Hi all,

This sub has been somewhat lax about it in the past, but this rule has been long overdue. This is a community aimed at fostering discourse for those who are already vegan antinatalists, graphic content meant to shock viewers into considering veganism is unnecessary and likely counterproductive. Thanks and please keep this in mind for future posts!

Pan-, a prefix meaning "all", "of everything", or "involving all members" of a group.

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Obviously we encounter this a lot and it's usually just a case of a person not understanding what the purpose of an analogy is.

One that I just saw on the AN sub from u/Uridoz:

The person said something like, "Me choosing not to eat meat isn't going to change anything."

The analogy: "So you would be OK with funding child p0rn because you abstaining isn't going to change the number of violations required to make that content."

We can and often do make the same kinds of analogies with other things like rape, slavery, the holocaust, etc.

The analogy here is very clearly between not funding or engaging in X obviously unethical thing and not recognising that the logic for why it is not acceptable to fund that thing also applies to funding or engaging in consuming animal products. Not that child p0rn/slavery/holocaust badness is equal to animal eating badness.

Often we see the person respond with pearl clutching and, "How could you compare X to eating animals? That proves how unhinged you are, you need help, I don't have to justify.... blah blah blah."

The question then is do you take the route of explaining how a basic analogy works?

Or do you take the route of justifying why most bad things we can come up with actually are comparable in terms of their badness with what happens to animals in the animal agriculture industry?

Which is the better route in your experience? Or are they both pointless because the person is already too far gone?

Just knowing that you exist makes me happy and keeps me sane. You just make veganism and antinatalism seem so normal, and like they make as much sense to you as they do to me, in a world where ridicule and hate towards people who hold these values is rampant.

It’s literally impossible to get through life without contributing to animal (and human) suffering.

This kind of complements the post here called "Screw Antinatalism ?" which I quite agreed with.

When vegans talk about antinatalism on reddit, I often read words like "Humans are a cancer", or stuff about harm caused by an individual life. Having to be a human (while other species being born are ignored) seems to be often presented as fundamentally unethical because it "damages nature" or "overpopulates". So in the end, what's the difference between these vegan antinatalists and VHEMT ? They both seem to believe that all suffering has been caused by humans and that extinction would be a "solution". Now, as an antinatalist, obviously I understand their objection to reproduction since I fully agree with it, but they should at least acknowledge that it offers the opposite of a solution - or at least, a very very repugnant one, and is anything but a long-term way to reduce suffering. As horrendous as it is to conceive, human-caused suffering is, if not a drop in the ocean, then still not much more than a vat of unbelievably piss in the dark hellish ocean of our blue planet.

No, I don't offer a solution. But simply saying : be vegan and be an antinatalist, since if everyone embraced that way, harm and cruelty would be gone forever, has consequences that are not much less dangerous than the ones that purely anthropocentric non-vegan antinatalism would entail. While non-vegans shouldn't even call themselves antinatalists, down the line, whether antinatalists were to "win people over" or whether vegan antinatalists were to "win people over", the world would soon be exactly the same. And not in a pretty way. This shows that, in a way, both have fairly anthropocentric considerations. However, as for the present, I can only encourage people who are considering antinatalism to go vegan (though of course, this applies to everyone, even the natalists... but these guys seem kind of hopeless). But, simply said, they should consider wild animal suffering in their ethics. Reading people like Matty Häyry who mention wild animals but still say more or less "ethically, they're not ourpoblem, and we should go extinct for the greater good now that we've decided to ignore wild animals" is frightening. How could you get so close but miss the mark so dangerously ?

"It is just yet another manifestation of our own sense of inflated self-importance that we believe that only the suffering that humans impose really matters and is worth preventing." - Magnus Vinding

I don't know how one should be an antinatalist. But being a vegan antinatalist while keeping a mainstream view of "environmentalism" and not giving a (wild) rat's ass about wild animal suffering is an ethical shame. I'm not telling you to have kids. But consider the wilderness, if only in your theoretical discourse. It's a shame to think so much about ethics while disregarding such a grave matter.

For Sentiocentric ANs who care about wild animal suffering:

It is clear that the majority of Antinatalists aren't Vegan and don't care about animal suffering, wild or otherwise. Do you have any ethical qualms with supporting a movement, philosophy, belief, stance, etc. in which the majority of its adherents don't value animal suffering or rights?

Projecting the movement into the future, what happens if Antinatalism somehow gains traction, but it is the same as it is now, mainly anthropocentric?

Would you feel like you had failed existing animals by supporting this movement in its 'infancy'?

The worst thing I can imagine is humans becoming convinced of the reasonableness of their own extinction, but believing, as people like Les Knight do, that the natural world should continue on ad infinitum.

STILL LOOKING AS OF APRIL 14TH! title. i want to collect as many of you all as possible

to be more specific, looking for king county, pierce county, kitsap county

I asked ChatGPT and got "19,000 to 190,000 or more, based on the 1.9k subreddit members".

...without specific data on the overlap between veganism and antinatalism, it's challenging to provide an accurate number. If we take a very speculative approach and assume that 1-10% of the interested population is engaged enough to join a subreddit, and considering the niche intersection of veganism and antinatalism, the actual global number of vegan antinatalists could potentially range from 19,000 to 190,000 or more, based on the 1.9k subreddit members. This estimate must be taken with caution, as the actual number could be affected by many factors not accounted for...

Also Calling all vegan antinatalists !!!

View Poll

I remember when I was a senior in high school and we were learning about the Buddhist ideology. As my teacher explained it, Buddha used to be royalty and was pampered all the time, and it wasn't until he went out and met a starving person, sick person, and an old person that they realized that life is suffering. One of my classmates argued that there are some things in life that are enjoyable, and my teacher asked "And why do you do those things?" and the implied answer was that it's to distract yourself from the suffering. They believe that you shouldn't eat animals, have sex, or participate in any other worldly desires. This kind of reminds me of the antinatalist philosophy in that we believe that having children is immoral because life contains suffering.

Give me your counter antinatalist cultural hot take please 👇