romanticize speciesist aspects of indigenous identity.

The short response to this is that obviously not all indigenous people love meat. But this type of identity-politicking utilizes a tool that colonization has been using against indigenous people for years; erasure. In this particular case, the erasure of indigenous vegans benefits these so-called anarchist hunters who, implied by their own statement, only value indigenous people based on their proximity to the indigenous hunter stereotype.

Jack: “Indigenous people love meat”. Oh wow…

“What’s love got to do with it? got to do with it? …a second hand emo…tion… ”. Sings Michael Jackson and me.

It proves nothing to say indigenous peoples “love” meat. But if he wants to use that weak logic, how’s this logic- It is well-established and widely accepted by anthropologists that the preponderance of early and indigenous peoples were gatherer-hunters who ate a primarily plant-based diet, only secondarily supplemented by hunting. So, I guess indigenous people loved foraging and eating plant foods a LOT more than they loved hunting and eating meat.

And I used to “love” Whoppers. And Jeffrey Dahmer apparently “loved” eating his human serial-killer victims. And “Hitler was vegetarian” they say. None of this “proves” anything.

And just who are the “indigenous” people he’s talking about? As I argued above, even indigenous people who hunted and ate animal flesh were on the path of civilization. And killing was very becoming of them, and of the modern-day hunters, indigenous and non, like these two in the debate…all steeped in the shadow-self of killing and its discontents.

And all indigenous cultures who hunt are, to more correctly name them, Indigenous-Civ peoples, to distinguish them from indigenous ppl who did not hunt, and remained true to their biology and true to living in the way they most loved, without the corrupting influence of being murderous.

KT: I love human brain, but I don’t eat it.

Ken: How ridiculous. I’m not even going to bother commenting.

Rabbit: deeply offensive, lazy and once again, ironically, anti-indiginous. Nothing says “thoughtful” like broad sweeping generalizations.

Ria: How does that coincide with the popularized rationalization that indigenous people who ‘only eat animals out of need, to subsist’? Like all animals, we have a primal calling for what to eat, as well as how to relate with others in our guild. When we overcome science and culture indoctrination, and open our natural intuitions, we sense an innate repulsion to harming animals. We, even as toddlers, are drawn to foraging plant foods, and repulsed by harming animals. Even while served slaughtered animal tissues, a child who enjoys harming animals is feared, psychiatrically diagnosed and medicated, by civilization. Yet oddly enough, pro-meat civilization’s god of science, in this case nutrition science, reveals the outcomes of our primal truth in the health benefits of being vegan, even when limited to civilization’s nutrient-stripped domesticated crops.

5. “You’ll never see a cave painting of salad.”

Danny: I don’t recall ever seeing a cave painting of people taking a shit. I guess humans never shit back then either. If they were drawing about attacking animals, they were already civilized. Using civilization to justify more civilization? That’s not anti-civilization.

Flower Bomb: Perhaps the consumption of veggies, fruit or salad was normalized to the extent that it didn’t merit any meaning beyond just a daily activity? I mean, would you spend resources painting a picture of the cup of coffee you drink every morning?

Jack: Serial killers and other deranged people often doodle their sick obsessions too.

There are so many other perspectives we can explore when analyzing cave drawings. The Medium is the Message (to borrow from McCluhan). Aside from the actual depictions/subject matter, what is the psychology/world view behind the act of creating symbolisms such as cave drawings? What non-human animal would ever bother to do that?

Maybe that’s the question we need to explore before we bother to look at the superficial manifestations (drawings) of such a mindset. What were the cave drawings symptomatic of? What message does the medium itself tell us about these peoples (not to mention the sick subject matter of killing). I contend that a peoples who went so far as to gouge into rocks with their symbols were already very far along on the path of civ and its way of perceiving the world, and themselves. Already along the path of relating to the world with abstractions and linearizing the world, and objectifying it, with lines gouged into rocks and in their minds. I wonder if a non-hunting/killing peoples, who only foraged and ate “salads”, would ever think, or bother, to deface cave rocks.

And there are so many other ways to look at it- the act of cave drawing and the subject matter of them. Could it be an attempt to normalize their killing? To desensitize themselves from the abject horror of it? Could it be a venting of guilt? Could it be they are just fixated on killing and “loving it” to the point of doodling about it too. Could it be a psychic cathartic thing to assuage their uncomfortableness? Maybe a way to concretize and operationalize the cognitive disconnect attendant to hunting/killing?

Perhaps “drawing salads” would have been too painfully honest in contrast to their actions. Heck, maybe cave drawing was a form of “educational” indoctrination of children- “now children, this is what we do and isn’t it cool?... “Johnny, can you draw us your idea of a hunting scene on this rock-wall for us showing how great and skilled and powerful we are?”

And why didn’t the cave drawings primarily depict the gentler more mutualistic side of life? Could it be they were too far down path of disconnect from their hearts, due to…well…exactly what they were depicting. And maybe it served the same purpose as current-day human carvings on rocks and trees- to express an aggression toward the revere-able Earth, assert a power over her to the point of gouging, display an indifference toward that which wishes to remain inviolate, and to announce a human supremacist and primacy attitude to “make your mark” and show that you were here and don’t you forget it- “M.E.- 2025”.

And why do we wax so wonderful about a bunch of hominids gouging lines into rocks? Oh, I see…it represents our “early stages of art” ...and civilization. So unique and special are we.

