TLDR: Many - maybe most - vegans are irrational nutjobs, but you shouldn't tar all vegetarians with the same brush. I've been out out of the dating game for a long time now and it's highly unlikely I'll ever return, but since I've never been masochistic enough to date someone who's cray, I would have never dated a vegan.
The vegan lifestyle - and it is a lifestyle, not just a diet, since the vegan philosophy affects so many things - is attractive to a certain type of personality: a need for following rigid rules, an unshakeable conviction that one has found the One True Path, a need to proselytise and a belief that all animals are equivalent to humans.
It's the same mindset as that of religious and political fanatics, and I've always found bigotry repulsive.
Vegetarians are different, and I've had a vegetarian diet for much of my life. Many aspects of modern, intensive animal farming are ethically disgusting and harmful to the environment and to human health, but not all animal products come from rural factories. I've never had problems with the morality of eating eggs and dairy products that come from animals who have good lives, and although I'm not crazy about meat, I don't feel bad about eating meat that's from animals who were treated well, had a good life and whose end was sudden and humane.
The thing that made me realise just how totally bonkers vegans are was learning that a True Believer Vegan won't eat honey. As far as they're concerned, honey is the product of exploited animals that are always treated cruelly by beekeepers.
We've had bees for more than a decade now. While there is some degree of truth in what Peta and vegan wingnuts say about how large-scale commercial beekeepers treat their bees, we respect our bees, interfere with them as little as possible, allow them to do what their instincts drive them to do, don't treat them with synthetic chemicals and still manage to get a decent crop of honey from them every year.
But as far as vegans are concerned, none of that matters. We're evil for keeping bees and our honey is just as bad as any other. Of course, there is a fundamental irony in vegans eating food that only exists because some beekeeper made sure that there were bees flying around to pollinate the crop's blossoms. But I guess in the airy-fairy world of a vegan who has always lived in the city and hasn't the faintest fucking clue about what growing food is really all about, they're certain some native, wild bees will always appear out of nowhere to do the pollination if there's not a beehive around.
It's the same with eggs: as far as a fanatical vegan is concerned (and most of them are fanatics), it's always morally wrong to eat an egg, even if that egg should come from a hen that's been sold by a battery farm because she's too old to lay reliably every day and she's now living in a luxurious chicken coop in your backyard and spending her days happily scratching in your flowerbeds.
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TLDR: Many - maybe most - vegans are irrational nutjobs, but you shouldn't tar all vegetarians with the same brush. I've been out out of the dating game for a long time now and it's highly unlikely I'll ever return, but since I've never been masochistic enough to date someone who's cray, I would have never dated a vegan.
The vegan lifestyle - and it is a lifestyle, not just a diet, since the vegan philosophy affects so many things - is attractive to a certain type of personality: a need for following rigid rules, an unshakeable conviction that one has found the One True Path, a need to proselytise and a belief that all animals are equivalent to humans.
It's the same mindset as that of religious and political fanatics, and I've always found bigotry repulsive.
Vegetarians are different, and I've had a vegetarian diet for much of my life. Many aspects of modern, intensive animal farming are ethically disgusting and harmful to the environment and to human health, but not all animal products come from rural factories. I've never had problems with the morality of eating eggs and dairy products that come from animals who have good lives, and although I'm not crazy about meat, I don't feel bad about eating meat that's from animals who were treated well, had a good life and whose end was sudden and humane.
The thing that made me realise just how totally bonkers vegans are was learning that a True Believer Vegan won't eat honey. As far as they're concerned, honey is the product of exploited animals that are always treated cruelly by beekeepers.
We've had bees for more than a decade now. While there is some degree of truth in what Peta and vegan wingnuts say about how large-scale commercial beekeepers treat their bees, we respect our bees, interfere with them as little as possible, allow them to do what their instincts drive them to do, don't treat them with synthetic chemicals and still manage to get a decent crop of honey from them every year.
But as far as vegans are concerned, none of that matters. We're evil for keeping bees and our honey is just as bad as any other. Of course, there is a fundamental irony in vegans eating food that only exists because some beekeeper made sure that there were bees flying around to pollinate the crop's blossoms. But I guess in the airy-fairy world of a vegan who has always lived in the city and hasn't the faintest fucking clue about what growing food is really all about, they're certain some native, wild bees will always appear out of nowhere to do the pollination if there's not a beehive around.
It's the same with eggs: as far as a fanatical vegan is concerned (and most of them are fanatics), it's always morally wrong to eat an egg, even if that egg should come from a hen that's been sold by a battery farm because she's too old to lay reliably every day and she's now living in a luxurious chicken coop in your backyard and spending her days happily scratching in your flowerbeds.