Your Positions

• We should all be vegan. Animals should never be exploited, because they are sentient and have the capacity to suffer. (Start over)

• Buying meat or dairy is never OK, but some activities possibly including eating abandoned backyard eggs from rescued chickens, buying second-hand leather or honey, going to zoos that use some of their profits towards conservation efforts, or eating dumpster meat are OK. (Go back)

• Eating honey is OK, because it doesn’t really hurt the bees to harvest their honey with modern techniques, and bee-keeping provides a lot of ecological benefit which buying honey supports. (Go back)

Things to Consider

Noah Lewis has some great writing detailing honey bees and bee-keeping (alternate archived link here). Be sure to also read the linked section on Honeybee Ecology, it debunks many persistent myths.

tl;dr Honey bees are hurt by harvesting honey from them, and they are exploited in industrial agriculture as pollinators, often at the expense of the well-being both of the bees themselves of the many other wild pollinators who are affected by these practices (which has negative ecological consequences).

Select a Position You Want to Explore (you can go back and explore more than one)

1. The complicated behaviors of bees don’t necessarily indicate that they suffer. They are more like intricate machines, not really thinking and feeling in the same way mammals do. Plenty of human-constructed machines, which we are pretty sure don’t experience anything, are capable of similarly complex behaviors.

2. As much as it sucks to exploit bees, at this point with our population rising, we pretty much need to in order to grow enough plants to feed everyone.

3. We should draw the line at insects. We already kill a whole bunch just by our agricultural practices, and its absurd to be worrying about insects when larger, more intelligent animals are suffering.