And how elementary and shallow of science to just focus on how it “proves” early humans hunted. Yup, it does suggest it, but it also suggests so much more, most of which is equally unflattering. But science never HAS been known for its deep and wholistic thinking. It remains ever true to its propensity to linearize and superficialize life, and reduce it to shattered pieces parts. And it ends up falling so far short of primal a-priori truth, and so often just flat-out wrong. (Thus their mantra at the end of every study- “more research is needed”, assure their ad-infinitum folly).

Just as in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, what civ and the anthropologists and the hunters see of the cave-drawings are merely the misperceived shadows of truths they do not want to see.

KT: Maybe hunting was such witchy, zombie, lunatic thing that they had to show us, ‘Look what these crazy people are doing, killing animals.’ If I saw some crazy shit, I’d be drawing it out too.

Ken: They didn’t eat salad.

We carve Presidents heads in mountain sides, proving that the largest works of art in a culture doesn’t necessarily reflect the viewpoints of its people.

Rabbit: this is, this is just sad. These are not the statements of serious people, of serious academics.

Ria: Who writes the anthropology narratives explaining the intentions behind science’s ‘hard facts’? What are that person’s subjective cultural and individual biases?

How do you know this early symbolism, drawing animals and hunting on cave walls, was not a way to channel anxiety about harming animals, mediating them into the abstract to cope with the trauma of the real-world experience? What are your indoctrinated cultural and visionary biases?

6. Veganism is civilization’s morality.

Danny: Veganism was already pre-civilization’s morality before the idea of morality even existed. Anarchy is the idea of just leaving other humans alone. Don’t be an aggressive asshole. Don’t be a fucking bully. Veganism is the same thing applied in relation to other species. It can be practiced long before it is ever defined by civilization. In modern civilization it is an attempt at boycotting speciesism within the confines of this civ prison we have built. Civilization absolutely needs it to be seen as a diet because it is a threat. I personally would love to boycott it completely and return to my natural state by existing on a tropical beach and eating tropical fruits all day and enjoying the sunshine, but all you psycho speciesist hunter-minded bullies would send your psycho civ cops to throw me in jail, label me a loony, and lock me up in a psych ward. That’s what your fucking mentality is. You just simply refuse to live and let live.

Flower Bomb: Civilization consumes animals in diet, entertainment, scientific experimentation, along with every inch of their habitat with the expansion of cities and highways. Civilization is fine-tuned anthropocentric morality in the social, economic, and environmental sense. Veganism can be understood as an amorality, an uncivilized refusal to accept the non-human animal-as-inferior morality institutionally imposed by industrial civilization, and constructed socially over the course of human history long before industrial civilization. So-called anti-civ hunters generally critique all aspects of industrial society – except for the socialized, speciesist programming that’s made a home in their head.

Jack: By extension of what I have argued above, HUNTING is civilization’s morality, steeped in all the attitudes and disconnects that characterize it, and hyper-defended, with civ’s primary tools of mass destruction- logic, rationalization, science, powers of objectification commodification and reductionism, superficialized “knowing”, humanocentrism, and a disconnect from the primacy of the heart. The ethos of veganism, in contrast, arises from the antithesis of all that foundationalizes civ. It comes from the heart and from the gut, and it is primal. Hunting is never primal as an instinctual drive. It is not innate. It is learned. It goes against our instinct to live mutualistically. And it can only “justify” itself with the tools of a civ-based mind, to construct an artificial morality around it.

So, sorry hunters, but your arguments for hunting reside very much within civ-based moralizing. And it’s the moral of your story.

KT: If that were true then why are only like 1% vegan, and 90 some % of people eat meat. We’re in civilization, and almost everyone eats meat. So…

Ken: Archeology has uncovered ancient human feces consisting of 100% plant matter. Your understanding of ancient people’s is naive.

Rabbit: civ, especially when coupled with capitalism, commodifies everything. So those conclusions don’t follow. Plus there is a ton to unpack regarding the circular nature of how we see the world from our current lens. We couldn’t have this discussion at all with our evolved understanding of empathy, equality, liberation and autonomy and how we interacted with each other and the environment. Including what is and isn’t anti indigenous.

Ria: Did early humans have ‘morality’? Did the transition from humans as plant eating seed spreading prey, to generalized predators originate a rationalizing brain, a morality? Anthropologists are slowly shifting their dubious narrative with heavy focus on our cultural bias conjuring early human heavy meat and murder lifeways, toward fuller truths. As anthropology opens and challenges its culturally biased foci story telling a bit, the narrative is getting closer to a story of early human more as plant-based prey, not meat loving predator. Their natural diet and set of technologies mis-adapt toward passive then active scavenging, then hunting, behaving outside their natural selves. Civ’s science is finally taking a glimpse at how incredibly plant-based and vegan our kind has been from origins.

The January 2017 study “Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus” doi.org found some vegan Neanderthals. The latest new study on hominin foodway, January 6, 2025, “Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools” piles on to debunking the Paleo diet fad:

“Despite their potential implications for hominin diet, cognition, and behavior, only rarely have plants been considered as drivers of human evolution, in part because they are less archaeologically visible. We report the discovery of diverse taxa of starch grains, extracted from basalt percussive tools found at the early Middle Pleistocene site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov. These include acorns, grass grains, water chestnuts, yellow water lily rhizomes, and legume seeds. The diverse plant foods vary in ecological niches, seasonality, and gathering and processing modes. Our results further confirm the importance of plant foods in our evolutionary history and highlight the development of complex food-related behaviors.”[2]

Sometimes species acquire a behavior that humans grind into a morality, that is not useful, and actually causes harm to self and others. Humans’ acquired moral cultural civilization of predating upon, exploiting and dominating animals has ingrained a habit that destroys our relations with others and separates us from our symbiotic wildness as seed spreaders.

