Are Oysters Vegan? | Gary Yourofsky & The Vegan Black Metal Chef

I don't eat them but if you're vegan and eat them, I ain't gonna judge ya. If a vegan is craving animal protein, I'd much rather see them eat oysters than a chicken, bivalves are so much better for you than regular meat also

A pearls?

I lost all respect for Gary when I learned what a horrible racist he was viewing Palestinians as inferior. Shame he values the lives of oysters more than those of Palestinian children. Shame he forgot they are sentient beings too.

He came out as really irrational and angry in this video. He didn't even address the question, which is are oysters sentient or not. This is why vegans get a bad reputation.

Forget about the clams, forget about the scallops....But NEVER forget about your meds.

The neuroscience black metal guy should go back to school. You need a brain to experience pain. No brain, no pain. Ganglia are not brains, not even close. When you sever the human spinal cord, pain sensation disappears below the cut, even though there are ganglia there. The more complicated the brain, the richer the subjective experiences, including suffering. That means that fish also don't suffer, but they feel some form of pain and discomfort when hurt. I wouldn't eat fish for environmental reasons. Animals like pigs and dogs have brains like 1 y old baby, so eating them should be criminalized. Dolphins have brains comparable to an adult human, so killing those animals would be unethical.

Who wants to eat these? Do clams look like food to anybody? Yuuuuck

If they are not sentient I don’t see anything unethical with consuming them. They metal chef didn’t confirm if they feel pain or not so I guess if they feel pain then it’s not okay? Personally I used to really enjoy mussels and oysters and it would be awesome if it was okay ethically to eat them. I probably wouldn’t eat them that often as there something you’d usually eat out at a restaurant but I’d be pretty stoked to include them in my diet. They also didn’t discuss any environmental impacts of oysters and mussel farming, do they consume many resources? Would have appreciated more info from the interview rather than a flat no and little explanation.

Thank you for further proving eating bivalves is VEGAN.

Dont kill organisms be fruitarian

Little living beings of the sea I will never eat them.They have the same right to exist as all marine life.

I think refusing to eat oysters just goes to show that for some people following the dogma behind the vegan label and remaining "pure" is more important than the ideals of veganism. Intelligence (the ability to respond to stimuli and interact with the external environment) and sentience (the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively) are two different things. Plants are intelligent and if you were to watch a time-lapse video showing how much plants move every day to follow the light you could conclude they are also sentient. Plants have also been shown to secrete toxins when researchers played them the sound of certain insects, exchange nutrients with one another, and show signs of distress when cut. This clearly shows they are intelligent but we can't say they are sentient. We currently have no proof that oysters are sentient either. And if the ideal of veganism is to reduce suffering then I don't see why oysters wouldn't be vegan.

Why though? I need a good reason to not do something. I don't eat creatures that feel pain and don't want to die, Im not even interested in eating bivalves, but if bivalves are no more sentient than plants how is it ethically wrong? Because they are animals? GTFO. I love plants too. I eat them because I don't hurt them. I usually respect Gary, but I don't respect his just because explanation.

It’s so sad that no ethical argument was even attempted here.

I don't believe that you should intentionally take the life of any being unless it is necessary. Which is why I'm against people randomly stepping on ants or cutting down trees or spraying poison for no reason. Suffering and sentience makes life taking more egrigious, which is why killing a dog or a pig much is worse than tearing up a sapling.

Assuming that oysters had slightly bigger capacities to feel pain than plants(which have no nerves), we still eat plants because we need to. Human bodies have no need for animal products if we can get proper nutrition from plants especially in Western cultures, where oysters are more of a delicacy.

Thanks for subtitles. Greetings from Argentina

There is a danger in anthropomorphizing here: projecting our specifically human notion of "pain" and "suffering" onto something that has no possible mechanism to experience anything like it. The definition of "animal" is arbitrary, and whether or not we define something as an "animal" should have zero bearing on the question of whether or not it's ethically okay to eat it. For instance, what about lab-grown meat that is genetically "animal"? Is that somehow not vegan even though no animal was harmed in making it?

If I feel like I'm crashing oysters in a can going in my belly

Que bueno que traduzcan estos vídeos. Lástima que hay muchos vídeos de gente Gary Yourosky que no están traducidos y me quedo con ganas de verlos.

I love you and your channel. But this guy is unpleasant sorry all love x

it's okay to eat them

Go Vegan. 🌎

If there’s one thing my Philosophy of Mind and Free Will courses taught me, it’s that neuroscientists are still poor philosophers. To the best of our knowledge, nervous tissue is necessary for sentience [the capacity to have experiences (with valence/preference) which makes something a moral patient]. However, it is not necessarily sufficient. Whether bivalves have experiences that are “good” or “bad” to them is the central question, and he failed to point out and try to bridge the gap between the premises of his argument (the presence of ganglia, etc.), and his conclusion (that bivalves aren’t to be eaten). The conclusion does not follow from the premises. Even the presence of nociceptors would be insufficient, though that would certainly muddy things.

