They call themselves freegans

Hi, ive been vegan for a bit over 10 years. I don’t think animal parts are for us to use at all. I’m not really sure why you’d harvest animals at all, I don’t think normalizing the commodification of others’ bodies is a good thing to be doing. If you really can’t live without animal parts, that’s probably the least harmful way of acquiring them. I wouldn’t recommend eating anyone you find lying on the ground though, that sounds like a good way to contract horrible diseases.

Veganism is about doing the most that is possible and practicable. We probably kill insects just by walking, but it’s not reasonable to never move again to avoid that. Similarly, driving a car for many people is a necessity to be able to access goods and services, and its not at all practicable to avoid driving for them.

Ultimately, veganism is a moral stance about reducing harm to others as much as you can. It’s not a competition, so don’t feel like you have to be perfect at it to do good.

I think it would depend who you ask. I consider myself vegan and would have no major issue with someone using roadkill for parts. I mean, I would find it disgusting and could never myself, but if they want to and still call themselves vegan, I see no problem with it as the harm has already been done to the animal. Seems the same as harvesting bones from the forest - what’s dead is dead.

I’m not vegan myself but I had asked a similar enough question to a vegan friend a while ago and liked his answer:

He said for him it’s 2 parts, 1 is that while the animal that died may not have been harmed by humans, the ecosystem that relies on scavenging carcasses will be hurt if humans effectively start removing their entire food source (same way we have driven species to extinction by hunting).

The 2nd part is that with humans everything with even the tiniest loop hole will get abused… Imagine that we say this is okay. Today it may be the odd naturally deceased animal, in a month it’ll start including animals “killed accidentally”, in a year it’ll be someone farming animals with some weird way of culling them so they can claim it’s still natural causes by some twisted logic… at the end of it we’d just not be able to trust any of it anyway so it’s easier to not even entertain the thought - the energy to figure it all out would be better spent on improving alternatives.

To me it’s not a matter of ethics but a matter of health. Unless you saw the animal die from something that clearly isn’t disease I wouldn’t trust meat I just found laying around.

From a materialist point of view, I can’t see any harm in harvesting the hide of an already dead animal. However, wearing a real fur coat and calling yourself a vegan is never going to be an easy thing to explain lmao

From my end, I’m a registered organ donor because I feel that I won’t need this body once I’m done with it, and if anything is useful off it for someone else, then hell, let them have my liver.

However, an animal can’t consent to that and yeah, an argument could be made that who gives a fuck, it’s a pig/chicken/cow, it’s not gonna give a shit, but death is unfortunate for anything and I’d feel more at ease that the carcus is either left for nature to do what it does than me harvesting it for food.

You can do pretty much whatever you want man…

Like “vegan” isn’t even a century old yet, it was made up in the 1940s by some guy who thought vegetarians weren’t good enough, and he set whatever rules he wanted to.

You can just keep using his word, but not care about his rules.

Or you can make up your own name and rules.

People searching for labels they like and then conforming to every fucking aspect of that label and nothing else, doesn’t work out well.

So please, if you want to eat roadkill just do it.

Idk much about vegan philosophy and it is a philosophy not a diet to be clear. However, personally I see it as stealing from the vultures. The vegan solution is of course, to limit roadkill to negligable levels by making cars a redundant and antiquated form of transportation.

Also I wouldn’t trust roadkill to be safe for consumption

A see the issue as more about habit formation and incentives, rather than the act in isolation being a problem. Those that come to rely on animal products from roadkill will inevitably turn to more conventional methods when roadkill is not available since they have become habituated to using animal products (although this is likely worse with more regular habits like meat eating).
Additionally, if this method became widespread enough, there would be an incentive to increase the amount of roadkill (or at best, not decrease it) when in reality roadkill itself is a failure of transport design and land use.

For the sake of argument I think you could say that you’re depriving a scavenger of a meal. I don’t know if that’s how veganism is usually framed.

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shouldn’t it be considered vegan to harvest any of the useful parts from it, since there was no human-caused suffering involved?

What the fuck are you talking about? The corpse is still made up of animal parts. For the record I’m a vegetarian because I hate animals and I think they’re gross.

I’m agitated by this post not because of whatever morality question you’re trying to pull, but for linguistics sake.

Definition of Vegan from Merriam - Webster:

a strict vegetarian who consumes no food (such as meat, eggs, or dairy products) that comes from animals

also : one who abstains from using animal products (such as leather)

People like you are the reason why the word “literally” doesn’t mean “literally” anymore and we literally don’t have a replacement word.

For the second question, one could argue driving a car isn’t vegan (unless it’s electric) because gas and oil are technically animal products, even if that animal was a dinosaur