See anti-civ, frugivore anthropologist Layla AbdelRahim. laylaonthe.net

7. “You don’t understand anarchy until you’ve hunted, getting your own food with your own two hands.”

Danny: I’ve hunted & fished, and I’ve picked apples & raspberries. I’ve been an anarchist almost as long as I’ve been vegan. Anarchy, veganism, anti-civilization, and primitivism are all branches on the same anti-bullying tree. Hunting is the man-made wildfire trying to burn the fucking tree down. That’s all I have to say about that absolute bullshit.

Flower Bomb: This is what it looks like when anarchy is defined by someone with an anti-oppression worldview limited to human struggle. Essentially, violence is totally cool, as long as it happens to animals. Let’s try their statement a different way…

“You don’t understand anarchy until you’ve raped, getting your own body with your own two hands.”

“You don’t understand anarchy until you’ve owned slaves, getting your own servants with your own two hands.”

Imagine if deer were able to pick up and shoot guns. Get my point?

Jack: What? Wait…The essence of Anarchy is killing? I thought the essence of anarchy is liberation? And I thought the essence of CIV is killing. He’s treading close to the edge here as rabid pro-civ apologist.

Gotta hunt your own food with your own two hands in order to get anarchy? That would give me the heebie-jeebies, and kill my anarchist spirit. But foraging plants with my own two hands sure does it for me. There’s nothing like reconnecting with nature without murdering her fellow animals. And when I see crazed hunters stalking fellow animal with vile weapons of murder, my anarchist rage kicks in.

He is anything but an anarchist. He is an oppressor and the antithesis of a liberator.

To piggyback on Ken’s comment below, you don’t understand anarchy until you’ve ran interference on the hunting and trapping of wild animals, liberated tortured animals from laboratories, and opposed every misbegotten means of civ’s war on fellow animals and the Earth, “with your two hands”.

KT: So, do you live in anarchy, or civilization. If you live in anarchy would you tell me where it is cuz I’d love to join you. You won’t know anarchy until you pop a man’s head off cuz he’s trying to rape you. Well, if we’re making shit up, let’s make it colorful. What the fuck.

Ken: You don’t understand anarchy until you’ve trashed deer stands, bear bate stations, trail cams, and duck blinds.

Rabbit: one imperial, bizarre claim after another trotted out after another with no real argument or evidence to support the claim. So edgy.

Ria: Anarchy resides outside culture’s authoritarianism, normatives and identity-stripping social devices. Hunting is the longest lasting exemplar of cultural indoctrination, rationalizing in the logic brain while quashing the intuitive heart. Humans by nature are repulsed by harm to animals, the lived evidence is all around, seeping out despite the fierce enculturation. My perception is that anarchism by its liberation essence is vegan. And veganism by its liberation essence is anarchy. That would mean that today, most self-labeled anarchists and most s elf-labeled vegans are not true to their essence.

To pile on to Jack and Ken above, you don’t understand anarchy until you’ve monkey-wrenched logging machinery raping wild earth. Anarchy in action.

8. “You have to kill animals to liberate yourself.”

Danny: Can my response just be a giant face palm? Ugh. What the actual fuck? So if these psychos were to get their anti civ utopia with 4 billion adult humans blowing away wildlife, does it mean they’re no longer liberated once they’ve killed off the last of all other species? Then would they just be sitting around eating apples and pineapples complaining about how they can never be liberated?

Flower Bomb: I wonder how Uncivilized Podcast would react if this statement said “You have to rape to liberate yourself.” or “You have to enslave to liberate yourself.” Is the “animals” part truly the deciding factor for hosting people who hold this particular view? I suspect UP’s response would have something to do with justifying violence as long as the target is an inanimate, food-commodified object. But still...are there not large swaths of history where this type of thinking served as foundational to war, societies and governments? Why is it that when this statement refers to animals Uncivilized Podcast has little to no reaction? (Vegan) food for thought.

Jack: Laughs…and cries at the same time. “You have to kill animals to liberate yourself” ???

This is the stuff of insanity. Standard immersed-in-civ thinking, logic, and doublespeak. And how absolutely self-centered and ego-consumed, only thinking of his own “liberation”, whatever the F that means. And smacks of new age woo-woo “spirituality”.

His notion of ”liberation”, absent the liberation of his victim, shows he completely misses the point of what anarchy and liberation is. It’s standard typical non-vegan human-only-focus pseudo-anarchist attitudes:

“Liberation now!” “Freedom now!” “Revolution now comrades!”-

“Liberation!! (fist image). -All human, and self, -centered.

And what better way to express ill-liberation than by hunting-? Free from the shackles of civ, living as a true “paleo man”. Right… .

Which brings me to a tangent and to one point of agreement with the hunters here. Most vegans completely miss what anarchism is and how essential it is to be anti-civ if they are to be true to veganism’s liberation ethos.

