Tag Archives: vegan superpowers

Vegan Superpowers

Someone proposed using snake-skin in a LARP as a prop (by which I mean shed snake skin, not harvested skin) and some other people from “Team Vegan” piped up and said “not for us thanks” and went on to explain that they didn’t care how it came off of the snake, they want nothing to do with it.

I’m now wondering if they feel the same way about wool. Both snakes and sheep must shed their outer layers for their own comfort on a regular basis. Sheep can’t do it themselves (due to those traits being bred out of them) and need our help to do so. Not helping a sheep shed its wool in the summer is actually crueller than shearing it as it won’t be able to cope with summer heat with the thermal layers of wool. Snakes shed their skin as they grow, squeezing out of the tighter layer being shed to be more comfortable in the new larger scales beneath.

Jeremy is currently in blue at the moment (preparing to shed) which may be part of my reaction to this, but all I can think is that “Team Vegan” is so against any kind of animal product being used that they’re objecting even to the use of naturally discarded bits. I don’t get that. I can understand working against animal cruelty, and modifying your lifestyle to match, but not using natural discards seems overboard to me.

Antlers are discarded by deer every year, scales are shed by snakes regularly, sharks constantly replace their teeth. You can collect all of these things and more without ever harming or even capturing the animals in question – there’s no cruelty involved. It strikes me as being similar to objecting to cutting down forests and refusing to use fallen branches in a fire to keep you warm. It also strikes me that such extreme attitudes will lead to an increase in the use of synthetics, which will pollute the earth faster and cause more damage to animals in the long-term.

I don’t know – I just don’t get the extremism. Unless you really do get Vegan Superpowers from it.