(This post was written entirely by a human without any help from AI)
Mollie Englehart decided to start serving animal products in her Vegan restaurants. She also decided to turn away from vegan farming to do regenerative farming instead.
The reason Why Mollie Englehart is not vegan anymore in her own words is that “Through farming and other events, I realized that you can’t have a farm without death.”
A neighboring dog killed her rescued sheep. It’s too bad she had to own sheep in the first place. Animals should belong to themselves. But there is no place for wild sheep in the human world so many vegan farms take in rescued animals. But this is not a reason to start eating animals again.
We don’t become vegan so dogs will stop killing sheep or so that all animals will stop eating other animals. We become vegan because as humans we can do less harm to animals and not use others for our own pleasure or for the taste and convenience they give us. We are not obligate carnivores therefore we do not need to eat other beings to survive, especially since we now have access to B12 in pill form.
Another reason Mollie Englehart is no longer vegan is that she and her human companions ate the sheep instead of just wasting the bodies because that was honoring their life. Should we eat other humans when they die to honor their lives? Some tribal folks do.
Mollie tells a story of how she owned some female ducks and the drakes (male ducks) “raped and killed her girls”. So, the conclusion she came to was that she should have culled/killed the drakes to save the females. Did the ducks need to be owned by her? Ducks still exist in the wild so why not let them work it out for themselves? Couldn’t they have sorted things out without humans getting in the way? She doesn’t go into details. I don’t know if the female ducks were locked in a pen with the males or what happened.
The arguments former vegans give for eating animals make no sense when you think about animal autonomy. Animals do not need to be owned by humans or tampered with by humans. It’s too bad there is so little habitat left for them and we should work on ways to give back habitat.
The other reason, and perhaps the real reason Mollie Englehart is not vegan anymore and the reason she gives for serving meat is that she believes vegan restaurants are obsolete because you can pick up a vegan option anywhere these days including Burger King. But what if we don’t want to have to support a restaurant that serves mostly meat?
What if we would rather support vegan restaurants?
I understand that the restaurant business is a hard business to be in and many vegan restaurants go out of business because they cannot compete long term.
But why not just be honest and admit she is no longer vegan because of financial and business issues? She needs to make a living with her farm and restaurant business. Why slam veganism and call it naïve when really it was a business decision to change her farm-to-table business to a regenerative animal agriculture model?
Mollie Englehart thinks that regenerative agriculture is better than vegan farming because there is more cow, sheep, chicken, and duck shit if we keep slave animals so it’s better for the microbiome of the soil.
Well, Molly, you can use animal manure without killing animals. You can also use humanure without killing humans. Humanure is perfectly safe once you compost it and there sure is plenty of it available!
Regenerative agriculture has a lot of innovative ideas. But why not update those ideas to include a vegan version? Keeping and killing animals is demanding work and takes up a lot of time, grain, and space. Maybe there is another way that would be even better.
If we start thinking about building a regenerative agriculture system using the humanure that billions of us make every day all over the planet we could make a huge change in the animal waste runoff problems we have right now.
Farm-animal pollution is one of the major polluters for ground water, rivers, and the ocean because of the factory farming system that dominates much of the world now. And there isn’t enough land for regeneratively farmed “grass fed” animals to create enough meat to feed all 8 or 10 billion humans even if it was healthy to eat the stuff.
We could have an ecologically sound water and sewage system without pollution if we would just start to have a conversation about change. Maybe we don’t have to milk and kill trillions of cows and kill and eat billions pigs and chickens and ducks and sheep every year to have the manure we need for healthy soil.
Maybe we don’t have to enslave other non-human animals to get soil diversity, we need to stay healthy as a human society. But if we keep dismissing vegan ideas, we’ll just have the same old bullshit forever.