And yet, the same holds true of most anarchists- they can’t be true to the ethos of liberation and anarchism unless they also embrace the ethos of veganism and by extension oppose hunting and all exploitation (non-liberation) of fellow animal beings. Both need to merge. There cannot be one without the other, at their true essence.

KT: Actually, you have to kill hundreds of thousands if not billions of men to liberate yourself, since we’re just making shit up. The civilized education system fails everyone, but it’s really failed this person. Ya know, when you argue to slay sentient beings, you sound like a fucking moronic asshole. “Oh but we worship them, and we like it.” It’s still murder dude. Ain’t fooling me fucker. I really enjoy cutting up a man and eating him slowly from the inside out. Worship every bite. I express gratitude for every tender morsel of that man.

Ken: You’re wrong. You liberate yourself be letting go of your ego.

Rabbit: I echo the statements made here by my comrades. Well said everyone.

Ria: More sick and sickening mentality just revealed in this point, and it hides in plain sight within this sick and sickening civilization. Must say, this point and others also reveal the sad state of unciv anarchists and anarcho-primitivists who co-opt indigenous culture. This pressures and pigeonholes indigenous people into performing some romanticized ideal, in the process losing their individuality, challenging their freedom to adapt. Co-opters cherry pick their preferred parts of an indigenous culture, such as hunting but not slavery, to idealize and replicate. This is a safe way to try on a culture, play indigenous, while hiding behind the third rail taboo against criticizing anything indigenous.

Try on this Deep Ecology Paul Shepard quote on the true goal of hunting not being liberation but subjugation — pursuit of a woman as sex object aligning with an animal as killing object:

“A romantic removes the ‘love object’ from the reality of its being to the secret places of his mind and establishes a relationship of power/domination over it. There can be no reciprocity, no element of mutuality between the romantic lover and the ‘love object’. The quest (chase) is all that matters as it provides a heightened sense of being through the exercise of power.”

— The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game

This point also misses the human embeddedness in wildness and symbiosis, being hyper-selfish in the realm of anthropocentricism. Some animals can be quite flexible in behavioral dietway, to adapt to bioregion changes and in temporary ways that generally assist the biocommunity’s thriving. For example, some squirrels in California began hunting, killing and consuming voles in a mast populations. The squirrels’ behavior can adjust to what appears omnivory, but they return to their biological ‘species optimal diet’ herbivory/granivory. Imagine if squirrels adapted their diet to omnivore to adapt to changing conditions, but kept advancing their killingway over millenniums with advancing technologies, in ways that degraded wildness of themselves and their wild community.

link.springer.com

9. “Something has to die for life to exist.”

Danny: Hunters love saying this. It’s probably their second favorite EXCUSE for unnecessary killing/exploitation behind, “But I only hunt to feed my family!”.

They also love to say because vegans kill animals via crop deaths in modern plant agriCULTure, it’s ok if they unnecessarily shoot rabbits, deer, etc. I counter this absurdity by asking them this: If civilization didn’t exist and all vegans only foraged wild fruits, essentially not harming anyone, then what would be your next EXCUSE for unnecessarily killing?

That is the heart of the matter. You have one group of humans trying to be natural and minimize harm, while the bloodthirsty civilized majority will accept literally any absurd EXCUSE to kill. We humans murder over 100 million sharks every year. Hunters would proclaim this is natural because a chimpanzee once ate an insect on a piece of fruit; and no, that’s not hyperbole. The EXCUSES really are that INSANE. I’ve been hearing them for 17 years straight while doing animal advocacy.

Flower Bomb: This statement exposes the speciesism of the individual who said it by demonstrating a lack of personal agency to animals. Imagine if people were referred to as “things” needing to die for life to exist. As long as animals (and historically humans) are referred to as objectified “things”, their consumption, exploitation and killability is made easier for those attempting to sooth their primal guilt.

Jack: So, some “other” must die for you, and life, to exist? What a negative attitude and leave it to hunters to use that excuse. In the case of humans tho, nothing has to die, save for foraged fruits, vegetables, seeds, pulses, etc. Why insist on killing animals? If you could thrive without killing animals, wouldn’t you? If you say no, you’d still want to kill and eat animals, then there’s no point in further debating you here. Your soul has a hole in it that no amount of reply can heal. But if you answer yes, then you agree that they’d rather be spared, and it’s better that you don’t kill, and it’s better to exercise a bit of empathy and compassion. So, I have great news for you, the animals, and the Earth- Yes, you CAN thrive without eating animals, and complete your journey to true anarchism in the process.

“Something has to die for life to exist…”? The only thing that has to die, for life to exist, is hunters’ fixation on killing.

KT: So how about you, why don’t you drop technologies that make you an artificial predator and offer your body as prey to feed the ‘circle of life’? Your contribution to a sustainable harmonious planet.

Think back to when you were a little child and your daddy put a gun your hand, and you shot the sentient being. Remember how your stomach dropped and you felt some kind of shock and shame? The only people that feels good to is serial killers. If you derive pleasure out of murder… We’re more likely to be murdered by a human than an animal. That’s why we’re all in our little human zoos to protect us from each other.

Ken: Jeez, what a twisted thought process. I suppose every terrorist believes this.

Rabbit: I feel like I’m listening to a serial killer or cult leader. I feel like most of this shit is shock and aw. Or a way to “own” the vegans. It feels like the hunters were just looking for mic drop moments.