Also, as a thinker who refutes the inherent badness of death and goodness of life (a life is only as good or bad to have as the experiences it contains), animals that actually fare well when farmed like oysters might be acceptable to consume at least depending on the nature of their death. Fishing is much more palatable from the animal welfare angle despite that it’s unacceptable due to the terrible death by suffocation, for example (however, poor conditions in fish aquaculture is a big issue & oceanic depletion is awful nearly globally). If a raised oyster is ok while it lives, or even experiences well-being while we raise it, then its death at our hands is justifiable. Also note that when we talk about aquaculture, we’re not talking about whether it’s right to kill them - if they’re alive, they’re gonna die anyway - we’re talking about whether it’s right to bring them into being and give them a certain kind of life. We’re causally responsible for both the pleasure and suffering of the creatures we cause the life of.

I was recommended Gary's "best speech you will ever hear" video and haven't watched it yet. Based on the extremely fallacious arguments he presents here right from the get-go (mushrooms aren't plants either; vegans aren't vegan because "muh animal protein", but because it can't be produced without suffering, bivalves aside), I'm not going to be watching that video. I am looking into veganism and I really hate how dogmatic and pretentious the vegan community can be.

I'm not sure I buy it. There is a vast difference between a precursor to a brain and an actual brain. They're not magically going to get thoughts and a nervous system. There's also the question of sentience. Is a Venus flytrap sentient because it has receptors to close when parts of it are touched? There is a difference between conscious decisions and reactions as opposed to automatic reactions to stimuli

Nerve ganglia, but not attached to a brain? Sounds like a good support system for a brain, but if the brain isn't needed then it just does the basic stuff. Besides, think, feel, suffer.

I'm Vegan since 2015 and have done a lot of animal rights protesting. But I like to play the devils advocate.

Would love to hear peoples thoughts.

PS I love Gary!

they are animals! what walks, sleeps, eats and shits -- does not belong to human consumption.

Unrelated to bivalves, but one time I see a bug eat another smaller bug. Now enters a 3rd bug to eat the first mentioned bug. Bug #1 keeps eating while being eaten himself, and doesn't even seem to notice he's being eaten. So, not sure it the bug was feeling any type of pain. I've heard of Eat or be eaten, now it's Eat AND be eaten. At the same time, ha ha. Plus don't blame me on this one, I just had some hummus and chips, that's it!!!

I substitute oyster mushrooms for actual oysters to avoid any possible bivalve suffering!

From this, it follows that Gary would be against lab-grown meats since they contain animal protein. Quite a weird stance.

People who eat Oysters in my eyes aren't Vegan. Period.

I'd argue that the research around sentience for invertebrate mollusks like Oysters/Clams and the fact that it's relatives include snails and octopuses suggest that oysters shouldn’t be dismissed as non-sentient. They also possess the pre-cursors to a central nervous system called the nerve ganglia. Even if they are not all connected as a brain, there are little clusters of nerves that is almost like a pre-brain. If you just observe them they do exhibit behaviors of sentience, you can see them feeling around their environment and scanning for things and that would suggest they have an ability to have a subjective experience. The best approach is still to take the precautionary principle and simply adhere to the traditional vegan definition of excluding all animals from our diet.

It was funny and unexpected when this guy popped up in the middle))

The thing freaking moves. They are animals. Please THINK! what is wrong with these people they pick on things so deep to complicate what is very simple to understand. Even a child would think that is an animal and not a plant.

When u cut a tumor off u it has the same. So we should care about keeping tumors alive to as it’s also human animal protein?

By that same argument, oral sex would be forbidden as well

One could argue it is more ethical to eat bivalves than some plants.

With bivalves, you evade the collateral killings from agriculture. Bivalves themselves might as well be plants from a moral standpoint. So you are not killing anything sentient and you avoid collateral victims.

Someone tell The Nutrivore this. What a fake vegan.

if they dont sufer or expirience the world they are in the group of plants imo

🤦‍♀️ As if they’re just completely oblivious to the amount of actual SENTIENT animals which are killed via soy and mono crop agriculture as compared with the most sustainable and least harmful method of agriculture, which is the “factory farming” of bivalves…it’s almost as though they don’t actually truly care about animals at all! How you can tell that vegans base their philosophy on emotions rather than logic is the fact that they choose to eat tofu rather than scallops or oysters, when the former food likely contributes to more animal deaths annually even than the meat industry (when you consider that one or two cows can feed a whole family for a whole year)!

they certainly dont fit and can not fit into the vegan spectrum.

I totally agree with the 'maybe they're sentient sobleave them alone just incase' argument but 'theyre animals so no' argument just seems dogmatic to me

Gary is so awesome, hope he's doing well.

Lol oysters are vegan. No pain receptors. Use your brains.

The fact this is recorded in a motel is what makes it perfect

Yeah but you need to provide reasons why we should not eat animal protein. This idea that we should not consume things under one specific category is incomprehensible we are the ones who assigned these categories anyway. Bivalves are non-sentient there is no ethical argument you can provide to argue with it, nutritionally it is deceiving that you are just nitpicking the few potential bad things and leave out rest and if you are going to use the environment argument then you should not be eating plants in the first place. Anything always has some effect to the environment if you use that as your main point.

Mushrooms have animal protein as well so

Ostrovegans don’t count as vegans.