Sorry, but reading about hunting lobsters and killing them to eat just creeps me out. I never liked cooked lobster because the thought of boiling them alive always seemed wrong to me. It just seems serial killerish to stalk and kill animals for food. Obviously very vegan here.

As for synthetic vegan replacements for clothes made of animal products, i’m all for it. Synthetics are natural, i believe. Oil is a vegan product, making plastic a vegan product, i think. The fact that oil is unsustainable? Anything becomes unsustainable when you use it too much and it is made too slowly, i think. I bet there are ways to grow oil faster. We can have oil farms. :) I’m all for scientific research into vegan products. I don’t agree with scientific experimentation on animals. I wanted to be a plastic surgeon up until 6th grade when they made us dissect animals and insects in biology and i hated it so much that i decided that i’d rather not be a plastic surgeon if it involved killing life so i could study their body. This was before i even went vegetarian. Maybe if they found more ways to research plastic surgery in a vegan way, i would have done it. Even dissecting dead humans seems better than euthanizing animals for research, i think.

I agree with Ron’s take on pets. I’d like to take it a step further in that I think keeping a pet is like slavery.

I also agree with another post of Ron’s. I wish the forum had a quote function. :) I believe I should do my best and leave the rest up to God. I try my absolute best with what i can control. But, there’s stuff in life i can’t control. I try to to be vegan and not use animal products. At this point, i’d rather be a cooked vegan than a raw animal eater. Sometimes I use animal products without knowing it, or i feel i have little option- as in Ron’s example of bath soap.

Bees are “insects” but they are still life with awareness, I think. Same for fish, i think. Plus, beekeepers can be unwittingly cruel, even nice ones, i think.

LovesPeter- I see her as very logical, i think. I don’t see it as offensive, although it may be more direct and therefore unnerving to people. But, I think she is defining the term vegan more clearly.

As for her being 100% vegan, I think she is probably as vegan as you can get in this society. So, i think I sort of “round up” and consider her 100% vegan. I consider myself vegan more than raw, although i came into raw before vegetarian or vegan.

Oil is unsustainable because of the massive pollution it creates, not because we can’t produce it fast enough.

Like cooked food, the way they process oil probably makes it polluting. I don’t think there is anything wrong with oil, although it is in very short supply. Anything can be made toxic if used in the wrong way.

Beautiful thread everyone! Shane – you’re right, it’s a journey and a frame of mind. I’m vegan and raw, but I make mistakes and that’s okay. I think it’s important to welcome folks of all types, because as Kandace said in an earlier post in this thread, it’s exciting to see that so many folks are trying to eat some raw vegan food. Just imagine what an incredible effect this will have improving health and increasing sustainability as the word of raw foods spreads!