Ria: Ah yes, everything dies, so just lull us into a sweet compliant sleep with this obvious bullshit excuse for intentionally harming animals. Our strongest primal intuitions are not to harm, but to care for animals. If we eat berries with insects so small we don’t see them, or step on animals too small to notice, we are not repulsed. Our natural form, our gut, our essence, determines our desired relations with others, until we formed a go-around, separating us from our nature and nature itself, in the form of a rationalizing brain that struggles to hide our innate shame.

In the words of Martha MacCaughey, author of “The Caveman Mystique:

Pop-Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science”:

Men must use their imaginations… to create a new masculinity. I hope that by gaining a broader, sociological view of themselves as gendered beings in a gendered society, men might see the caveman identity as an empty fiction… Manhood itself must morph into something new.”

10. Hunting is egalitarian because there’s no ownership.

Danny: Most people have heard of the term “white-washing” in regards to history. The ideological term “hunting” is part of the speciesist-washing of history by civilization. Ever ask yourself why society calls the unnecessary killing of humans “murder”, but decided to call the unnecessary killing of other species “hunting”? It’s an essential piece of this human supremacist civilization.

People proclaiming to be anti civ hunters paint this picture of themselves killing an elk or two a year and “only taking what I need.” Ever notice those same people rarely, if ever, speak out against “indigenous” peoples breaking & enslaving horses and camels in order to ride/use them? Is that necessary? Natural? Isn’t that ownership? Is that egalitarian? Is it egalitarian to unnecessarily kill another? These “anti civ” hunting advocates know in their subconscious it is not egalitarian. It’s why once the egalitarian EXCUSE starts to break down, they jump to the next excuse, and the next, then circle back over and over. It’s exhausting trying to have a rational conversation with human supremacists, same as it’s exhausting trying to get through to a racist or sexist.

An animal roaming free in the wild is not “owned” by anyone, but unnecessarily killing her, then trying to rationalize it, that’s the epitome of civilization. It’s the unique mindset of civilized humans that you have the right to her body, even with the knowledge that you could just leave her in peace. Thinking you have the right to someone else’s body, is that not the mindset of ownership?

Flower Bomb: It amazes me to know that there are people out there who refuse to acknowledge the targeted consumption of another individual’s body as something not related to ownership. Ownership is a product of enforced control. In order to control a wild individual, one must use force. Hunting in a group is a demonstration of force being applied collectively in order to control the hunted individual. Once an individual is subdued by collective force, ownership is enforced by means of control – whether that be tying that individual up or leveraging death to gain psychological compliance from the individual. All of this may sound familiar because it is the strategy used by industrial civilization against anyone who refuses to comply. The idea that the lynch-mob practice of hunting is egalitarian is naive at best, and could possibly come from a desperate denial rooted by guilt.

Jack: I don’t know what could be more of an expression of ownership than taking the life of another being. It’s the epitome of appropriation. Especially in the case of hunters, who talk of assimilating their very spirit, and how said animals “give themselves over to them”.

KT: Oh wow, say that to the sentient being that you murdered. Did he get his fair share too.

Ken: No one owns any animal, human or otherwise. They exist for themselves. In fact those that hunt and trap are thieves. They are taking life without permission. They are stealing the animals the rest of us want to see, watch, and enjoy, and personally I resent that. Hunters are also wildlife terrorists and thus wildlife is deathly afraid of humans. Again, that is infringing on my right as an earthling to see and observe and connect with my fellow wild earthlings.

Rabbit: I would take it step further and say that not only is hunting imbued with a sense of ownership but it’s deeply supremacist and mired in a might makes right mentality. Obviously humans have had a variety of ethical and philosophical reasons for hunting over the millinia but ultimately its only considered an option because humans could over power other animals with technologies.

Ria: As scavenging and hunting increased in intensity, as in the way of Parable of the Tribes, humans became expansively powerful, dominating over one another, forming a sense of ownership over land and others. For example, a snippet from Harvard Magazine summarizing Biological Anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire; How Cooking Made Us Human:

“In the bush, the sight or smell of smoke reveals a cook’s location at a long distance, allowing hungry individuals who have no food to easily locate cooks in action…The effect among Homo erectus is easily imagined. Because females were smaller and physically weaker, they were vulnerable to bullying by domineering males who wanted food. Each female therefore obtained protection from other males’ wheedling, scrounging, or bullying by forming a special friendship with her own particular male. Her bond with him protected her food from other males, and he also gave her meat. These bonds were so critical for the successful feeding of both sexes that they generated a particular kind of evolutionary psychology in our ancestors that shaped female-male relationships and continues to affect us today.

Wrangham describes the resulting pair-bond as a “primitive protection racket” in which husbands “used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favor by preparing their husbands’ meals.” Cooking brought many benefits to humans, he concludes, but it “trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.”

11. Hunting is the most sustainable lifeway, has the least impact.

Danny: As KT said, yes, what is more sustainable than eating fruits, shitting the seeds, which naturally grows more fruit, and the cycle continues? Sustainability would be living in our natural climate, eating our natural diet, existing within nature like all the other species. It’s not rocket science. Our anatomy is not similar to bears or wolves, and we obviously don’t have natural fur. Human supremacists want so badly for us to believe we are two-legged polar bears.

Flower Bomb: For the ‘human’ animal who possesses virtually no naturally born hunting instincts, this is a subjective opinion at best since the act of taking a life (hunting) is quite the opposite of sustaining life.

