hmmm

I don't know what I think about framing veganism as a 'rights' issue. Something to chew on. The more I talk to small local animal farmers, the more issues I have with it. They may love the animals to some degree, but they are still commodities to them and they treat them as such--economically, you can't afford not to. The only scenario I can imagine is if you had some ducks or goats or something running around, like pets, and you gathered some milk or eggs when it was abundant and the animals didn't mind.

http://blog.veganfreak.com/

The other big reason that so-called “animal rights” ovo-lacto vegetarianism is pointless has to do with the essential problem of the relationship of dominance that humans assert over animals. Veganism as a social movement – and if we’re going to get serious about veganism, we have to begin building a movement that goes beyond mere consumption – seeks to redefine the ways in which humans relate to animals. To be vegan is to demand that animals are accorded rights that cannot be violated for mere reasons of convenience, taste, or tradition. Many of the basic rights that abolitionist vegans push for are rights would look pretty similar to the ones that we all cherish, including the right not to be the property of another, the right of bodily integrity and safety, and the right not to be used solely as the means to another’s ends (we treat these rights at great length in the next chapter). Put most simply, we are looking to abolish animal slavery by according animals a set of inalienable rights.

Thus, even if it were somehow possible to produce dairy and eggs that did not result in the death of billions of animals a year, a producer still must confine and control animals to produce these commodities for consumers – consumers which clearly include legions of ovo-lacto vegetarians. Fully the property of their owners, the animals involved in these forms of production are little more to their owners than living machines for profit, slaves who day in and day out for every single day of their lives suffer solely to fulfill demands extraneous to their own desires and needs. Though the particulars of confinement and slavery may differ slightly by setting, the same basic and underlying dynamic holds whether the products in question are the typical ones in your grocery store, or whether they are labelled “cage-free,” “local,” “organic,” or even “free-range.” The myth of a compassionate animal product is just that: a myth.