There are some tricky items up for debate in the vegan community: palm oil, sugar, honey and horseback riding. The girls talk about why these things may not be considered vegan, along with why wool and silk are not vegan.

In This Episode

Content warning: talk of animal experimentation, exploitation and cruelty

Meat, leather, dairy – these things are obviously not vegan. But there are other things that are not so much so; things that are sometimes even contested within the vegan community. The princesses tackle six of these topics to help vegans make informed decisions for themselves and to have conversations about these things with others:

Silk

– “Silk fabric is made from the silk that is spun by silkworms when they form the cocoons for their pupal stage, before becoming a moth.”

– Since silk is an animal product, and causes exploitation, silk isn’t vegan.

– Most silk is mass produced, from farms with domesticated silkworms.

– “The silk is secreted as a liquid from two glands in the caterpillar’s head. While they are still in their pupal stage, the cocoons are placed in boiling water, which kills the silkworms and begins the process of unraveling the cocoons to produce silk thread. If allowed to develop and live, the silkworms would turn into moths and chew their way out of the cocoons to escape.”

– Silk can be produced “more humanely” by not killing the caterpillar, and allowing it to chew through the cocoon the way it would naturally, but this damages the silk strands and yields less silk so this method isn’t used very as often.

– Approximately 15 silkworms are killed to make a gram of silk thread, and 10,000 are killed to make a silk sari.

Resources

Why Vegans Don’t Wear Silk (AnimalRights.about.com)

Honey

– Bees are animals

* Honeybees have been shown to have emotions, are cognitively sophisticated

* Honeybees and vertebrates share common neurological traits, pessimism

– Honey and pollen are for the bees to eat during winter months

– Commercial beekeeping is basically factory farming for bees

* Bees are fed high fructose corn syrup since honey is stolen

* Administer antibiotics whether bees are sick or not

* Queens artificially inseminated with a syringe, wings clipped; Drones are crushed to inseminate queen

* Inbred for gentleness and productivity, leading to genetic deficiencies

* Some beekeepers will burn or destroy hives and bees in winter, as it’s cheaper than keeping them alive

– During harvesting & collection, bees are injured, crushed or killed, no matter how gentle the handler is

– Honey is tested on animals

* In order to try to prove the healing effects of honey, animals are wounded and the wounds are treated with honey, dissection to determine effects of honey on bones and metabolism, and the removal of reproductive organs to test honey’s effects on hormonal profiles as it relates to menopause

Resources

If You Eat Honey, Read This (Your Daily Vegan)

Honeybees Might Have Emotions (Wired Magazine)

Sugar

– Refined sugar comes from either Sugarcane plants or from Beet plants

– The sugars are very similar so it’s impossible to tell the difference between the two after they are processed

– Beet sugar is not processed using Bone Char so it is vegan