Jack: See Ria’s answer below. She nails it. Read it twice in place of my answer here.

KT: We eat an apple, poop it out, and apple trees grow. You eat an animal, and all you did was murder somebody. How is that sustainable?

Ken: Where I live in Wisconsin, much of the rural Wildlands are owned by hunting groups, families, etc. they often alter the land to attract game, just like indigenous people before them. In the southern part of the state they reject woodland restoration in favor of letting it grow up in thick invasives because deer and other game species do well in thickets, while ancient peoples burned the land keeping it open for hunting and foraging opportunities.

In the North, the state, Federal and county land managers favor clear cutting and aggressive timber harvest because after logging, the forest springs up in thick Aspen clones favoring deer, grouse, etc which generate more hunting license revenues. Across the state hunters till land to plant food plots for deer, erect all sorts of tree blinds, and bating stations. The indigenous way of hunting morphed into the civilized way, both ways intentionally controlling animals and shaping the land. One is less thriving than the other, but the spirit of power over others is the same.

That power in the hands of modern technology has far worse impact. Hunters have polluted the land with lead shot resulting in poisoned wildlife for centuries to come. Fisher people pollute waters with discarded fishing line and lead tackle.

I’m not suggesting plant eaters don’t also alter the land for their needs, but the vast majority of land manipulation is for meat production.

Rabbit: The human species itself was the original colonizer. Once we broke out of natural place in our bio regions, destruction followed in our wake.

Ria: Has the least impact? Least impact on whom? Here’s how Orwellian this point is. Research report in The Accelerating Influence of Humans on Mammalian Macroecological Patterns over the Late Quaternary, bolstered the Pleistocene Overkill from hypothesis to theory. Elephant-dwarfing wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and various saber-toothed cats highlighted the array of massive mammals roaming Earth between 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Large mammal extinctions started at least 125,000 years ago in Africa just after Homo sapiens came on the scene. As indigenous humans migrated out of Africa, large mammal extinctions followed in regions and on timelines coinciding with known human migration patterns. The magnitude and scale of these extinctions surpassed any other recorded during the last 66 million years.

Further, there is little support for the idea that climate change affected the extinctions, as large and small mammals seem equally vulnerable to temperature shifts, and only large mammals were impacted.

Restructuring animal makeup from large to small mammals had ‘profound implications’ for the world’s ecosystems. Large mammals tend to be herbivores, devouring large quantities of vegetation and effectively transporting associated nutrients around a bioregion. When they disappeared, small mammals were poor substitutes for important ecological functions.

“The transition of hominins to a meat-based diet 1.8 million years ago led to the exploitation of other mammals for food and resources. As hominins particularly archaic and modern humans, became increasingly abundant and dispersed across the globe… extinction of large-bodied mammals followed; the degree of selectivity was unprecedented… Today, most remaining large-bodied mammal species are confined to Africa, where they co-evolved with hominins… Analysis demonstrates that anthropogenic impact on earth systems predates the terminal Pleistocene and has grown as populations increased and humans have become more widespread. Moreover, owing to the disproportionate influence on ecosystem structure and function of megafauna, past and present body size downgrading has reshaped Earth’s biosphere. Thus, macroecological studies based only on modern species yield distorted results, which are not representative of the patterns present for most of mammal evolution. Our review supports the concept of benchmarking the ‘Anthropocene’ with the earliest activities of Homo sapiens.”

Where the early human hunting ethos has led is revealed in a study, The Unique Ecology of Human Predators. Global data concluded that humans have adapted into a ‘unique super-predator’ with ruthless hunting practices and heavy ecological impacts. Humans’ hunting at unsustainable rates, exploiting wild animals with imbalanced advantages like no other predator. If anything, human hunting is the least sustainable human lifeway, having the most impact, shifting the origins of the Anthropocene, i.e. civilization, back to the origins of our Homo sapiens.

Periods of human technologies seeming sustainable at origins tend to advance in method, social dynamics, and ethos, often increasingly impacting land and animals. Invented and enhanced technologies trace steppingstones toward full blown civilization, inch by inch in fits and starts. This ‘advancing’ often results in a progress trap, leading to dependence on technologies even for survival, especially with increasing populations.

For example, over many thousands of years, Mesolithic Paleo-Indians constructing weirs for corralling and trapping fish, progressed to weirs feeding Neolithic tribal villages worldwide, progressed to goliath weirs stuffing contemporary canneries as product for profit. The more weir technology progressed, the the greater the impact, with fluvial sediment deposits altering water flow, disrupting fish migration, changing riverbed morphology, impacting aquatic ecosystems and animals that depend on them. From their origin weirs conveyed an ethos in earlier humans degrading relations with other animals and Earth. While under the latest wave of modern technologies weirs were adapted into overproduction glut, ancient weirs impacted river life to lesser extents, but were similar in killing method and domination ethos.

Prehistoric humans invented arrays of land and water management practices. Today’s humans who support uncivilizing tend to be pro-tribalism and set against dams for the harm they cause to animals and earth, blaming civilized technologies. Yet, the lines blur:

“For those who view dams as evidence of progress and civilization, it should be pointed out that Indian people were building dams long before European people were aware of the existence of this continent. In the Southwest, the Anasazi people in New Mexico and the Hohokam in Arizona were building dams more than a thousand years ago.”[3]

Another example of technology mounting into progress traps is unintentional seed spreading via wild foraging, progressing into technologies of purposeful seed sowing. A diversity of refined and revamped methodologies had a diversity of impacts along the path of agriculture. ‘Progress’ toward civ is step by step, fits & starts, overlapping. Despite pop narratives’ hard line between civilized and uncivilized, over millenniums indigenous technologies transitioned toward intensifying forms of domestication including agriculture. For instance, some Native American agricultural tribes’ methods increased erosion and sedimentation, degrading river life hundreds of years before European arrival amped up the impact. pubs.geoscienceworld.org

“The myth persists that in 1492 the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness, “a world of barely perceptible human disturbance’ There is substantial evidence, however, that the Native American landscape of the early sixteenth century was a humanized landscape almost everywhere. Populations were large. Forest composition had been modified, grasslands had been created, wildlife disrupted, and erosion was severe in places. Earthworks, roads, fields, and settlements were ubiquitous. With Indian depopulation in the wake of Old World disease, the environment recovered in many areas. A good argument can be made that the human presence was less visible in 1750 than it was in 1492.”[4]

Did Native Americans Really Live in Balance with Nature?:

https://youtu.be/UhLizvrhbOU

12. “Veganism is a civilized psychology. It’s a civilizing impetus against indigenous people.”

Danny: Indigenous is native to a region. My idea of indigenous humans probably differs from most. The only humans I consider indigenous are the very early hominids that existed in their natural environment/climate prior to hunting. Everyone after that who migrated to other regions and started killing were not natives. They were colonizing assholes, spreading civilization like wildfire. I’m not against indigenous humans; quite the opposite. I’m in favor of everyone being truly indigenous, not civilization’s bullshit idea of what indigenous is.

Flower Bomb: See my earlier responses about erasing indigenous vegans and civilization being a blunt instrument against veganism.

Jack: Just as I said above that hunting is civ’s morality, hunting is civ’s psychology as well. From the mental dis-order and psychological character flaws needed to engage in murder of one’s fellow being, to the out-of touch denial of reality and the manufacturing of obfuscating excuses and irrational rationalizations, a litany of civ’s psychological dysfunctionalities are at once called into play to enable the existence of hunting. In fact, hunting was the genesis of the very psychology of civ. They now work very well in tandem with each other, and in a mutual cahoots against going back to our non-murderous lifeway.

As for veganism “being a civilizing impetus against indigenous peoples”, yeah, we ARE trying to save them from themselves and their killing ways which, as I have contended, inevitably led to full-on civ. Not much of a jump from hunting to the brink of nuclear annihilation, in terms of the underlying attitude, and practice, toward life.

KT: Veganism is people waking the fuck up, cuz the pictures you see everywhere around you are the greatest percent of people in civilization eating meat. The word veganism is civilized, that’s al

And it’s a failed argument when you have to separate people into groups.

Ken: Again, archeologists have found ancient human poop that’s 100% plant matter so it’s completely possible to be vegan in an uncivilized world, region, continent. Our DNA shows us that we’ve evolved primarily as plant eaters. Meat eating is probably a more recent development evolutionary speaking.

Rabbit: “but indigenous folks…” is the new “but bacon tho” and is tired and lazy like most of the “arguments” put forth in the debate. Not to mention insanity tokenizing and reductive.

Ria: Aztec Emily Victoria says it is not

“respectful to ‘honor’ an animal whose life was taken from them. It’s time to evolve and stop trying to live by outdated traditions simply because it was done for years or because ancestors did it… And what bothers me even more is when non-natives speak on this subject by trying to erase indigenous vegans… Saying that vegans target indigenous people when a lot of vegan indigenous people exist is INVALIDATING and ERASING indigenous vegan people. I have dedicated years of my life to veganism and animal liberation. Tradition and culture is not a justification for animal use and abuse.”

Missed the mark, again in such an Orwellian manner. With its origins in human hunting, civilization’s human predation is an ethos against the mutualistic nature of our indigeneity. Each act of predation is a step toward domination, exploitation and domestication, i.e. civilization.

The workings of civilization’s psychological impetus against indigeneity are presented by anthropologist Layla AbdelRahim in the interview “How Children’s Literature Links to Narcissism and Violence: Stories we tell ourselves work to justify the abuse we inflict on the planet:

“…because the economies of wilderness are governed by mutualistic, empathic relationships of exchange, individuals and groups (or species) continuously seek new ways of interacting. Here, empathy, or cueing in to how your community of life feels becomes an important guide by which members of the community gather knowledge and which guides their actions and reactions. This system requires presence and favours the constant evolution of diversity. Civilisation, in contrast, is rooted in the economy of domestication, in which everything and everyone is forced to conform to the will of human owner of resources. It is a socio-environmental and economic system rooted in monoculturalism, where empathy stands in the way. Thus, civilisation came up with a convoluted technological system that allowed people to alienate themselves from the pain they inflict on others. Language and symbolic culture thus enabled humans to institutionalise an ideology of violence and transmit it through abstract “knowledge” based on narratives that frame our and other beings’ experiences. Instead of basing our knowledge on direct experiences of how our own livelihoods impact others from whose suffering we benefit, we now rely on narratives to define for us which acts are to be understood as violent and thus to be defined as illegal or deviant and which violent acts are not even to be seen for what they are.

…the stories we tell ourselves mostly work to justify and veil the abuse we inflict on the planet and our nonhuman siblings. Within a blink of an eye, our civilisation has brought life on earth to the brink of extinction. I urge people to rethink the ways in which each of us, wittingly or not, perpetuates this tragedy, both on personal and institutional levels; the ways in which each of us plays our role of the “Little Eichmann” in the holocaust against life. Because language constitutes the main technology for the transmission of socio-economic choices, people need to examine the ways in which language inhabits and domesticates us prompting us to contribute to an economy based on predation. In other words, we must connect words with deeds and not separate them as we currently do.”

13. Vegans “promote indigenous genocide...”

“because a core attribute of almost all indigenous societies is animal food, relationships with animals that have to do with actually killing them and eating them. Taking them apart, using all their parts, intimately connecting with the animal in that way.”

Danny: See my previous response. This is describing civilized colonizers, not indigenous humans. When we started hunting we became Christopher Columbus to the other species of Earth. They are the real natives. We Stole their habitat, freedom, babies, and lives.

Flower Bomb: “Taking them apart, using all their parts, intimately connecting with the animal in that way.” Imagine if instead of a non-human animal, this logic was applied to another human. I wonder if both of these hunters would take any personal offense to a vegan gleefully fantasizing about killing and mutilating one of them (or both), using all their body parts, intimately connecting with the two corpses in a ceremonial way. If this activity was normalized across bands of nomadic, misanthropic people I am certain these two hunters would be singing a very different tune.

These two hunters have turned their romanticizing of the indigenous hunter stereotype into a god complex that ultimately determines their (human supremacist) interaction with animals. Going vegan would be akin to an act against god for these two — and they’d never have the courage to commit such a betrayal. Imagine it...for these two to go vegan, they would have to resume independent thinking dislodged from their guidance. They’d have to break away from the social membership they enjoy as part of an entire civilized population that supports their view of other animals as “food”.

Jack: Indigenous genocide is happening all over the world precisely because the world is contaminated by the fallout from the hunting ethos practiced by early humans. Civ has certainly advanced the de-volution of it into an all-out war on life, but what goes around comes around, into a self-destruct. Which includes the precursors and committers of the “original sin” of killing. Of course, indigenous peoples who hunt are not AS “bad”, but bad is bad. Just ask the animals. And the megafauna back then as they were being murdered into extinction.

Again, we need to look further back than the hunting lifeway to re-discover our way to a sane and sustainable way to reside on this Earth. It’s our only truly viable option. Instead of glorifying and repeating that which has led to this uber-killingway. It will take being “indigenous” sans the killing. So, yeah, we are calling upon all indigenous people to lead the way and stop their killing. The only genocide in that, is the genocide of the genesis of civ.

KT: Murder is not a relationship, and it’s only intimate when your lover requests it. People have been dumb for a long fucking time. Stop being dumb. I’m pro vampire, and this is why. Cuz at least they do have an intimate relationship. If you’re not brainwashed, I don’t know what is. I’ll pray for your soul.

The mental gymnastics that has to go on to say murder is not murder… You gotta murder someone? Fucking call it what it is. When you murder someone, you don’t feel ashamed? It’s insane. It’s disgusting. I have the greatest idea, go hang out with the bears without a weapon, get in a fight and see what happens.

Ken: Ha, that’s what Jeffery Dahmer thought. There is strong evidence of ancient peoples living on all or mostly plants. You are cherry picking indigenous cultures that at some meat and primarily lived in northern regions. There is no way a population of our current size could be sustained by eating meat — farmed or hunted.

Rabbit: once again, hella reductive. I can’t add more to any of the responses that have been put forth here. And I’m in full agreement with them.

Ria: Anarcho-primitivist author and Anarchy Radio host John Zerzan response to a question on veganism during an interview:

“Ishkah:… There was a podcast you did for Oak Journal on lots of topics like humanism and one thing that came up was veganism and then there was an interesting response by Ria who runs the website VeganPrimitivist.wordpress.com. They did a long response to some of the points that were brought up.

And anyway their ideal future is people foraging plants and mushrooms only, and I think using fire, but just conscientiously choosing not to hunt animals…

If you knew that you could meet all your nutritional needs living this life, and you knew there wasn’t going to be warfare, and you knew you could maintain the skills of hunting if you needed to go back to that, would you hypothetically choose not to hunt animals? Just living a life where you’re communicating with them through seeing otters in the wild, but just choosing not to hunt, do you think that would be an ethical responsibility? What do you think if you knew that you could survive perfectly fine with low labor hours?

Zerzan: That sounds rather nice, yeah I wouldn’t argue against it, I mean if it’s conceivable and I think you know hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting, but still, maybe that would be more ideal. If you’re trying to learn anything from the record, it’s a bit hard to imagine that in terms of our evolution, but it sounds nice, yeah.”[5]

[1] Veganism or Hunting? — Uncivilized Podcast 61. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5bzcrM5BL0>

[2] Starch-rich plant foods 780,000 y ago: Evidence from Acheulian percussive stone tools. <www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121>

[3] Dam Indians: The Background. <www.nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/377>

[4] The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. <www.tandfonline.com>

[5] A Conversation with John Zerzan on Direct Action, School Shootings, Authenticity, Veganism & More. <theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ishkah-a-conversation-with-john-zerzan-on-direct-action-school-shootings-authenticity-veganism#toc5>